Ultra-processed foods harm men’s health. They increase weight, disrupt hormones, decrease testosterone, and introduce harmful substances linked to declining sperm quality. They contain industrial and synthetic ingredients. This may be why over the past 50 years, sperm quality has plummeted.

[u/mvea]

https://cbmr.ku.dk/news/2025/not-all-calories-are-equal-ultra-processed-foods-harm-mens-health/

[u/Acrobatic_Flamingo]

Id love for one of these "ultra processed foods" studies to use like beyond meat and tofu and protein powder and other ultra processed foods that dont already also belong to the highly caloric, highly paltable group of foods we've known were bad for us forever. Ultra processed seems like a nonsense category to me and focusing on seems like its how we get people thinking beef tallow fries and cane sugar soda are the secret to health.

[u/Mostly_Enthusiastic → u/Acrobatic_Flamingo]

Ultra processed food is a nonsense buzzword thrown around by health influencers to drive engagement through fear. Processing does not inherently make foods unhealthy. Yes, many UPFs like chips, soda, etc. are unhealthy, because they are loaded with fat, salt, and sugar and engineered to be highly palatable, not because they are "processed." There are plenty of UPFs that are incredibly healthy - yogurt, oatmeal, non-dairy milks, whole grain breads, canned beans, etc.

[u/ParadiseLost91 → u/Mostly_Enthusiastic]

You're mixing up "processing" and "ultra-processing".

Rolled oats, baker's bread, canned beans etc are NOT UPF, they are just processed. There's a difference. Look up the NOVA classification, there are 4 levels and only the last level is ultra-processed. Humans have processed food for millennia; processing (grinding, straining, peeling, rolling, applying heat, baking, fermenting etc) are NOT problematic. Only ultra-processing is an issue. There's a difference, and you listing oats as UPF tells me you haven't looked into what constitutes the difference between processing and ultra-processing.

Humans have processed food (canning, preserving, straining, fermenting, rolling, peeling, baking, cooking) for millennia. Processing isn't the issue; ultra-processing is.

[u/TheKnitpicker → u/ParadiseLost91]

Humans have processed food for millennia

This statement really detracts from the strength of the rest of your comment. The fact that humans have been doing something for a long time is NOT proof that it’s safe or good for us. The fact that we’ve been doing something else for a short time is NOT proof that it’s bad for us. Some examples: Modern medicines like antibiotics are both modern and highly processed. They’re also good for you. On the other hand, humans have been creating alcoholic beverages for a very long time, but alcohol is not good for you. We’ve also been preserving things with salt and/or smoking for a long time, and those foods aren’t considered healthy either (compared with fresh foods).

But this gets at the heart of the debate around the usefulness of classifying things as ultra-processed foods. It’s not clear which processing steps are bad and why, and lay advocates for this classification scheme primarily rely on vague “it’s modern and industrial!!” phrasing, as though that’s inherently obviously bad. But why is it bad? When exactly does the evil enter the food? It’s like we all start with an intuition-based classification scheme for food - chips are bad, fresh veggies are good, chicken nuggets are bad, baked chicken breast is good - and then form this classification system to align with that intuition, and then use that to conclude again that chicken nuggets are bad.

And many of the criteria, at least as conveyed to a lay audience, sound poorly defined and therefore stupid. For example, “things you can’t do at home” or “ingredients not commonly used by home cooks” is obviously a moving target. The ingredients available to home cooks changes over time, as do the appliances and processes. Air frying is newer than pan and deep frying, does that mean it’s more unnatural and therefore unhealthy? Probably not.