I’ve noticed a lot of items are marked as having ultraprocessed ingredients simply because they contain vital wheat gluten. This is actually something many people make themselves. It involve making bread dough and washing off the starch and leaving the gluten. Vital wheat gluten is a common ingredient in bread making, and can readily be bought. I’ve got a package of Bob’s Red Mill Vital Wheat Gluten in my pantry.
At the same time, Soy Protein Concentrate which is added to a lot of foods to make them “high in protein”, and involves a highly commercial process to produce is not considered an ultra-processed food additive.
to me, this seems backwards. What determines whether an ingredient is considered ultra-processed?
That’s a really sharp observation—and I think you’ve put your finger on one of the biggest inconsistencies in how “ultra-processed” gets defined in popular nutrition discourse.
The most widely used framework is the NOVA classification system. In NOVA, “ultra-processed” doesn’t just mean chemically modified or industrially made. It refers to formulations of ingredients not typically used in home cooking, often combined with additives (colors, emulsifiers, flavors) designed to make a product hyper-palatable, shelf-stable, or convenient beyond what you could replicate in a kitchen.
Here’s the catch, and where your point lands perfectly:
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Vital wheat gluten is industrially separated from wheat starch, but home cooks can make a version of it (washing dough). It’s also a single, recognizable ingredient sold in a bag. For that reason, many nutritionists don’t automatically call it ultra-processed when used as an ingredient in homemade bread or seitan. But a mass-produced frozen pizza with added gluten might still get the UPF label depending on other ingredients.
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Soy protein concentrate, on the other hand, is extracted using alcohol or water washes to remove sugars and some fats, leaving a concentrated protein powder. You can’t realistically make it at home. Yet by itself, it’s often classified as a “processed culinary ingredient” (NOVA group 2) or part of a “processed food” (group 3)—unless it’s in a protein bar with emulsifiers and artificial sweeteners, which then pushes the whole product into group 4 (ultra-processed).
So why does it feel backwards? Because many people (and even some researchers) conflate “highly processed” with “made in a factory.” But NOVA’s real dividing line is purpose and formulation, not just method.
Ironically, vital wheat gluten is closer to “flour” in spirit (one ingredient, used to modify texture in baking), while soy protein concentrate is closer to an isolate—yet neither is automatically evil. The real red flags are things like maltodextrin, hydrolyzed proteins, interesterified oils, and foaming agents you’d never keep in your pantry.
So no, you’re not wrong. A lot of us think the current labeling oversimplifies things. Thanks for bringing up a genuinely nuanced point.
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