Is It Really Food?
- Dr Lucille Fifield
- 20 minutes ago
- 8 min read
What the Nutrient Hierarchy Teaches Us About Ultra-Processed Foods
Every now and again, I read a piece of research and think, “Well, this is what we’ve been teaching at Manna House for years!” And the growing body of research around ultra-processed foods, or UPFs as they're now commonly called, is a good example.
If you've attended one of our health programmes, you'll probably remember me talking about the Nutrient Hierarchy and the Health Continuum. These are two simple concepts that help us understand something very important: not everything we put into our mouths has the same value to the body, and the choices we make every day can move us either towards greater health and vitality or towards poorer health and eventually disease.
Understanding the Nutrient Hierarchy[1]
At one end of our Nutrient Hierarchy are the things that are absolutely essential for life. We call these Group 1 — Basic Nutrients: air, water, sunshine and the natural environment around us. Think about it: you can survive for quite some time without food, but take away your air and you have only minutes. These are therefore at the highest end of our hierarchy because they are fundamental to life itself.
Then we come to Group 2 — Natural Raw Foods. I often describe these as foods that you can simply “pick and pop into your mouth.” Think of an apple picked from a tree, grapes from the vine, a strawberry, a tomato or many nuts and seeds. There is no factory required and no long list of ingredients on the back of a packet. You can look at the food and recognise exactly what it is.
Next is Group 3 — Grains and Legumes. These are also foods that come from the earth, but they usually require some preparation before we can eat them. Wheat may be ground. Oats are prepared and cooked. Beans and lentils may be soaked and cooked. This is processing, and this is where I think we need to be careful with our terminology, because processing food isn't automatically bad. Human beings have been processing food for thousands of years. Grinding, soaking, chopping, fermenting and cooking are all forms of processing.
The important question isn't simply, “Has this food been processed?” We need to ask, “What has the processing done to the food, and what is the resulting food going to do to the body?”
Noah gives us a fascinating example
There's an interesting example of this very early in the Bible. After the Flood, Noah planted a vineyard. Genesis 9 tells us that he drank wine from his vineyard, became drunk, fell asleep and lay naked in his tent.
Now think about what happened. The original food, the grape, wasn't the problem. Grapes are a beautiful natural food. You can pick one from the vine and pop it straight into your mouth. But the grape underwent a process. Through fermentation, sugars in the grape juice were converted into alcohol.
It might seem like only one processing step, but look at the difference in the resulting product and its effect upon the body. The grape is nourishing; the alcoholic product can intoxicate. In Noah's case, the Bible records that his judgement and behaviour were affected: he became drunk, fell asleep and was left exposed.
That's a powerful illustration because it shows us that processing isn't simply about counting the number of steps. Something can undergo what appears to be a relatively simple process and yet the end product can have a very different physiological effect from the original food.
Later, in Genesis 18, we see another kind of processing when Abraham tells Sarah to take fine flour, knead it and make cakes for their visitors. Here the grain has been ground, kneaded and cooked. We also see Jacob preparing lentil pottage in Genesis 25. So processing itself isn't something invented by the modern food industry. People have always prepared food. The real issue is what the processing does to the food.
We can process good food badly in our own kitchens
And this is where I think we sometimes miss the point. We don't need a huge food factory to diminish the nutritional quality of a perfectly good food. We can do it ourselves in our own kitchens.
We can start with beautiful, fresh vegetables packed with nutrients and then boil and boil and boil them until they're limp, colourless and sitting in water containing nutrients that have leached out of the food. Some vitamins, particularly vitamin C and certain B vitamins, are sensitive to heat and water, and naturally occurring enzymes in raw plant foods are generally inactivated by cooking.
As I sometimes jokingly say in our presentations, “We've murdered it in the pot!” We started with a beautiful living plant food and boiled it to death.
Of course, that doesn't mean cooking is bad. Cooking can make many foods safer, more digestible and more enjoyable, and it can actually make some nutrients more available to the body. Beans and many grains, for example, need appropriate preparation and cooking. The point is that the method matters. Gentle steaming is very different from boiling vegetables excessively and then throwing away the nutrient-rich cooking water. Baking a potato is very different from turning that potato into a highly refined, heavily salted, flavoured and packaged product.
So again, the question is not merely, “Is it processed?” The better questions are: How has it been processed? What has been removed? What has been added? What has been changed? And what is the nutritional quality of the food at the end of that process?
Then we arrive at Group 5
At the other end of our Nutrient Hierarchy we have Group 5 — Refined and Processed Foods, including many of the products now described as ultra-processed foods.
This is where we have moved a very long way from picking an apple from a tree. Many of these products have been manufactured, refined, broken apart, recombined, flavoured, coloured, sweetened, texturised and preserved. Some contain ingredients that most of us would never have in our kitchen cupboards, and the original food may be almost impossible to recognise.
That's why I sometimes look at these products and ask, “Is this really food?”
It might be edible. It might taste wonderful. It may have been deliberately formulated to make us want another mouthful. But is it nourishing the body in the same way as the food from which some of those ingredients originally came?
That is an entirely different question.
And now the research is sounding the alarm
This is what makes the growing research into ultra-processed foods so interesting. A major umbrella review published in The BMJ brought together evidence involving almost 10 million people and examined the relationship between exposure to ultra-processed foods and a wide range of health outcomes.[2]
The researchers found that greater exposure to ultra-processed foods was associated with a higher risk of numerous adverse health outcomes. Particularly concerning evidence included associations with cardiovascular-related death, type 2 diabetes and common mental health disorders, alongside associations across a wider range of health outcomes.
Now, we have to be responsible when we talk about research. An association does not automatically prove that a particular ultra-processed food directly caused a particular disease. Much of this research is observational, and there are many things that influence our health. Nevertheless, when evidence involving millions of people repeatedly points in a similar direction, surely it is something worth paying attention to.
For me, it is further confirmation of a principle that we've been sharing on our programmes for years: the quality of what we put into our bodies matters.
Where are you on the Health Continuum?
This brings me to the other principle we teach at Manna House: the Health Continuum. We sometimes think of health as two separate states; “I'm healthy” or “I'm sick”, but there is a whole journey between vibrant health and disease.
Every day, our choices can move us along that continuum. What we eat matters. What we drink matters. Whether we move our bodies matters. Sleep matters. Sunshine matters. Fresh air matters. Our emotional and spiritual wellbeing matter. These things work together.
That's why I don't want people simply waiting until they receive a diagnosis of diabetes, high blood pressure, obesity or another chronic condition before asking, “What can I take for it?” I want us to ask an earlier question: “What am I doing every day that is moving me towards health, and what am I doing that is moving me away from it?”
The Nutrient Hierarchy gives us a very practical way of looking at that question. Look at what you're eating over the course of a week. Where does most of it sit? Is your diet dominated by foods that you can recognise as having come from the earth, or by products manufactured in factories?
In what direction are you travelling?
Start moving in the right direction
Sometimes when I teach this, people immediately start thinking about everything they have to give up. But that's not how I want you to approach it. Think about what you can add and replace.
Can you eat more fruit? More vegetables? More beans and lentils? More whole grains? More nuts and seeds? Can you cook those foods in ways that preserve their nutritional value rather than destroying it? Can you gradually replace some of the highly processed products in your cupboards with foods that you actually recognise?
You don't have to change everything overnight. Just start moving in the right direction — away from Group 5 and towards Groups 3 and 2, while remembering the fundamental Group 1 nutrients that sustain life.
And once you understand why you're doing it, making those choices becomes much easier.
This is why education is at the heart of Manna House
Our retreats aren't simply somewhere to come for seven or ten days, eat beautiful plant-based food, have some treatments and then go home. Education is at the heart of what we do.
Yes, I want you to enjoy the food. I want you to experience what it feels like to give your body good nutrition, appropriate movement, rest, fresh air and the other conditions that support health. But most importantly, I want you to go home understanding why these things matter.
Because what happens when you leave us?
That's the real test.
If you've understood the Nutrient Hierarchy and the Health Continuum, you're equipped to stand in a supermarket, look at something you're thinking of buying and ask yourself, “Where does this sit on my Nutrient Hierarchy?” You can look at what you're cooking at home and ask, “Am I preserving the goodness in this food, or am I processing the goodness out of it?”
That's when information becomes practical.
Our final health retreat of 2026
If you've been saying all year, “I really need to do something about my health,” there is still one final opportunity to join us in 2026. Our last Manna House Health Retreat of the year begins on 25 October 2026, with our 7-day Refresh programme running from 25 October to 1 November, and our full 10-day Restore programme running from 25 October to 4 November.
I actually think this is a wonderful time of year to do it. We're heading into the British winter, the days are getting shorter, we're spending more time indoors, and rather than waiting until January to start thinking about your health, why not prepare yourself for winter now?
Come and learn. Come and understand your body. Come and experience wholesome food. Come and learn about the Nutrient Hierarchy and the Health Continuum and discover practical things you can do at home to start moving yourself in the direction of better health.
And perhaps today, before you eat your next meal, take a look at what's on your plate and ask yourself one simple question:
“Where does this sit on the Nutrient Hierarchy?”
Because what we do to our food matters — and ultimately, what we do to our food determines something of what that food will do to us.
Reference
[1] Sharps, J (2011) Basic Prinicples of Total Health: The Hierarchy of Nutrients
[2] Lane MM, Gamage E, Du S, Ashtree DN, McGuinness AJ, Gauci S, et al. (2024). “Ultra-processed food exposure and adverse health outcomes: umbrella review of epidemiological meta-analyses.” BMJ, 384:e077310. DOI: 10.1136/bmj-2023-077310.
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