The nation’s leading public health journal is laying down a marker for how it wants the Trump administration to define ultra-processed foods.
The guiding light for the administration, as it seeks to define highly processed foods and develop new food warning labels, should be a classification system called NOVA developed by a Brazilian researcher, say researchers who contributed to an edition of the American Journal of Public Health focused on the harms of ultra-processed food.
The NOVA system categorizes food by its additives and industrial processing, instead of nutritional content. The researchers said the approach – which defines ultra-processed food as including little to no whole foods or ingredients used in home kitchens and intensely processed – is the best way to ensure no foods slip through the definitional cracks.