As Mr. E. Blair pointed out, if you change the language with which people are informed and think thereby you change the information people gain and the way that they think. Which brings us to the recently resigned Food Czar for the nation:

Ultra-processed food — meaning a packaged product, generally high in calories and low in nutrients,

Leave the ultra-processed part out of it - despite the fact that that bans tofu to everyone’s great relief - and concentrate upon the definitional switch done there. Using Our Friend, Mr. Google, the first entry tells us that:

(NOO-tree-ent) A chemical compound (such as protein, fat, carbohydrate, vitamin, or mineral) contained in foods. These compounds are used by the body to function and grow.

Calories, from those carbohydrates, are nutrients. Not “calories and nutrients”, but “nutrients, such as calories and”.

It is possible to test this. Lacks of certain nutrients will indeed kill - no Vitamin C through scurvy, no niacin through pellagra, lack of protein through kwashiorkor and so on. A lack of calories will kill through simple starvation. Also, a lack of calories will kill rather faster than any of those others.

Calories are nutrients, an essential part of a human diet.

At which point we really do have to stop and think just for a little bit. We have here someone desirous of planning the diet of the entire nation. Someone who doesn’t, in fact, grasp the very basis of nutrition in the first place. This really might not be quite the place for us to be getting our national plan now, might it?

Not that we should be having a national plan and all that but this herd of nonsense needs to be stopped before it even gets out of the gate.

Calories are an essential part of all animal nutrition. Any discussion of food which tries to ignore this is doomed to logical and medical failure.