Don't judge a food by the label "ultra-processed" alone — what actually matters is its calorie density, how hyper-palatable it is, and which additives it carries, not which NOVA bucket it lands in.

noli's read

Stripped of the plug for the ZOE app, the claim checks out: the NOVA system lumps very different products under "ultra-processed" — sugary sodas on one end, fortified cereals or plant milks on the other — with very different health effects. A 2025 critical review in Proceedings of the Nutrition Society confirms this heterogeneity: sugar-sweetened beverages are consistently tied to worse outcomes, while some ultra-processed products (fortified cereals, certain dairy) show neutral or even protective effects. An inter-rater reliability test published in Nature (2022) found low agreement among nutrition experts classifying the same foods with NOVA. Spector's point — swap the binary label for mechanistic criteria (energy density, palatability, additive load) — is well grounded, even though his in-house "Processed Food Risk Scale" has no independently published validation yet.

the sources

1. 1Hall KD, Ayuketah A, Brychta R, et al. 2019
2. 2Lane MM, Gamage E, Du S, et al. 2024