Vincenzo Fogliano, professor of Food Quality and Design at Wageningen University, advocates a different definition of healthy food. In his opinion, it is too much about the extent to which food products have undergone processing. In his opinion, the nutritional composition is especially important.
Fogliano, together with several international colleagues, recently wrote a commentary to the science journal The Lancet. According to the article he is responding to, the risk of cancer and cardiometabolic diseases increases as people consume more ultra-processed food products. Last week, another article appeared in science magazine BMJ in which researchers draw a similar conclusion.
Not all products supplied by the food industry that are now labeled as ‘ultra-processed’ are unhealthy, says the Wageningen professor. He believes the problem stems from the Nova classification. This classification was devised a number of years ago and has since been often used in research to indicate whether food products are processed or unprocessed.
For example, frozen vegetables are ‘ultra-processed’ according to the Nova classification, but their nutritional values are just as good as fresh vegetables. Fogliano would prefer to see products classified based on their nutritional values. In his opinion, by looking at ‘processed’ versus ‘unprocessed’ the food industry is unnecessarily made a scapegoat. It also does not encourage companies to improve their products, because they will always continue to be characterized as ‘ultra-processed’.
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2024-03-06 16:18:41
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