Why would scientists insist that a protein bar and a candy bar are the same thing? NOVA, the world’s most controversial food system, both fall under the category of Ultra-Processed Foods. An unsettling answer that could change how you see what’s on your plate..
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.
Food now feels like homework.
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. Chicken Breast became just protein.
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.
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 Food Classification System.
NOVA Food Classification Explained: The 4 Food Groups
Nova means “new” in both Latin and Portuguese, but in the language of food, it signals something more, a radical way of rethinking what we eat.
At the University of São Paulo, NOVA became a new way of seeing what we eat. Where traditional nutrition science reduced diets to chemical parts, NOVA insisted on something more holistic: that the origin story of a food and the industrial fingerprints on it mattered as much as the calories or vitamins it contained.
To see why NOVA emerged, picture Brazil in the early 2000s.
On paper, everything seemed to be improving: Brazilian families were using less sugar, oil, and fat. Yet their hospitals were overflowing with patients battling obesity and diabetes. According to national surveillance systems, between 2006 and 2017, adult obesity in Brazil climbed to nearly 19%, a marked rise across demographics.
Nutritionist Carlos Monteiro dug deeper and discovered the quiet culprit behind the paradox. Traditional staples such as beans, rice, and fresh produce were vanishing from plates. Instead, Brazilians were increasingly turning to instant noodles, flavored yogurts, frozen dinners, and packaged snacks: pre-made, ultra-convenient, and engineered for ease rather than nourishment.
The shift was more than anecdotal; it was measurable.
Data from household budget surveys showed that from 2002–03 to 2008–09, the share of calories from ultra-processed foods rose from approximately 23% to nearly 28 % for the nation and over one-third in higher-income households. Families in the top consumption quartile of ultra-processed foods were 37% more likely to have obese members compared to those in the lowest quartile.
The old nutrient tables were unable to explain this shift. Counting grams of fat or teaspoons of sugar missed the larger story. So Monteiro and his team proposed a new lens: the NOVA classification system.
Instead of measuring nutrients inside the food, NOVA looks at the steps and processing the food went through before it arrived on your plate. Take a tomato versus the ketchup packet with your fries. The tomato is food; the ketchup is chemistry with added sugar, salt, preservatives and flavoring. One grows on a vine, the other is engineered to last indefinitely
NOVA Food Classification divides foods into four groups, not by their chemical makeup but by the degree of processing they’ve undergone.So Monteiro and his team proposed a new lens:
- Unprocessed or minimally processed foods are the closest to nature: fruit from trees, grains milled into flour, milk from cows, and meat from animals. Foods are eaten as they’re grown or raised, with little more than washing, cutting, or chilling.
- Processed culinary ingredients are the building blocks of cooking: oils pressed from seeds, butter churned from cream, sugar crystallized from cane, salt mined from rock or sea. Not meals in themselves, but tools that transform raw ingredients into food.
- Processed foods are a middle ground: whole foods preserved or enhanced with sugar, salt, or oil. Cheese, canned vegetables, and freshly baked bread. They still resemble their origins but bear the imprint of human craft.
- Ultra-processed foods (UPFs) are the outliers: industrial products assembled from food fractions, additives, colorings, stabilizers, and flavorings. Sodas, instant noodles, packaged snacks, frozen ready meals — creations designed in factories for shelf life, convenience, and irresistible taste, often bearing little trace of their agricultural roots.
Think of sodas that never go flat, instant noodles that last for years, snack bars that taste more like a chemistry set than a grain. These aren’t simply foods with sugar or salt added; they are inventions, engineered to be hyper-palatable, addictive, and almost immortal in their packaging.
Monteiro’s provocation was that such foods were fundamentally different from bread, cheese, or even canned vegetables. They were re-engineered so completely that their connection to farms and kitchens had all but vanished.
This was NOVA’s most radical idea: How a food is made might matter more than the nutrients it contains. And it is why ultra-processed foods have become the flashpoint.
Some folks in the scientific community praise it as the missing key to understanding modern epidemics, while others think it’s too broad, too strict, or even unscientific. A few even question: “is NOVA classification accurate?”
Why NOVA Food Classification Matters for Your Health
The genius of NOVA lies in its elegance and simplicity. For decades, nutrition was a dizzying spreadsheet of grams, percentages, and daily values. A world where the difference between 29 and 31 grams of fat could decide if a food was “healthy.”
NOVA cut through that noise with a single, intuitive shift: Instead of measuring nutrients inside the food, NOVA looks at the steps and processing the food went through before it arrived on your plate.
Suddenly, the paradoxes made sense. Why did Mediterranean villagers who cooked with olive oil live longer than Americans counting calories on margarine? Why did traditional Japanese diets high in salt yield lower rates of obesity than the low-sodium frozen meals lining Western supermarket freezers? Nutrients alone can’t explain the impact of food. Processing can.
What makes NOVA powerful is that it works across scales. A shopper can use it in the aisle. A policymaker can use it to write dietary guidelines. A researcher can use it to trace the rising tide of diabetes or heart disease across nations. And the categories don’t blur with borders: a soda in São Paulo, Seoul, or San Francisco is still ultra-processed, no matter its precise recipe or sugar content.
But NOVA’s most radical contribution may be moral rather than scientific. Older systems quietly suggested that individuals failed: there was too little discipline and too much indulgence.
NOVA points the finger elsewhere. It blames the industries for making the foods more addictive, almost immortal, with shelf lives stretching to 24 months, and impossible to resist.
NOVA’s Global Impact: How Ultra-Processed Foods Are Changing Diets Worldwide
NOVA didn’t remain a Brazilian curiosity. It became a global lens. Its ideas inspired dietary guidelines across Latin America: Uruguay, Peru, Ecuador, and Brazil’s 2014 guide all explicitly advise minimizing the consumption of ultra-processed foods.
The Pan American Health Organization and PAHO-WHO have also endorsed NOVA’s logic. In France, policymakers set a bold goal to reduce UPF (ultra-processed foods) consumption by 20%.
Beyond the Americas, NOVA has been used to analyze diets in Canada, the UK, the US, Australia, Chile, Mexico, Sweden, Norway, New Zealand, and Spain, helping researchers track UPF consumption trends and link them to health outcomes, such as obesity, hypertension, and chronic disease.
Like the first pair of glasses gifted to someone who thought the world was naturally blurred, NOVA didn’t just change what we eat, it changed how we see it. But once the lens was sharpened, not everyone agreed on the picture it revealed…
NOVA Food Classification Criticism & Limitations
NOVA has always been a little unruly, a system that cuts through the noise with a blunt knife. The very thing that makes NOVA elegant, its simplicity, is what makes the critics uncomfortable. To them, it’s absurd that a protein bar fortified with vitamins and marketed to athletes should be classed alongside a candy bar, that artisanal bread from a supermarket bakery should share a label with sugary breakfast cereals made shiny and neon with food colorings.
Yet for NOVA’s defenders, that bluntness is the point.
The protein bar and the candy bar may play different cultural roles. One markets itself as fuel, while the other markets itself as a treat. Ultimately, both are composed of the same industrial fabric. The “health halo,” they say, is precisely what keeps consumers trapped in the supermarket’s middle aisles, mistaking chemistry for nourishment.
NOVA’s refusal to grant exceptions is a kind of discipline: a reminder that, in the end, food is either made in a kitchen or assembled in a lab.
That tension, between nuance and clarity, science and public messaging, shadowed NOVA from the start. And in 2025, it erupted into open conflict. When the Novo Nordisk Foundation, famous for funding blockbuster obesity drugs, announced a “Nova 2.0” project at the University of Copenhagen, the backlash was immediate. More than 90 researchers, including Carlos Monteiro himself, accused the project of being captured by corporate interests. A revision, they warned, wasn’t just semantics. If “ultra-processed” could be softened to spare protein bars, fortified shakes, or frozen meals, the framework would lose its teeth.
In a sense, the fight over Nova 2.0 was a sequel no one asked for, like a studio re-cut of a film whose rough edges were precisely what gave it power. The public health world didn’t need a slicker version, they argued.
It needed the honesty of the original: a system that called out the way food had shifted from nourishment to engineering, from kitchen craft to industrial design.
And maybe that is NOVA’s true legacy. Not precision, but perspective. It asks us to stop tallying nutrients like accountants and instead to confront a harder truth: at what point does food stop being food and start being an invention?
Who Gets to Write the Menu of Modern Life
NOVA is not perfect. It can feel too rigid for something as complex as food and culture. But its rigidity also forces us to confront the uncomfortable truths we often overlook about what we eat.
The real fight was never between candy and protein bars. It is about who gets to write the story of what counts as “real” food. For decades, that story has been told by marketers in bright packaging and carefully crafted taglines. NOVA, with its strict categories and blunt labels, takes control of the narrative
In doing so, it reminds us that eating is not just a matter of biology, but also a matter of biography. A record of industry, power, convenience, and compromise. Looking at food through NOVA’s lens means seeing beyond calories and nutrients, to the industrial systems and machinery that shape what ends up on our plates.
That may be why it unsettles so many. NOVA doesn’t just classify our food. It classifies us, too: as consumers in an age where nourishment and profit have become almost indistinguishable.
If you’re wondering how NOVA fits into your daily diet, here are some quick answers to the most common questions about ultra-processed foods and the classification system.:
1. What is the NOVA food classification system?
The NOVA system, created by researchers at the University of São Paulo, Brazil, categorizes foods based on how much they’ve been processed, not just their nutrients. It divides foods into four groups: unprocessed or minimally processed foods, processed culinary ingredients, processed foods, and ultra-processed foods (UPFs).
2. What are examples of ultra-processed foods?
Ultra-processed foods include sodas, instant noodles, packaged snacks, frozen ready meals, sweetened breakfast cereals, flavored yogurts, and protein bars. These foods often contain additives, colorings, preservatives, and other industrial ingredients that make them shelf-stable and hyper-palatable.
3. Why are ultra-processed foods considered unhealthy?
Ultra-processed foods are linked to obesity, diabetes, and heart disease because they are typically high in added sugars, unhealthy fats, and salt, while being low in fiber and micronutrients. Their engineered taste can also encourage overeating.
4. Is the NOVA food classification accurate?
Supporters argue that NOVA offers a clear and practical way to understand modern diets, highlighting the role of industrial processing. Critics, however, say it can be too rigid. For example, treating a fortified protein bar the same as a candy bar. Despite debate, NOVA is widely used in nutrition research and public health guidelines.
5. How is NOVA different from nutrition labels?
Nutrition labels focus on numbers like calories, carbs, fats, and proteins. NOVA looks at the process: how a food is made and what industrial steps it went through. In short, nutrition labels tell you what’s inside the food; NOVA tells you how far it has drifted from its natural form.
6. Which foods are safest under NOVA?
NOVA recommends prioritizing unprocessed or minimally processed foods: fresh fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes, milk, eggs, and meat. Cooking with basic culinary ingredients like oil, salt, and sugar in moderation is also part of a healthy diet.
From processed foods to how we label our bodies, systems shape our choices. Explore the next step in this conversation: Why Doctors Are Renaming Obesity to ABCD And What It Means for Healthcare, Stigma and Design
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