Food Group 1 is defined as “unprocessed or minimally processed foods,” things like meat, fruit, flour, and pasta. Group 2 is “processed culinary ingredients” – oils, butter, sugar, honey and starches. Group 3 is “processed foods”: ready-to-eat mixtures of the first two, processed for preservation, ie beans, salted nuts, smoked meats (and especially “real freshly baked bread”). Finally, Group 4 is “ultra-processed foods,” defined as formulations of ingredients, “usually for exclusive industrial use, made by a range of industrial processes, many of which require advanced equipment and technology.”
Translated into common parlance, ultra-processed foods are what our parents called junk foods: packaged snacks, sodas, sugary cereals, energy drinks, candy bars. The use of the scientific-sounding “UPF” moniker in the book implies that something new and scary is lurking on an ingredient list. It’s easy to forget that what’s new here isn’t the food; it is the label or framework to describe it.
As Van Tulleken explains, foods in NOVA are grouped according to the purpose of processing. UPF is primarily processed to maximize profit, with extremely cheap ingredients and a long shelf life. Manufacturers, the author says, also employ “misleading marketing, bogus lawsuits, covert lobbying, fraudulent research — all of which are vital for companies to get that money.” Because the defining characteristic of ultra-processed food is a predatory profit motive, the book’s warnings about the bodily harm it causes often lead to attacks on corporate greed and late-industrial capitalism.
Van Tulleken focuses particularly on the issue of obesity, arguing that the main reason for the rapid increase in the condition, particularly since the 1980s, “is the correspondingly rapid increase in the production and consumption of ultra-processed food and drink products. “