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Ultraprocessed Foods: Are They Bad for You? > News > Yale Medicine [1]
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Date: 2025-01
Frozen pizza, ready-to-eat meals, instant noodles, and many store-bought breads are just a few examples of what some consider “ultraprocessed foods,” or products that contain a long list of ingredients, chemical additives, and little to no “whole” foods.
Lately, the ultraprocessed-food (or UPF) category is gaining attention due, in part, to studies that link them to health issues. A review, published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) in 2024, looked at 45 studies involving almost 10 million participants. The review authors suggest that eating more ultraprocessed foods is linked to a higher risk of dying from any cause and has ties to 32 health conditions, including heart disease, mental health disorders, type 2 diabetes, and other problems.
The studies in the review relied on a widely used classification system called NOVA that was developed by academic researchers in Brazil and breaks foods into four categories: unprocessed or minimally processed; processed culinary ingredients; processed; and ultraprocessed. (Examples of these foods appear below.)
The NOVA system, created in 2009, is recognized by the World Health Organization (WHO) and other groups, but not by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). It is hard to gain consensus on how to classify different types of processed foods, and there is debate among public policy experts, nutritionists, and the food industry on this topic.
Avlin Imaeda, MD, a gastroenterologist in Yale Medicine’s Metabolic Health & Weight Loss Program, says she talks to her patients about ultraprocessed foods—items that have “industrial formulations, chemicals, refined oils, fats, starches, and proteins,” which make them last longer and are highly palatable, or pleasant-tasting.
“That makes people eat more of them, and they are more calorie-dense, meaning people are consuming more calories even when they are eating smaller amounts of food,” she says.
Dr. Imaeda says she isn’t surprised by the review findings, but notes that the incidence rates of the related health conditions are small. “One issue with the studies they looked at is that the relative risks are not very high. They are 1.1-fold to 1.5-fold increases. However, if you are talking about a serious health problem, such as a heart attack, a 1.5-fold increase is still a lot,” she says. “Many of these studies are also not of the highest quality, which is, in part, because those are difficult to do. There are studies where they surveyed patients, everything from asking them to report what they consumed the previous day to asking them how often they eat certain foods, as opposed to a randomized clinical trial, where the diet is controlled by researchers.”
Another problem is that most of the foods people eat are ultraprocessed, Dr. Imaeda says. In fact, UPFs make up 67% of calories consumed by children and teenagers in the U.S., according to the review.
“If everyone is eating lots of ultraprocessed foods, researchers don’t have a baseline group of people who don’t eat them to compare them to,” she says. “Plus, how many UPFs have a direct risk of these medical conditions versus how many of them are related to obesity? We know that obesity raises your risk of diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and various cancers.”
Below, we talk more with Dr. Imaeda about ultraprocessed foods and what the recent review reveals about their possible health effects.
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https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/ultraprocessed-foods-bad-for-you
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