It’s terribly broken, which is unsurprising since it was never designed to do what it does, and ends up placing healthy, non addictive foods under the ultra processed category 4, while including hyper palatable foods that are not healthy at all in categories 1-3.
Hyper palatability, which is much better defined and is designed to capture what the NOVA system is actually used for, is likely a better categorization.
Speaking of Mesoamerican ingredients, nixtamal is pretty heavily processed, and is a staple in many areas, but it's much healthier than unprocessed corn which can cause pellagra when used as a staple food.
It's like "organic".
Too many variables are conflated to make any of this reasonable.
OTOH everybody intuitively understands junk food is bad for you, has a rough idea of what it is and that the definition is circular.
"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".
Neither is there for speciation. Doesn’t make the term or concept useless. And doesn’t mean we can’t make useful statements about one species versus another, even if it gets blurry at the edges.
What framework has Nova helped develop for eating healthier?
No one believes that. We're all adults and not looking for loopholes or edge cases to exploit. A system can be generally good even if it has inconsistent edge cases, which is basically all systems that have ever existed.
It's could be OK to have informal system with plenty of inconsistent cases for informal conversations, but once we start talking of regulation, it's time to switch to something that does not have quite as few loopholes.
Because for example grape juice has more sugar per cup than coca-cola, and almost no nutrients (if filtered.) And yet it's firmly the best type of food according to NOVA system (minimal processing, no artificial additives). You can be sure that if any sort of government adopts NOVA system, it's that kind of food that would be pushed to consumer, not the actual healthy stuff.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-0009.70066
Which variables are conflated?
It asserts that UPF is bad because they tend to result in quicker absorption, amongst many other things. So why not say quick absorbing food is bad for you, and why use a definition that also includes food that is processed to absorb slower?
Then repeat across several other characteristics. Few UPF foods will bingo on all characteristics and a lot of non-UPF foods will bingo on many of the same characteristics.
Redirect your energy toward something useful.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova_classification
Presumably, since the first citation in the paper is said epidemiologist (Monteiro), this is the framework they rely on.
Unless you’re intent on scientific gatekeeping, in which case having actually read the reported study (it’s linked in the article fyi) would have offered much more effective methods of rebuttal than semantic quibbles.
Nova also does not even attempt to categorize in terms of health because "processed" has nothing to do with "healthy" despite being used in conversations about public health. Absolutely perfect example of how bad the term "processed" is.
This is like arguing astronomy isn’t real because colloquial definitions of space are ambiguous.
The study [1] uses a definition that finds a significant effect. We should investigate that further. If it pans out and the term ultra-processed food triggers people, we can rebrand it. (Did the cigarette lobby ever try muddying the water on what cigarettes are?)
[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-0009.70066
Besides, 'ultraprocessed food' itself is and has always been a useless buzzword (buzzphrase?).
I don’t need a term to be perfect to be useful.
For losing fat, "fried chicken", "chocolate cake", and "sugary drinks" are intuitively unhelpful, and "vegetables", "lean meat", "water" is more "healthy".
It's not that I didn't know that certain foods were unhealthy. The term UPF (understood to mean foods that are manufactured specifically to be hyper-palatable while otherwise lacking in nutrients) taught me the reasons why I find certain foods harder to resist than others, and consequently what foods I should focus on instead (higher protein / high fiber).
Please don’t tell me impossible burger patties are like cigarettes.
I guess “bad foods should be treated more like cigarettes” is too obvious.
Sometimes I wonder if the gluten free trend is a ploy by food processing companies to whitewash expensive proprietary processed foods as “whole”.
Not everyone has a good nutritional understanding of their foods, so these are short form efforts to try and help.
Rather than knocking what's out there, how about also trying to determine an alternative and see how challenging it is.
I read a lot of people poking holes, but not a lot of suggestions of how to improve things.