Food scientists offer 'food for thought' on NOVA and UPFs

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Food scientists offer ‘food for thought’ on NOVA and UPFs

25 Mar 2025

Mari Rydings

Mari Rydings is a versatile content creator, editor and marketer with experience developing dynamic, results-driven materials for B2B and B2C audiences. As the editorial director for Avant Food Media, she leads the day-to-day editorial operations for the company’s print and digital magazines, newsletters and social media platforms. Outside of work, she loves reading, hiking, putting together jigsaw puzzles and spending time with her husband and their twin daughters.

KANSAS CITY, MO — The term “ultra-processed foods” (UPFs) is getting a lot of attention in the press lately. While nutritionists point to research studies that link consumption of UPFs to serious health risks, food manufacturers contend that processing improves food safety and offers a convenient — and less expensive — way to feed people worldwide.

Adding to the confusion is a shift away from the decades-old science-based US dietary guidelines, which promote the benefits of nutrient-dense foods and healthy eating to reduce the risk of disease, toward the four-tiered NOVA Food Classification System, which categorizes foods using only processing and formulation criteria.

“NOVA doesn’t distinguish between nutritious and non-nutritious foods,” said Matt Teegarden, PhD, a food scientist, chemist and manager of regulatory affairs, nutrition for Abbott Nutrition. “Foods can exist across multiple NOVA categories.”

Teegarden and Susanne Gjedstead Bügel, PhD, a nutrition scientist, researcher, professor and head of the nutrition and health section the Department of Nutrition, Exercise and Sports at the University of Copenhagen, shared their insights during “Navigating the Science of Ultra-Processed Foods,” a webinar hosted by the Institute of Food Technologists (IFT).

The NOVA system organizes foods as follows:

– Category 1 | Unprocessed and minimally processed

– Category 2 | Processed culinary ingredients

– Category 3 | Processed

– Category 4 | Ultra-processed

Under NOVA, mass-produced packaged white, whole wheat, and whole grain bread and buns are classified as Category 4 ultra-processed foods, while whole wheat bread from a local artisan bakery and cake made from scratch at home are classified as Category 3 processed foods.

“These foods might be ultra-processed according to NOVA, but some of them also have a lot of good nutritional value that we should recommend people to eat,” Bügel said. “Maybe it’s not all foods that are classified as UPFs, but only a few, and that is what we need to take a closer look at. We need to distinguish between what is healthy and what is not healthy.”

Bügel is currently leading a two-year international initiative aimed at revising the NOVA system to include a category that combines processing, formulation and nutrition into account.

Research studies and ultra-processed foods

While epidemiological studies have found a connection between eating foods categorized by the NOVA system as ultra-processed and certain health risks, Teegarden added a word of caution.

“There are known issues with dietary recall data … the data these studies rely on,” he said. “These surveys are sent to people who represent the population and ask them in different ways what they tend to eat. It’s really hard to measure what people eat, and there are known issues with bias and measurement error when collecting this type of data.”

Teegarden added that the data used in many of the published studies to date was not necessarily collected with processing in mind and may have been collected before NOVA was invented.

“The processing levels of the foods in these dietary surveys are actually implied,” he said. “We don’t have good tools to collect the type of data scientists would need to accurately classify different foods as ultra processed or minimally processed.”

While epidemiological studies are important, Teegarden said, they exist across a spectrum of other evidence that’s needed to inform science-based dietary recommendations.

“We have studies that compare apples to orange juice, but what we also need are studies that compare apples to applesauce,” he said. “The gold standard is the randomized controlled clinical trial because it can do an intervention and show the effect of the intervention. Only a few clinical studies exist for ultra-processed foods.”

Ultra-processed foods and food insecurity

On an adjacent level, the issue of food insecurity also comes into play when talking about ultra-processed foods.

“We need to discuss both,” Bügel said. “Many of the ultra-processed foods have longer shelf lives. They can be transported over longer distances and can reach remote areas. This wouldn’t be possible if we didn’t have these processed foods.”

Five takeaways for NOVA categorization

Teegarden offered five key factors to consider when analyzing NOVA:

Processing and formulation have been conflated. Both can impact the healthfulness or nutritional value of a food, so they need to be studied independently.
Food technologies can address many of the concerns raised by NOVA.
Food and society shape each other.
Foods need to fit a variety of needs. They need to be healthy or fit within a healthy diet pattern, safe and sustainable.
A multi-disciplinary approach is needed for progress, and food scientists should be in the conversation.

“Looking at dietary patterns as whole and trying to understand why people choose to eat what they do is important, and it’s a code nutrition researchers have been trying to crack for decades,” he said. ““The take home message for consumers or people trying to eat a healthy diet shouldn’t necessarily be, ‘If you’re going to eat cake, eat one from home.’ The recommendation should be to eat less cake.”

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