If you're talking about American-style bacon, and it tastes like bacon, there's no such thing. They're just exploiting labeling rules by selecting very specific nitrite sources. Nitrites are what give bacon (and ham) its flavor.

<strike>This is before we get to the whole premise of avoiding nitrates. Would you eat a beet? That's a serving of industrial bacon's worth of nitrates right there.</strike>

Later

(Actually, super bad example, since the concern is nitrosamines which are formed in the presence of proteins. The point about the illegitimacy of nitrite-free bacon stands!)

I don't know that it does, but I do know that carrageenan does, and they're both just seaweed extracts.

Later

This video is really frustrating. The first half of it is making relatively banal arguments about the importance of food to health. He's setting up an argument that I think basically everybody agrees with (hyperpalatable packaged food are a major driver of illness). But then he gets to UPFs, says the definition is totally agreed on, and then says they're all made by investor-driven large corporations.

That's just straightforwardly false. I made a mac & cheese out of some stored roasted cauliflower (never put a raw cauliflower in your fridge). To melt the aged cheddar I used, I added a half teaspoon of sodium citrate (a miracle ingredient). My cauli-mac is now a UPF. No giant corporation made it.

My argument isn't that packaged food isn't exactly as much of a problem as the UPF people say it is. My argument is that "UPF" is not the right axis on which to determine which foods are and aren't healthy.