Hello, and welcome back to the Nutrition Diva podcast. I'm your host, Monica Rineagle,

and today we are revisiting a hot topic that we have talked about before, ultra-processed foods,

or UPFs. Last spring, in episode number 735, USDA researcher Dr. Julie Hess joined me on the podcast

to talk about a provocative study that she and her team had just published, demonstrating

that it is actually possible to create a healthy diet that relies almost entirely on ultra-processed foods.

In fact, the seven-day meal plan that Hess and her team developed rated significantly

higher than the average American diet on something known as the Healthy Eating Index score.

So while the typical diet rates a disparating 43 out of 100, Hess's UPF diet scored an impressive

86. Well, I had an opportunity to hear Dr. Hess present her latest findings at the annual meeting

of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, and I know you're going to be interested in what she's been up to.

As with her previous research, this latest analysis raises important questions about how we

categorize foods and the impact of processing on nutrition and health. So to back up,

let me remind you what the NOVA system is. This classification

system sorts foods into four categories based on the extent of their processing. As Carlos

Montiero, the chief architect of the NOVA system has written, the most important factor for now

when considering food, nutrition,

and public health is not nutrients and is not foods so much as what is done to food

stuffs before they are purchased and consumed. So the assumption appears to be that the more

processed of food is, the less healthy it becomes.

And although Nova is not the only system for classifying foods according to their level of

processing, it has quickly become the most widely used, especially in nutrition research.

Over the past few years, a slew of studies using the Nova system have linked

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