NOVA – A New Way of Thinking About Food

In the past decade, we have learned that the more ultra-processed food you eat, the higher your risk of obesity, heart disease, cancer, gastrointestinal maladies, and maybe even dementia. The problem is, these so-called foods are getting harder and harder to avoid. A recent JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association) article notes that kids’ consumption of a substance called ultra-processed foods has increased significantly in the past 20 years, going from about 61% to 67% or what is now two-thirds of their diets.

Kids’ consumption of ultra-processed foods has increased to 67% of their diets.

Why are ultra-processed foods so hard to avoid?

The reason these substances are hard to avoid is that they’ve been manufactured and marketed to look like real, actual food, but perhaps a bit cheaper and flashier. Take pizza, for example. My husband likes to make pizza. He makes a dough from scratch with the following ingredients: wheat flour, water, yeast, salt. He makes his sauce from scratch too with tomatoes, salt, pepper, a little bit of sugar, garlic, basil, oregano. The cheese, he buys, but it contains only milk, cultures, and salt. Compare that to the ingredients of a frozen supermarket pizza (which may not be any better, ingredient-wise than the take-out pizza you get from your local chain). Can you picture what all the individual ingredients in my husband’s pizza look like in your mind’s eye? Now can you picture what all the ingredients listed on the frozen pizza look like? I can’t.

I’m not arguing that my husband’s pizza is health food. It isn’t. It’s a processed food. It’s not a banana or an apple or kale for that matter, but it’s still recognizable as food to our bodies. The stuff that we are all now consuming, and our kids are consuming at an alarming rate, isn’t. Your mind can’t picture what some of the ingredients widely used in 67% of kids’ diets look like and your body isn’t quite sure what to do with some of them either. They are more than just processed. They are ultra-processed.

A New Nutrition Classification

That’s why in 2009, a new nutrition classification system, called NOVA, put ultra-processed foods into its own category.

We have to be able to name a thing as a first step in figuring out what to do about it, so NOVA groups foods into four categories:

• Category 1 is made up of foods that are unprocessed or minimally processed. Unprocessed foods are eaten as nature gives them to you—an apple, banana, or kale. If you take the kale and bake it into chips, you’ve processed it, but minimally (it’s still basically kale).
• Category 2 is made up of what are called processed culinary ingredients like oil or salt. Nature does not give us oil or salt directly. We have to make them from basic starting points (pressing olives in the case of oil and grinding whatever it is that salt comes from—rocks? The sea?). They should be used sparingly to enhance the flavor of Category 1 foods.
• Category 3 foods are processed foods. It generally is how we have historically preserved food to last a bit longer. Bread and pasta are processed. Real cheese and yogurt are processed. The ingredients used to make them have to go through a few steps to get to their final stage, but they are essentially still wheat or milk.

Category 4 are the ultra-processed foods. NOVA says these are made up of: substances that are of “rare” or of “no culinary use” or are “additives whose function is to make the final product sellable, palatable and often hyper-palatable. Food substances of no or rare culinary use, employed in the manufacture of ultra-processed foods, include varieties of sugars (fructose, high-fructose corn syrup, ‘fruit juice concentrates’, invert sugar, maltodextrin, dextrose, lactose), modified oils (hydrogenated or interesterified oils) and sources of protein (hydrolysed proteins, soya protein isolate, gluten, casein, whey protein, and ‘mechanically separated meat’). Classes of additives used only in the manufacture of ultra-processed foods, are flavours, flavour enhancers, colours, emulsifiers, emulsifying salts, artificial sweeteners, thickeners, and foaming, anti-foaming, bulking, carbonating, gelling and glazing agents.”

Category 4 foods are the culprit in many diet-related diseases…

Here’s what I want to communicate clearly—Category 1 foods are best, but Category 2 and 3 foods are fine as long as we don’t go crazy with them. Category 4 foods are the culprit in many diet-related diseases and now we can identify them (at least when we have access to the list of ingredients).

What’s the next step?

Well, according to the JAMA study, in the past 20 years, there was a notable DECREASE in the consumption of sugary beverages by kids. This is probably due to numerous campaigns to steer kids away from sodas. So, we know how to make our diets healthier and it’s not just about avoiding fast food. Ultra-processed foods are in pricier restaurants too. They are in our school cafeterias and in our homes, though the JAMA article notes that the more we eat at home, the less ultra-processed foods we tend to eat. If we can put them in, we can take them out. We didn’t always eat ultra-processed foods. They are a relatively recent invention. Like sodas, we can learn to limit them or cut them out entirely. NOVA means “new” in Portuguese and it’s a good, new way to think about what we eat this year.