Warnings on ultra-processed food packaging akin to cigarettes

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 holds 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 well-known in the medical world as the creator of the term ultra-processed food. But which food products does this term refer to? And what restrictions does the professor believe should apply to them? Read on to find out.

Based on Carlos Augusto Monteiro's research, a new classification of food products by their processing levels was established. This classification, known as the Nova classification, recognizes four levels of human intervention in the preparation process of a given product:

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

The creator of this last term was the Brazilian epidemiologist. The doctor noted an increasing amount of this type of food worldwide, and we are not sufficiently informed about its effects on our health. 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, similar to cigarette packages.

If you still have doubts about precisely ultra-processed food, let’s hear directly from Professor Monteiro. 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'.