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/no_1_knows_ur_a_dog]

All categories are arbitrary and "processing" exists on a continuum so you're always going to find squishy classifications.

There's no simple definition of UPF. The Nova classification system considers things like: the number of ingredients that are not food itself but are additives for preservation, colour, foaming or anti-foaming; the amount of processing that requires industrial techniques (extrusion, mechanical separation, moulding); and the use of ingredients are not typically used outside of industrial food production facilities (e.g. casein, high fructose corn syrup, maltodextrin).

I made tofu yesterday, you grind soybeans and water and then boil the strained liquid, add a coagulant (lemon juice works) and then (for firm tofu) after the curds form you press out the excess liquid. It is "processed" in the sense that it is not plain boiled soybeans, but it is not "ultra processed" as described above. People been making tofu for millennia.

People have been making meat substitutes for millennia also! Buddhist vegetarian cuisine has a long history. But stuff like Beyond and Impossible is formulated in a lab and produced industrially, and (according to the Nova system) crosses the line into UPF.

[u/SimoneNonvelodico → u/no_1_knows_ur_a_dog]

the number of ingredients that are not food itself but are additives for preservation, colour, foaming or anti-foaming; the amount of processing that requires industrial techniques (extrusion, mechanical separation, moulding); and the use of ingredients are not typically used outside of industrial food production facilities (e.g. casein, high fructose corn syrup, maltodextrin).

These seem very different things. I can easily believe that some chemical additives have weird side effects. I would be very surprised if somehow triturating something or passing it through a funnel changed its nutritional properties significantly. This literally feels like we're saying "well, with all that stuff being done, something is probably bad for you".

[u/no_1_knows_ur_a_dog → u/SimoneNonvelodico]

For sure, it's possible we'll get more granular as research progresses.

Things can be counterintuitive though. For example mechanically separated meat — intuitively you think, well what's the big deal, it's just meat passed through a sieve under high pressure to separate meat from the bone, but fundamentally it's still just meat, right? But there have been concerns over its safety, and so in the US mechanically separated chicken is allowed only in certain types of products (e.g. hot dogs but not hamburgers) and must be clearly labeled, and mechanically separated beef apparently has a higher mad cow disease risk and has been fully prohibited in food for human consumption since 2004.

[u/SimoneNonvelodico → u/no_1_knows_ur_a_dog]

I guess the problem in that case seems to be that the process, which is meant to separate meat and bone, will actually end up leaving small bone particles in the meat, raising the calcium content (and I suppose the BSE risk due to marrow being also involved in the process, though the best thing would be to just not have prions in your cows...). That's kind of an unusual case, but fair, if we include processes in which contaminants can be present then it counts.