The UPF Distraction
If you believe the current media panic, the biggest threat to public health is a packet of ingredients you cannot pronounce. “Ultra-processed food” has become a moral category, not a nutritional one. It is used to lump together fizzy drinks, biscuits, supermarket bread, soy milk, plant burgers, margarine, and baby formula as if they share the same biological effects. That framing is not just lazy. It actively protects the foods doing the most damage while casting suspicion on the very alternatives people use to replace them.
This matters now because the panic is shaping policy, public advice, and cultural attitudes at the exact moment we need people to stop defaulting to animal products. When headlines tell people that plant-based milks and meat alternatives are just as bad as, or worse than, “real food” like meat and dairy, the outcome is predictable. People retreat to butter, steak, and cow’s milk, convinced they are choosing something more natural and therefore safer. That belief is wrong, and the evidence is no longer subtle.
The fantasy of the ancient meat-only human is a modern invention, recycled to sell diets and justify habits. Archaeology tells a different story. Long before agriculture, humans were grinding wild seeds, pounding and cooking tubers, and detoxifying bitter nuts. Processing plant foods was not a late civilised weakness. It was a survival strategy that allowed our species to spread across wildly different environments.
We did not just eat plants. We altered them. We used tools and heat to unlock calories and nutrients that raw plants would not reliably provide. That is processing, and it is older than farming, older than cities, and older than most of the animals now treated as dietary staples. The idea that processing itself is the original sin collapses as soon as you look at what actually kept humans alive.
There is also a hard physiological limit that the carnivore fantasy ignores. Humans cannot safely live on high protein alone. The liver cannot process unlimited amino acids. Carbohydrates from plant foods were not optional extras. They were necessary calories favoured by the brain. From an evolutionary perspective, plant processing is not a modern corruption of a pure meat past. It is part of why we are here at all.
NOVA Confuses Factories With Outcomes
The NOVA system classifies foods by how industrially altered they are, not by what they do in the body. That distinction matters, because “ultra-processed” is not a single nutritional category. It includes sugar-sweetened drinks and processed meats, but it also includes soy milk, mycoprotein, plant burgers, fortified cereals, and soft margarine. These products share manufacturing methods, not metabolic effects.
Media coverage rarely explains this. Instead, it repeats a simple story: more processing equals more harm. When researchers say ultra-processed foods are linked to disease, headlines quietly skip over the fact that the strongest signals come from ultra-processed animal products and sugary drinks, not from plant-based substitutes. The category is treated as biologically uniform when it is not.
Critics of NOVA admit the problem. Foods that differ radically in fat type, fibre, cholesterol, and bioactive compounds are treated as equivalent because they came out of a factory. That is not nutrition. That is packaging ideology.
When You Compare Like With Like, Animal Foods Lose
When studies stop comparing plant burgers to broccoli and instead compare them to the animal foods they replace, the results are consistent and uncomfortable for the “real food” narrative.
Replacing cow’s milk with soy milk reduces total cholesterol, LDL cholesterol, blood pressure, and inflammatory markers. It is associated with lower risks of breast cancer, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular events, stroke, and even dementia. In large cohorts, swapping one serving of dairy milk for soy milk is linked to a substantial drop in breast cancer risk. These are not marginal shifts. They are clinically meaningful.
Replacing meat with plant-based analogues lowers total and LDL cholesterol, reduces body weight, cuts circulating TMAO, and reduces ammonia production in people with liver disease. Mycoprotein in particular increases beneficial gut bacteria, boosts short-chain fatty acid production, and reduces compounds linked to colorectal cancer risk. Soy-based analogues reduce abdominal fat and improve lipid profiles even when protein and calories are matched.
Replacing butter with modern soft margarine lowers cholesterol and is associated with fewer heart attacks and lower cardiovascular mortality. This is not controversial in the data, even if it remains unpopular in lifestyle journalism.
None of these plant-based alternatives are whole foods. Many are classified as ultra-processed. And yet, across trials and cohorts, they outperform the “unprocessed” animal products they are meant to replace.
Why This Keeps Happening: Biology, Not Branding
Animal foods contain cholesterol and higher levels of saturated fat. Saturated fat suppresses LDL receptor activity, pushing cholesterol to stay in the bloodstream. Cooking animal fat also produces oxidised cholesterol, which makes LDL particles more prone to oxidation, accelerating atherosclerosis. These are direct mechanisms, not lifestyle correlations.
Animal proteins are rich in branched-chain amino acids and methionine, which are linked to insulin resistance, fatty liver disease, and higher diabetes risk. They also stimulate the IGF-1 pathway, which promotes growth and is causally linked to several cancers. Populations with genetically low IGF-1 have strikingly low cancer rates even when obesity is present. Milk increases IGF-1, increases height, and is associated with earlier puberty, all established breast cancer risk factors. Plant milks do not trigger this hormonal cascade.
Meat contains heme iron, which bypasses the body’s normal absorption controls and promotes oxidative stress. High heme iron intake is linked to higher risks of cancer, diabetes, and cardiovascular death. Plant-based alternatives do not contain heme iron.
Meat provides carnitine, which gut bacteria convert into TMAO, a compound strongly associated with cardiovascular disease. Plant-based replacements reduce TMAO levels when they displace meat.
Some animal products also carry additional risks that rarely make it into mainstream nutrition debates, including heat-resistant polyomaviruses and bovine DNA factors detected in certain tumour tissues. These are active areas of research, but they reinforce a broader point: animal foods bring biological baggage that processing does not remove.
Plant-based alternatives, even when industrially produced, are cholesterol-free, lower in saturated fat, higher in polyunsaturated fats, and often contain fibre that animal foods completely lack. Added fibres used as stabilisers, mocked as “cosmetic additives,” have been shown in trials to lower cholesterol and improve blood sugar control. They are not inert fillers. They are functional components.
Processing does not erase these differences. It does not magically turn plants into metabolic equivalents of animal tissue.
The Media’s Favourite Shortcut
When broadcasters and newspapers declare ultra-processed food a global health threat, they are not entirely wrong. Diets dominated by sugary drinks, confectionery, and processed meats are strongly linked to disease. But by collapsing all ultra-processed foods into a single villain, the message becomes dangerously imprecise.
The result is scaremongering that blames technique instead of substance. It shifts attention away from saturated fat, cholesterol, heme iron, and growth-promoting hormones, and toward ingredient lists and factory settings. It treats a fortified soy milk as nutritionally suspect while framing cow’s milk as wholesome because it came from an animal.
Even the same media pieces often admit the flaw in their own framing, quoting scientists who say we cannot tell whether harms come from processing or from the nutritional profile of the foods themselves. But that caveat rarely makes the headline. The fear does.
This is not accidental. The narrative of “too much processing” is politically convenient. It does not threaten livestock agriculture, dairy subsidies, or cultural attachment to animal foods. It allows policymakers to talk about reformulation and labelling instead of confronting the structural role of animal products in chronic disease.
The Real Pattern Is Not Subtle
Across archaeology, physiology, clinical trials, and population studies, the same pattern keeps appearing.
Humans have always processed plant foods, and doing so helped us survive.
Plant-based alternatives, even when industrially produced, consistently perform better on cardiometabolic outcomes than the animal foods they replace.
The biological mechanisms behind this are well understood and centre on fat type, cholesterol, iron chemistry, amino acid profiles, hormones, and the gut microbiome, not on whether something was mixed in a factory.
The foods most strongly linked to harm within the ultra-processed category are overwhelmingly animal-based or sugar-based.
The idea that “natural” equals safe and “processed” equals dangerous is not supported by human biology. It is a cultural comfort story.
Stop Letting Processing Do the Blame Work
None of this is an argument for living on plant burgers and margarine. Whole plant foods remain the gold standard for health. But public health is not advanced by pretending that swapping steak for a plant burger is nutritionally neutral, or that choosing butter over margarine is a return to wisdom.
When people replace animal products with plant-based alternatives, risk markers improve. When they cling to animal foods because they are less processed, they often make their health worse, not better.
If public guidance continues to treat processing as the primary enemy, it will keep nudging people back toward animal products under the banner of common sense. That is not just misleading. It is actively harmful.
The real divide is not between factory and field. It is between foods built around animal bodies and foods built around plants. Processing can make both better or worse, but it does not cancel out the fundamental biology.
Blaming “ultra-processed food” in the abstract lets the actual drivers of diet-related disease hide in plain sight. And they are still sitting on the plate, looking reassuringly familiar.