Nutrition app Zoe has devised a tool that highlights healthier processed foods to counter the “scaremongering” around UPFs.
The new Processed Food Risk Scale, which will be presented at the House of Lords today (28 March), seeks to hammer home “not all UPFs are equally detrimental to health”.
The scale splits out processed foods into four different categories: no risk, low risk, moderate risk and high risk. Foods are classified based on their energy intake rate – how quickly the calories are consumed – and their “hyperpalatability”, which refers to addictive ingredient combinations that wouldn’t be found in nature.
The tool also looks at the additives, colourants and emulsifiers in the product, and assesses whether whether they’re high risk or even beneficial to health.
Weetabix and unsalted butter are among the products classified as low risk, while Cadbury Dairy Milk and Warburtons Farmhouse Soft Bread fall on the high risk end of the scale (see table).
The system seeks to build on the Nova definition of ultra-processed foods (UPFs), which applies to as much as 60% of the UK’s diet. The definition had been designed for scientists, but didn’t help consumers understand the healthiness of food, said Zoe chief scientist Sarah Berry.
“We see this as a way not of demonising food but empowering people to make healthy choices, because 60% of our food isn’t bad for us,” she explained. “This scaremongering about ‘everything on our shelves is going to kill us’ is wrong.”
“There is no way I could stop my kids eating all foods classified by Nova as a UPF. But it empowers people to say, here are four cereals, which I should feed my kids?”
Certain UPFs can have health benefits, and can even protect against type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease, Zoe pointed out.
In its own research, the organisation’s nutritionists have checked over 3,000 foods against its new scale. Zoe is now looking to apply the principles to its entire database, which spans over a million products.
“We’re at the final stages of validating our score to show how well it can predict health outcomes,” revealed Berry.
Zoe has not yet decided how will use the information, and whether it will form part of its membership proposition. However, the aim was to make the scale available to “as many people as possible”, said Berry.
Zoe hoped to offer a barcode scanning feature that would enable consumers to find out “in real time the impact processing has had on the healthfulness of a food,” she explained.
The organisation also hopes to talk to the government about its research. The traditional measures of health used by the traffic light system – saturated fat, salt and sugar content – remain important, Berry said.
However, these measures alone don’t take into account the “complexities” of food, such as plant and fibre content, as well as the level of processing, she added. “We would advocate for it [the traffic light system] being used alongside the recommendations we give at Zoe,” Berry said.
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