Consuming large amounts of ultra-processed food (UPF) increases the risk of an early death, according to a international study that has reignited calls for a crackdown on UPF.
Each 10% extra intake of UPF, such as bread, cakes and ready meals, increases someone’s risk of dying before they reach 75 by 3%, according to research in countries including the US and England.
UPF is so damaging to health that it is implicated in as many as one in seven of all premature deaths that occur in some countries, according to a paper in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.
They are associated with 124,107 early deaths in the US a year and 17,781 deaths every year in England, the review of dietary and mortality data from eight countries found.
Not even. The NOVA system has been tested and doesn’t function as a system of classification. Experts cannot consistently classify things into UPF/not UPF. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41430-022-01099-1
So it’s more like “there’s this food and it’s bad for you but idk what it is :/”
The infuriating thing is that I believe that nutrition is more than just a linear addition of all the constituent ingredients (kinda the default view of nutrition science up through the 90’s), but addressing the shortcomings of that overly simple model shouldn’t mean making an even more simple model.
NOVA classification is the wrong answer to a legitimate problem.