What Actually Counts as Ultra-Processed Food?

The term comes from a classification called NOVA, developed by a team of researchers led by Carlos Monteiro. Instead of grouping foods by nutrients, NOVA groups them by the extent and purpose of processing they have been through. That is a deliberately different lens. It is not asking how much fat or sugar is in something, it is asking what was done to it and why.

There are four groups. The first three cover food as most people have always understood it. The fourth is the new category that the concern is really about.

The most reliable way to spot ultra-processed food is the one the researchers themselves suggest: look at the ingredient list. Ultra-processed foods are industrial formulations made mostly from substances extracted or refined from foods, plus additives whose job is to make the product cheap, shelf-stable, and hyperpalatable. The tell is the presence of ingredients you would simply never have in your own kitchen.

• Ingredients you cannot buy for home cooking: high-fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated oils, protein isolates, invert sugar, maltodextrin.
• Additives for texture and shelf life: emulsifiers, thickeners, modified starches, anti-caking agents, humectants.
• Cosmetic additives: artificial flavours, flavour enhancers, colours, and non-sugar sweeteners that make the product taste and look better than its ingredients would suggest.
• A long list, often with names most people do not recognise, on a product designed to be eaten straight from the pack.

Contrast that with a processed group 3 food. Fresh bread from a bakery might be flour, water, yeast, and salt, all things you could use at home. Mass-produced sliced bread with emulsifiers, preservatives, and added gluten and dextrose crosses into ultra-processed. Same basic food, different category, and the ingredient list is what tells them apart.

The strongest single piece of evidence is a tightly controlled trial run by Kevin Hall and colleagues. Twenty adults lived in a research unit and ate either an ultra-processed or an unprocessed diet, each matched for calories, sugar, fat, fibre, and salt on offer, and were told to eat as much or as little as they liked. On the ultra-processed diet, people ate about 500 more calories a day and gained weight. On the unprocessed diet, the same people ate less and lost weight. The food, not the person, drove the difference.

On top of that, a large 2024 umbrella review pulled together dozens of studies covering nearly 10 million people and found that higher ultra-processed intake was associated with higher risks of several outcomes, including cardiovascular-disease-related death, type 2 diabetes, and some mental-health outcomes. The evidence is mostly observational, so it shows a link rather than proof of cause, but the trial and the reviews point the same way often enough to take seriously.

Honesty matters here, because the category is broad and some of it is misleading. NOVA lumps a can of cola in with wholegrain packaged bread, a supermarket hummus, and a fortified plant milk, all as ultra-processed. Common sense says those are not equally worth worrying about. A soft drink and a wholemeal loaf with a couple of additives do not belong in the same mental bucket, even if the classification puts them there.

Some ultra-processed foods are genuinely convenient and reasonable choices: baked beans, wholegrain cereals with real fibre, plain fortified soy or oat milk, and many plant-based meat alternatives that help people eat less red and processed meat. The label ultra-processed tells you how a food was made, not whether it earns a place in your week. Use it as a prompt to check the food, not as an automatic red card.

You do not need to eliminate ultra-processed food, which is nearly impossible and not the point. The useful move is to shift the balance of your week toward whole and lightly processed foods, and to be choosy about which ultra-processed items you keep.

1. Build meals around groups 1 to 3. Vegetables, fruit, beans, lentils, eggs, dairy, fish, meat, tofu, plain grains, and tinned staples should make up most of your plate.
2. Keep the useful ultra-processed foods. Baked beans, wholegrain cereal, fortified plant milks, and wholemeal bread are convenient and fine. Do not throw out the good with the bad.
3. Cut the ones that add least. Soft drinks, sweets, crisps, and sugary snacks are the group 4 foods easiest to overeat and hardest to justify. Start there.
4. Swap where it is easy. Whole fruit for fruit snacks, plain yoghurt with fruit for the flavoured pot, nuts for crisps, home-cooked batches for ready meals. Small swaps, repeated, do the work.

That is the whole approach. Not fear, not purity, just tilting most of your eating toward food that looks like food, and being deliberate about the packaged items you let in.