Hello, Monica Reinagle here and I have another little piece of bonus content for you. Little something extra between our regular

episodes. I really wanted to share a response to a study that has been getting a

lot of publicity and this was another study that was linking the

consumption of ultra processed foods or UPS to all kinds of chronic diseases. You

probably saw it in the headlines and this is just the latest in a very long

string of similar studies showing this

the connection between the consumption of ultra processed foods and various health conditions and disease risks.

And the headline from this was the fact that this has become a highly consistent finding.

And that's important because all of this research

is correlational, right?

They're just showing associations.

And we know that correlation doesn't prove

causation but when do you see the same correlations over and over and over again then it

adds more confidence so they're really emphasizing the fact that there's

extreme consistency in this finding and this in turn is putting more and more

weight behind a push to incorporate new guidance

focused specifically on the consumption of processed foods into our national

dietary guidelines which then inform all kinds of other food policies.

Here's my problem with this.

There are some fundamental flaws in the NOVA classification system that underlies all of this research.

So every single paper that is being published and promoted with this finding has the same flaw at its core.

This Nova system, the point of it is to categorize foods based on their processing levels, which

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