Ultra-processed foods are not “real food” but really affect your health

Abstract

Poor eating habits, such as the increasing consumption of highly processed products, have deleterious effects on health status and represent a serious challenge for public health systems. They are not “real food” but formulations of food substances often modified by chemical processes and then assembled into ready-to-consume hyper-palatable food (cosmetic food) [1]. In this group, a large variety of industrially processed food products, such as savory snacks, reconstituted meat products, pre-prepared frozen dishes, and soft drinks among other food items, are included. Thus, it is very difficult to categorize them [2,3]. Three systems are reported to classify foods and beverages based on degree of industrial food processing [4]. The Nova system, developed in Brazil and used internationally in research, and two of them based on the U.S. diet: Specifically, a system developed by the International Food Information Council (IFIC) and used to examine the nutrient quality of foods consumed by Americans by processing category, and another created by researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) that categorizes all barcoded foods items sold in U.S. supermarkets.