Professor calls for cigarette-like warnings on ultra-processed foods

Should highly processed products contain information about the effects of eating them? And can such food items be considered as harmful as cigarettes? According to Professor Carlos Augusto Monteiro, the answer is yes. He has an obvious opinion on this matter.

Professor Carlos Augusto Monteiro is a Brazilian epidemiologist specializing in preventive medicine, lifestyle diseases, and the impact of food on the human body. He became famous in the medical world as the creator of the term "ultra-processed food." What food products does this term refer to? According to the professor, what bans and restrictions should be applied to them? More on that below.

Carlos Augusto Monteiro's research created a new classification of food products in terms of their processing levels. This classification, known as the Nova classification, has four levels of human intervention in the preparation process:      

1. Unprocessed or minimally processed food
2. Processed culinary ingredients
3. Processed food
4. Ultra-processed food

The Brazilian epidemiologist coined this last term. He noticed that there is more and more of this type of food worldwide, and we are not sufficiently informed about its effects. Such a high level of processing translates into numerous diseases, ranging from obesity and diabetes to heart diseases and even deadly cancers. According to a study published in February 2024 in the journal "BMJ," and cited by the portal national-geographic.pl, as many as 32 health consequences are associated with ultra-processed food.

According to Carlos Monteiro, counteracting and preventing the effects of excessive consumption of ultra-processed food is our moral duty. The Brazilian specialist has several ideas for this: public health campaigns, removing sales from schools and hospitals, high taxation, banning or heavily restricting advertisements, and most importantly, warnings on packaging, the same as in the case of cigarettes.

You might still have doubts about what precisely ultra-processed food is. To explain this, let's hear from Professor Monteiro himself. In his work "Nutrition and Health: The Problem is Not the Food, nor the Nutrients, but the Processing," he wrote:

Ultra-processed foods are basically confections of group 2 ingredients, typically combined with sophisti- cated use of additives, to make them edible, palatable, and habit-forming. They have no real resemblance to group 1 foods, although they may be shaped, labelled and marketed so as to seem wholesome and 'fresh'.