Ultra-processed foods: how functional is the NOVA system?

Agreed. I hope these terms go away. I think what people tend to mean is "calorie dense, low in nutrients, low in fiber", or something along those lines, and the term "processed" makes it far more confusing. "Processed" ends up meaning anything from "high in sugar" to "long shelf life" or "one of a dozen kinds of artificial sweetener" etc. It does more harm than good. I can have an extremely high fiber, high protein, nutritionally well rounded meal that's also "ultra processed". Someone mentioned Nova. Nova is a PERFECT example of how god awful the term is. When asked to classify foods into Nova categories there is almost no agreement amongst nutritionists. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41430-022-01099-1 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8181985/ Time after time, Nova is shown to be more confusing than helpful, with worse than random results. Nova itself doesn't even attempt to correlate with "healthy".

Unfortunately there seems to be no good aligned definition of what (highly) processed food is. 1,2 Whole grain bread or infant formula can be “highly processed” despite very healthy. In the end someone else cooks for you and packages it. They can cook healthy or not or in between, add a lot of salt or little, .. as always it’s more complex. 1: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41430-022-01099-1 2 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/nutrition-research-r...

There are a lot of different studies and my comment was pretty short, but this is an explanation and evaluation of the generally used system for classifying food into ultra high processed versus not. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41430-022-01099-1 Most studies involving human diet involve self reporting so that's why its important to understand the limitations of that classification system. There have been lots of studies showing a connection with microbiome changes, though some countries have been later than the USA in adopting more ultra high processed foods, allowing a more timely study, here is one about Spanish citizens and tried to guide the self reporting diet a bit more specifically about where to categorize their food intake. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8398738/

My buddy and I recently went down a rabbit hole researching this after "processed foods" started to be the topic everyone was talking about. It really is nonsense when people try to define it scientifically. This is the closest to anything we found that makes sense https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_processing#Processing_lev... but it's kind of separate from the popular idea of processed foods Here's a Nature article discussing the problems: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41430-022-01099-1

There is no reliable definition of processed or ultra-processed food though. Not one you'd recognise: for example under the NOVA system[1] you can get a lot of weird outcomes. For example pasta is a processed food (though also, bad for you - calorie dense). [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41430-022-01099-1