B. Srour, M. Touvier
Feb 1, 2021
Citations
0
Influential Citations
15
Citations
Journal
EClinicalMedicine
Abstract
Western diets are characterized by high intakes of energy-dense products, often with high amounts of sugars and sugary drinks, salt, and saturated fats, and limited amounts of fruit and vegetables, whole grains, and thus dietary fiber and vitamins. Strong scientific concordance linking these dietary factors to chronic diseases has been established and resulted in the setting of food based-dietary guidelines and tools to guide consumers towards foods and beverages of better nutritional quality (e.g. the front-of-pack nutritional label Nutri-Score, already officially adopted in seven European countries) [1]. More recently, the scientific community started to question the impact on human health of other dimensions of our diet, such as the degree of food processing. Food processing conveyed huge progresses across the last century (e.g. massive production of quick and easy to prepare foods, decrease of microbiological risk), but the question is: have we gone too far? Do these widely consumed (>50% of energy intake in the UK and the USA) “ultra-processed”/“ultra-formulated” products impact human health? Several categorization systems were proposed in order to classify foods according to their degree of processing; the most extensively used being the NOVA classification that identifies ultra-processed foods (UPF) [2]. Not only UPF have on average a poorer nutritional quality, they generally consist in products which have undergone several intense processes (e.g. molding, high-temperature extrusion) and contain cosmetic food additives and/or other industrial ingredients used to enhance the flavor and the palatability of the final product [2]. Recent systematic reviews and meta-analyses [3] show associations between UPF intake and increased risk of several chronic conditions, especially obesity and cardiometabolic outcomes (but also mortality, cancer, frailty, and depressive symptoms). These studies