Mercedes’ Kimi Antonelli overtakes Lewis Hamilton to win an action-packed sprint race at the British Grand Prix.

The annual Independence Day parade in Washington, D.C., was canceled late Friday due to sweltering temperatures in the nation’s capital.  The event, which is hosted by the National Park Service, was scheduled to begin at 10:30 a.m. on Saturday morning. Organizers said they canceled the procession due to an “Extreme Heat Warning” from the National…

The World Cup’s last-32 ties were decided in a busy six-day spell. But how closely were you paying attention?

The World Cup’s last-32 ties were decided in a busy six-day spell. But how closely were you paying attention?

Massive crowds showed up for the official start of the funeral of Iran’s former Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in Tehran, Iran’s capital, on Saturday, the beginning of a multi-day ceremony that is meant to project the strength and resilience of the Islamic Republic after a bruising war with the United States and Israel.

In little more than a decade, the term “ultra-processed foods” (UPFs) has risen from an obscure academic coinage to one of the most potent ideas in the American food imagination. It has saturated media coverage of diet and disease, spawned a profusion of guides teaching shoppers how to spot UPFs at the supermarket, and animated Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s crusade to remake American food policy. 

It might also be kind of fake. 

The trouble starts with the definition. UPF generally refers to packaged foods with questionable-sounding ingredients not typically used in household kitchens (high-fructose corn syrup, maltodextrin, and the like). But not even nutrition scientists can really tell you where normal processing ends and “ultra-processing” begins, and the difference often comes down to vibes. (I once covered a study that, inexplicably, classified tofu as ultra-processed.) 

Further, much of the evidence linking ultra-processed foods to poor health outcomes such as heart disease and cancer is notoriously low-quality because it’s based on big, noisy observational studies that can’t disentangle correlation from causation. That weakness plagues a lot of nutrition research, but it’s especially notable for UPF studies, because many of them are drawn from diet surveys that don’t capture enough detail to tell whether the “white bread” or “yogurt” someone reported eating was ultra-processed in the first place.

To correct for those problems, a handful of nutrition researchers have run randomized controlled trials (RCTs) — a gold standard for establishing cause and effect — to isolate the health effects of “ultra-processed” foods. Several of the best-known trials have found that UPFs indeed do contribute to adverse health outcomes such as overeating and weight gain — seemingly offering the stronger evidence that observational studies could not. 

But it turns out those trials might not show what they claim to, either. In a recent article published in Science, a group of researchers analyzed data from five landmark randomized controlled trials of ultra-processed foods and found that most of them compared ultra-processed and non-ultra-processed diets that differed in important ways beyond processing. The ultra-processed diets tended to be more calorie-dense and lower in fiber, for example, which can lead to overeating regardless of whether a food is “ultra-processed.” Accordingly, some of the effects that they attributed to processing may have had other causes.

These findings matter well beyond an academic fight over food categories. They offer the latest evidence against taking the UPF label too seriously when deciding what to buy — or fear — at the grocery store. 

Randomized controlled trials sought to add clarity to the UPF debate

UPF researchers sort foods using NOVA, a classification system with four tiers. From least to most processed:

• Group one includes unprocessed or minimally processed foods, like whole fruits, vegetables, whole grains, beans, nuts, milk, and cuts of meat.
• Group two encompasses “processed culinary ingredients,” like cooking oils, butter, sugar, and salt. 
• Group three is made up of processed foods produced by combining group one and group two ingredients into things like homemade breads, desserts, sautés, cured meats, and other dishes. 
• Group four, or ultra-processed foods, is defined as “formulations of ingredients, mostly of exclusive industrial use, that result from a series of industrial processes,” including dyes, preservatives, emulsifiers, and other ingredients rarely or never found in home kitchens.

The categories sound tidy. They are not. Many nutrition experts have criticized them as overly broad and hard to apply consistently. Wheat gluten, for example, is an ingredient often added to packaged breads; it’s not used in many household kitchens, and is usually classified as ultra-processed. Yet it’s been used in many Asian cuisines for centuries and can easily be employed in your home kitchen; I use it in my own. There’s no evidence that the ingredient’s rarity in household pantries makes it unhealthy or deserving of a special “ultra-processed” label. Nor is there any reason to assume that a store-bought whole grain bread with added gluten (category 4 under NOVA) is worse for you than, say, a homemade white bread (category 3).

To be fair to the UPF framework, its whole point is to try to capture something distinct from traditional nutritional metrics, to help make scientific sense of why modern, industrially produced food feels wrong. Some researchers argue that reducing foods to their individual nutrients misses something about industrial food as a whole. But many of the other factors that can make foods unhealthy or prone to being overeaten — calorie density, soft texture, hyper-palatability — are already well-known to nutrition science. The question is whether “ultra-processing” explains anything beyond those familiar mechanisms.

Kevin Hall, one of the most prominent nutrition scientists in the US, known for his research on UPFs, told me in an email that he was initially skeptical of the NOVA system but has come to appreciate some of its attributes as “a complementary lens for viewing food that can be a helpful integrative addition to the reductionist nutritional profiling lens.” 

Researchers like Hall have employed randomized controlled trials to rigorously test whether “ultra-processing” has real, and really troubling, effects. These trials work by recruiting a few dozen participants and assigning them pre-specified diets that are similar in their nutritional profiles but different in processing level. The researchers then examine whether any differences in participants’ health outcomes, like weight gain and cholesterol levels, can be pinned on the ultra-processed diets. 

Hall’s seminal RCT, one of the five trials examined in the new Science analysis, controlled for things like the number of calories made available to participants on unprocessed and ultra-processed diets; the amount of carbs, fat, and protein in those diets; and other factors. It found that the ultra-processed diets led to increased calorie intake and weight gain.  

The Science analysis, though, finds that the ultra-processed and non-ultra-processed diets in Hall’s study and other RCTs still differed in ways that could confound the trials’ results. The UPFs used in the trials tended to be softer than the non-ultra-processed foods, which can accelerate eating rate and lead to excess calorie consumption. They also tended to be more energy-dense (meaning that they had more calories per gram of food), less fiber-dense, and higher in saturated fat and sodium.  

These aren’t inherent properties of “ultra-processed” foods. “While UPFs are often characterized by properties such as soft texture, higher energy density, and lower fiber content, these features are neither unique to UPFs nor consistently present across them,” Faidon Magkos, a professor in obesity and metabolism at the University of Copenhagen and an author of the Science analysis, told me in an email. “There are many non-UPF foods with similar properties, and conversely, many UPFs that are harder in texture, lower in energy density, or higher in fiber.” (To name one example, I eat these ultra-processed bars, which are hard in texture and a good source of fiber, multiple times a week.) 

A core issue with most of the trials is that they compared ultra-processed diets (NOVA group 4) with diets made mostly or entirely of unprocessed foods (group 1). That “extreme contrast,” as Magkos and his co-authors call it, is not the cleanest comparison to make if the goal is to isolate what ultra-processing itself does. Nutrition scientists already know that unprocessed diets made up of whole foods are generally the healthiest for us and that many age-old processed foods, like white flour, white sugar, and cured meat, can be bad for us. But the question is whether there’s something uniquely bad about ultra-processing when compared with other types of processing. 

Consider a pair of meals from one of the trials: One ultra-processed breakfast consisted of Honey Nut Cheerios, milk, a powdered fiber supplement, a packaged blueberry muffin, and margarine. An unprocessed breakfast, meanwhile, included whole oats, blueberries, almonds, milk, and salt. These are so different that it would be hard to attribute the health differences to the presence of, say, tripotassium phosphate in Honey Nut Cheerios, rather than to the added sugars and refined flour in the ultra-processed meal — long-established nutrition problems that can be explained without the UPF framework. 

When I asked Hall about the criticisms raised in the Science analysis, he wrote that the analysis “presents plausible hypotheses to explain the observations from past UPF studies” but argued that its “implication seems to be that we already understand enough about the past UPF data and can simply skip the step of critically testing our ideas with careful experiments.” Magkos and his co-authors, for their part, do call for more research refining the past trials and better isolating the specific attributes of UPFs. 

This is not just academic

One of the most insightful critiques I’ve heard of the focus on ultra-processed foods came from Kevin Klatt, a nutrition scientist at the University of Toronto. The definition of ultra-processed foods in the NOVA framework, he told me in a conversation last year, “has absolutely nothing to do with processing.”

The comment surprised me, but Klatt makes a good point: Consider something like edamame pasta, he said. It undergoes intense industrial processing — it’s pulverized and extruded, which changes the plant’s cellular structure and makes its proteins and starches more digestible. Yet it would be categorized by NOVA as minimally processed, because its only listed ingredient is “edamame.” Seen in that light, the problem with UPF as a concept may not be just that it’s hard to define, but that it lacks a reasoned organizing principle beyond casting aspersions on an arbitrarily selected set of ingredients that have little in common with one another. 

Even so, you might say, if many if not most UPFs — things like Oreos, Pringles, Twinkies — are junk, why does it matter? 

It matters because nutrition guidance ought to be based on real information about the world, and when it isn’t it leads to bad politics and policy that don’t solve problems and may well make them worse. We have a live case study: a health secretary urging Americans to eat lots of red meat and full-fat dairy, while stigmatizing plant-based diets and “ultra-processed” meat and dairy alternatives. The public’s turn against UPFs, as Vox has written before, has likely contributed to the declining popularity of plant-based meat and milk, even though those foods are often healthier than their animal-based counterparts and are undeniably better for the climate and animals. 

Federal and some state officials are now seeking to build food regulations around the “ultra-processed” concept for programs like school meals, which could push food companies to reformulate products without making them any healthier. A growing number of programs now exist to certify foods “non-ultra-processed,” and, as Washington Post food columnist Tamar Haspel has pointed out, that has had the effect of lending the halo of health to conventionally, boringly unhealthy packaged foods like cookies. It’s hard to see how this helps consumers make better choices. Meanwhile, they can be misled into making worse choices if the UPF frame nudges them to choose, say, butter instead of a vegetable oil-based spread lower in saturated fat, because they’ve been convinced that the former is healthier (the American Heart Association and other authorities recommend the latter).

It’s not hard to see why the idea of ultra-processed foods has resonated so deeply. It taps into a justified feeling that food corporations profit at the expense of our health, and it has quite explicitly tried to turn that instinct into a scientific agenda. But a framework that cannot clearly diagnose what makes our food system harmful offers no real leverage against the industry that profits from it.

Cape Verde fans say they are ‘proud’ of their team despite a 3-2 defeat to Argentina that ended their World Cup hopes.

As America begins to celebrate its 250th birthday on Saturday, there are nearly 1 million outages being reported across multiple states.

Robert Emmet, the Irish republican leader. said he wished to secure for Ireland “the guarantee which Washington procured for America.”

America’s 250th anniversary has arrived, and, at a national level, the narrative is set: Presdient Donald Trump has made the semi-quincentennial into his personal party. 

The White House has rolled out a series of headline-grabbing events, from a UFC fight on the South Lawn to a failed concert series eventually replaced with — what else? — a full-fledged Trump rally. His transportation secretary called artists who decided not to perform “libtards.” 

The Great American State Fair is kind of a flop, too. And while Washington, DC, might see a record-setting fireworks display, no one knows exactly when, because it’s going to have to wait for Trump to finish his big speech on the Mall (at potentially 11 pm, or even later). 

But Trump’s vision of America doesn’t have to be how the whole country celebrates. After all, this has (kind of) happened before; America’s 1976 bicentennial under President Richard Nixon wasn’t smooth sailing either. 

Ultimately, according to MJ Rymsza-Pawlowska, a historian at American University and the author of History Comes Alive: Public History and Popular Culture in the 1970s, many of the bicentennial festivities ended up taking place at the local level, buoyed by grassroots support and a desire for a celebration that looked more like America. 

Rymsza-Pawlowska spoke with Today, Explained co-host Noel King in early June about how the bicentennial celebrations ended up the way they did, what Nixon’s original vision called for instead, and why even the most iconic national celebrations are often shaped less by official plans than by the people who take part in them.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation about America’s upcoming birthday, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Let’s dip back into the mists of time. It is 1976. America is a different country than it is today. What is the mood leading up to the bicentennial celebration of USA?

It is not dissimilar as the mood now, and it’s actually also not dissimilar as the mood in 1876. We never have an uncomplicated national commemoration, it turns out. 

In 1976, President Richard Nixon had just resigned under a cloud of scandal. He was a president who many people really, really disliked, who was accused of having an imperial presidency. We are coming out of a deeply unpopular war that had launched a lot of criticism and social movements, and Americans have been protesting for 10, 20 years. We live in a world where there have been very active social movements but where things have also changed a great deal in a short period of time.

Bicentennial planning started in 1966 when Lyndon Johnson was president. Lyndon Johnson formed the American Revolutionary Bicentennial Commission, which was the national body that was charged with planning the bicentennial. What Johnson really wanted to do is he wanted to have a commemoration that reflected his priorities for the domestic agenda, which was The Great Society. He envisioned a commemoration where the federal government would pump tons of infrastructure and resources into American cities. And the way that he wanted to do this is he wanted to have an international exposition. Several cities competed — Philadelphia finally won — and the idea is that [for] the bicentennial, the World’s Fair would be a kind of model city. It would be a showcase for all of Johnson’s domestic programs.

And then what happened? 

And then, Nixon came in in 1968, and he wanted to make it his own thing. Nixon also originally wanted an international exposition — a World’s Fair. But unlike Johnson, he was less interested in using it as an opportunity to build infrastructure and more interested in using it as an opportunity to celebrate America and Richard Nixon.

The first thing that I’ll say is that he took the American Revolutionary Bicentennial Commission, which, under Johnson, had been a nonpolitical commission. Nixon stocked it with people from his own cabinet and also his political allies. He put people in who shared his vision for the commemoration. But the thing that happened is that even when Nixon came in, he was a contentious, unpopular president. He had supporters, but he also had a lot of detractors. And the Vietnam War was intensifying. He immediately tries to do this kind of very celebratory World’s Fair. He gets a lot of pushback.

There’s an organization called the People’s Bicentennial Commission. They had a lot of support from civics teachers, and they had all these protests. And their idea was, basically, you should make the bicentennial a moment for reflection. Why don’t we try to plan a bicentennial that reflects the diversity of experience and the diversity of opinion across America?

One thing that I recall from being an American civilization major is that the 1970s were a time for everybody’s movement. It was the civil rights movement. It was the women’s rights movement. It was the Native American rights movement. These groups were calling on Nixon to complexify the plan, or to not make it so simple. Was it the same argument of, yes, America’s a great country, but it also has some problems and we need to acknowledge those?

Yes, absolutely. They were saying that a commemoration should be an opportunity to also reflect on the past, the present, and the future of America. For the American Indian movement, the thing that they said is: “This is a colonial history. This is not a history of freedom, of expanded rights — at least, not for us.”

You have President Nixon wanting to do the simple, patriotic Nixon-centric version, and you have all this pushback. What ends up happening?

The thing that’s really exceptional, and the biggest difference between 1976 and what we’re seeing now, is that the Nixon administration listens.

Part of the reason they listen is probably because they have a lot on their plate. This is all going on more or less simultaneously with Watergate. At the beginning of the Nixon administration, they had a lot more time and energy to micromanage the bicentennial. By the end, they are putting out lots of other fires. But the Nixon administration basically realizes that their vision for this kind of patriotic, celebratory, straightforward bicentennial is not flying. And so, they totally change course.

The mission totally changes. Nixon gives this speech in early 1974 when he’s announcing this new direction. And what he says is: “The bicentennial is not going to be invented in Washington, printed in triplicate by the government printing office, mailed to you by the US Postal Service, and filed away in your public library. Instead, we shall seek to trigger a chain reaction of tens of thousands of individual celebrations, large and small, planned in and carried out by citizens in every part of America.”

Wow. What does this tell us?

This is the bicentennial that we got. You had all of this grassroots energy of people really advocating for and planning their own commemorative activity that was more reflective of their experience. 

What they ended up doing is creating this new American Revolutionary Bicentennial Administration whose sole purpose was to disperse funding through the states to really hyperlocal groups — and even individuals who were planning bicentennial events — and then to publicize those events. The actual experience that most people had of the bicentennial was grassroots. a very ’70s take on commemoration.

This is very wholesome, what you’ve just described.

It is.

But it started out as a similar kind of politicized fury as what we’re seeing now.

Absolutely.

Do you think there is any chance that this heavily politicized celebration that President Trump has planned could morph into something perhaps a bit more hands across the water?

I think that in some ways it already is. 

As a public historian, as a fairly community-engaged person, I live in a world of the structures created for me by the bicentennial. One thing that happened when the bicentennial switched to kind of funding these small local projects is that a lot of small local projects and organizations were funded. And that capacity is still there. 

Your local museum probably got a new exhibit. Your library probably videotaped a bunch of people talking about what the commemoration means to them. That ethos is still there. And when I look at the kind of stuff that’s happening here in Washington, DC, for example, and in other cities where people that I work with in the public history community are involved, I see a lot of really great local projects. 

Here in DC, the public library is doing an exhibit about Washingtonians’ contributions to America. There’s a great organization called Made By Us that does these talk-back walls for people to write down what they wanna see for the next 250 years. There’s stuff; you just have to look for it.

The pontiff pays tribute to migrants who lost their lives at sea at a cemetery on the Italian island of Lampedusa.

“I’ll have what she’s having.”

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