People Love to Blame “Ultra-Processed Food.” It’s Unhelpful.
The problem, however, is that Nova was not designed to adjudicate the nutritional properties of individual foods. It is designed to understand population-level health outcomes. While a growing body of research ties the consumption of ultra-processed foods to increased morbidity and deems them a “threat to public health,” deeper examination of the data tends to suggest that, for the most part, the only statistically meaningful ill health effects come from ultra-processed foods that contain the things we already know are bad for us: too much salt, sugar, and fat. But the broadness of the fourth Nova category means that it captures foods as disparate as alcohol, sugary breakfast cereals, chips, infant formula, ready-to-eat meals, and plant-based meat alternatives, all of which are made using completely different processes and ingredients and have vastly different nutritional properties. This means that enriched soy milk and fortified bread are treated as being just as unhealthy as a bag of chips or a bottle of vodka.
It’s true that many ultra-processed foods are designed to be “hyperpalatable”—easy or even addictive—which can lead to over-eating. But this is mostly a problem because it means eaters can take in too many calories or an excess of salt, sugar, and fat. There is little convincing evidence that any particular form of processing is inherently unhealthy. In fact, one recent study suggested that eating more ultra-processed vegetables was a net health benefit for the simple reason that it increased vegetable intake.
Meanwhile, there is also little evidence that simply removing items deemed ultra-processed will yield health benefits. A recent study conducted in Brazil showed that even massively reducing the proportion of UPFs in children’s diets over a nine-month period did not result in weight loss or measurably better health outcomes. Sure, critics of this study might point out that some of the posited risks associated with ultra-processed food accrue over a longer period of time. But this still doesn’t look great for the anti-UPF theory of health—particularly since many dietary interventions do make a meaningful difference in a matter of months.
