Why your favorite snacks might be more than just 'processed' foods
In short: In the UK, the average person gets more than half of their daily calories from ultra-processed foods. These items are engineered for convenience and shelf life, but they may be fundamentally altering our health, from our gut microbiomes to our risk of chronic disease.
Researchers based at Brazil's University of São Paulo created the NOVA system to categorise these items. Unlike systems that focus on calories or vitamins, NOVA categorizes food by the extent of industrial processing. It distinguishes between unprocessed items (like fruit and eggs), processed ingredients (salt and oils), and processed foods (like jam or cheese), which can be made in a domestic kitchen. Ultra-processed foods (UPFs) are the fourth category: industrially formulated products containing ingredients rarely found in a home kitchen, such as emulsifiers, preservatives, and artificial flavors.
Because they are designed for mass production and long shelf lives, UPFs often displace nutrient-dense whole foods in the diet. Common examples include mass-produced bread, breakfast cereals, instant soups, and plant-based meat alternatives. While they are highly appealing and marketed heavily, they are frequently high in saturated fats, salt, and sugar. Research suggests that the negative health impacts may stem from three distinct factors: the high levels of these specific nutrients, the chemical additives used in formulation, and the way the physical processing of the food changes how the human body responds to it.
The consequences of high UPF consumption are significant, particularly in Western countries like the US, UK, and Canada. Regular intake is associated with increased risks of obesity, type-2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, various cancers, and poor mental health. Emerging research even suggests these foods may interact with the gut microbiome. However, the NOVA system is not without controversy; some scientists argue that because it focuses on processing rather than nutrition, it can unfairly label some nutrient-dense, affordable, and healthy ultra-processed products as 'bad.'
Consumption patterns are not uniform. Children, city dwellers, and people from poorer socioeconomic groups show the greatest levels of UPF consumption. Because the exact biological mechanisms are still being studied, experts are calling for more research to understand how these industrially formulated products interact with human biological processes over the long term.
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Sources
- Summary by Intellect · source: What are the impacts of ultra-processed food? | Decomplicated
- Also: Ultra-processed foods: how bad are they for your health?
- Also: Health impacts of ultra-processed foods
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