Food labels have trained us to shop like accountants: subtract this, add that, hit the daily target. A granola bar isn’t breakfast anymore. It is “190 calories, 7 grams of sugar, 3 grams of protein.” A carton of yogurt became “low-fat” before it was dairy. Food lost its smell, its texture, its joy.
We don’t enjoy our breakfasts anymore. Food labels have trained us to eat like accountants. We measure more than we taste: 190 calories, 7 grams of sugar, 3 grams of protein. A granola bar isn’t breakfast, it’s a math problem. A carton of yogurt isn’t dairy, it’s ‘low-fat.’ Somewhere in the process, food lost its smell, its texture, and most of all, its joy.
Walk into any supermarket today, and food doesn’t feel like food anymore.
It feels like homework. It feels like math.
Calories. Carbs. Proteins. Fats. Macros. Micros. A grid of numbers daring you to solve them, as if staying healthy were just a matter of passing math class.
And we tried. We counted, we tracked, we downloaded apps, we turned dinner into data. But even as we got better at the numbers, our health kept getting worse. Obesity is soaring. Diabetes exploded. Heart disease never left the top of the charts.
Somewhere along the way, the numbers stopped adding up.
Nutrition scientist Gyorgy Scrinis calls this obsession nutritionism: seeing foods only as the sum of their nutrients, not as foods. An apple became “fiber and sugar.” Bread became “carbs.” Cheese became “fat.” But none of these labels explained why the same diets that looked perfect on paper often failed our bodies in real life.
That’s why researchers built a new way to think about food: the NOVA system.
What is NOVA?
Nova means “new” in both Latin and Portuguese, but in the food industry, it is also an acronym. A label coined at the University of São Paulo to mark a new way of classifying food. Where traditional nutrition science had reduced diets to their chemical parts, NOVA insisted on something more radical: that the history of a food, the industrial fingerprints on it, mattered as much as the calories or vitamins it contained.
To understand why NOVA was created, picture Brazil in the early 2000s.
On paper, things looked good: families were cooking with less sugar, less oil, less fat. Yet hospitals were filling with more patients struggling with obesity and diabetes. Something didn’t add up.
When nutritionist Carlos Monteiro dug deeper, the paradox became clear. The problem wasn’t the nutrients people were eating, but the nature of the foods themselves. Beans, rice, and fresh produce were quietly being pushed off the table. In their place came instant noodles, flavored yogurts, packaged snacks, and frozen meals. These were foods engineered for convenience, not health.
The old nutrient tables couldn’t capture this shift. Counting grams of fat or teaspoons of sugar missed the bigger story. So Monteiro and his team built a new lens: the NOVA classification system.
Instead of asking “What nutrients are in this food?” NOVA asks, “What’s been done to this food before it reached your plate?”
The NOVA System of food classification sorts foods into four broad groups, not by their nutrients, but by the degree of processing they’ve undergone:
- Unprocessed or minimally processed foods | The closest to nature: Fruits pulled from trees, grains milled into flour, milk from cows, meat from animals. Foods that are eaten much as they’re grown or raised, with little more than washing, cutting, or chilling.
- Processed culinary ingredients | The building blocks of cooking: Extracted from nature to prepare meals: oils pressed from seeds, butter churned from cream, sugar crystallized from cane, salt mined from rock or sea. On their own, they’re not meals, but they transform raw ingredients into food.
- Processed foods | A middle ground: Made by adding salt, sugar, or oil to whole foods to preserve or enhance them. Cheese, canned vegetables, freshly baked bread: foods that still resemble their origins, but carry the imprint of human craft.
- Ultra-processed foods (UPFs) | The outliers: Industrial creations assembled from fractions of foods, additives, colorings, stabilizers, and flavorings. Sodas, instant noodles, packaged snacks, frozen ready meals — products designed in factories for shelf life, convenience, and irresistible taste, often bearing little trace of their original agricultural roots.
It’s that last group — the ultra-processed foods — that changed everything.
Think about it: sodas that never go flat on the shelf, instant noodles that last for years, snack bars that taste more like a science experiment than grain. These industrial inventions, built in factories, designed to be hyper-palatable, addictive, and almost immortal in their packaging. A one-up for just being foods with added sugar or salt.
Monteiro argued that these ultra-processed foods were fundamentally different from bread, cheese, or even canned vegetables. They were foods re-engineered to the point where their connection to farms and kitchens had all but vanished.
This was NOVA’s most radical idea: that how a food is made might matter more than the nutrients it contains.
And that’s why ultra-processed foods have become the flashpoint.
Hide reactions
