June 15, 2022 — The ASN Nutrition Live 2022 virtual meeting started with a feisty debate yesterday. The architect of the NOVA system for identifying ultra-processed foods – Carlos Monteiro – made the case for his magnum opus. Then, in this debate he faced off with nutrition professor Arne Astrup, who made the case that relying on the NOVA […]
May 22, 2022 — Our food environment has changed to contribute to the rise in obesity over the last half century. People disagree about many things in the effort to find policies to reduce obesity. But this presumption is one that most of us can agree upon. The real question, though, is how to define these changes. Are ultra-processed […]
May 16, 2022 — ConscienHealth enjoys the good fortune of attracting readers who might disagree with some of the words we share here. So yesterday, when we suggested that food policy wonks might be “giving ‘big food’ a free pass,” it was not entirely surprising to hear from a notable persona in food policy – Marion Nestle. Ever so […]
April 15, 2022 — The drumbeat is growing louder. “Ultra-processed foods are trashing our health – and the planet,” say four nutrition scientists from Deakin University. It would be hard to find a clearer definition of these products as our enemy. Yet another set of distinguished nutrition scientists argue that ultra-processed alternatives to meat and dairy can offer valuable […]
March 23, 2022 — New research keeps popping up to remind us that ultra-processed food is a slippery boogeyman. Headlines about their addictive and toxic properties confront us everywhere. They’re “the worst” for your heart, say headlines quoting cardiologists. But the problem with this boogeyman classification is that it’s slippery. A new paper this week reveals that even experts […]
March 14, 2022 — “Yes, not all types of food processing are bad and not all UPF are equally bad,” writes Carlos Monteiro. He’s commenting on a new study of ultra-processed foods in the American Journal of Epidemiology. Because he is the author and a big promoter of the NOVA UPF classification scheme, his comments are notable. But the […]
February 16, 2022 — Should we have better signposts in dietary guidelines to help people avoid ultra-processed foods? Or should we lean into processed foods with bio-active ingredients to treat high cholesterol in people who don’t want to take statins? Admittedly, this dichotomy is a bit extreme. But it does illustrate the confusing mix of information coming at us […]
January 14, 2022 — FDA announced yesterday that it is revoking the standard of identity for French dressing. That means food makers can now put any otherwise legal ingredients into a bottle and call it French dressing. To some people, this is obviously trivial news. So what if the FDA no longer cares too much about what goes into French salad […]
January 6, 2022 — We knew that 2022 would bring more plants into the food we eat, with plant-based diets continuing to be a hot topic. This long-term trend would also bring some faddish ultra-processed foods along the way, we wrote. Six days into the new year, KFC and Chipotle are fulfilling the promise with new offerings of fake […]
December 17, 2021 — We can’t believe it either. This weird, messy year is winding down and it’s time to figure out what just happened as we prepare to go into an new year of promise and uncertainty. In obesity and health, 2021 was full of change, confusion, and new insights. We started the year with a raging pandemic, […]
