New Study – Ultra-Processed Foods: Why It Is Time to Move Beyond Classification
A new Competere policy guide challenges the search for a perfect UPF definition and proposes a shift toward smarter, personalized prevention
I have published a new Competere policy guide, Ultra-Processed Foods — Beyond Oversimplification: From Classification to Smarter Prevention, developed as a practical tool for policymakers and the media navigating the rapidly evolving debate over ultra-processed foods.
The timing matters. Governments and health authorities are paying increasing attention to UPFs and searching for definitions that could eventually inform public policy. But our paper starts from a different question:
What if the real challenge is not finding a better definition, but moving beyond classification itself?
UPFs can be a useful signal for research. But the category encompasses foods with very different nutritional profiles, ingredients, functions, and patterns of consumption. Processing alone therefore cannot tell us everything we need to know about health risk.
Talking Points
- UPFs are a useful research signal, but a weak regulatory shortcut. A broad and heterogeneous category should not, on its own, determine regulation, labeling, or prevention.
- Processing is not a single exposure. Different processes serve different purposes and can affect foods in very different ways.
- Health risk cannot be reduced to processing. Nutritional quality, energy density, portion size, frequency, food matrix, individual needs, lifestyle and realistic alternatives all matter.
- Processing can also deliver benefits. It can improve food safety, shelf life, affordability, accessibility and nutritional value.
- More definitions may not mean better prevention. Competing approaches risk producing inconsistent classifications, exceptions, and regulatory uncertainty.
- Technology allows us to ask better questions. AI, wearables and digital food information can help move prevention from static categories toward contextual and personalized decision support.
New Study – Ultra-Processed Foods: Why It Is Time to Move Beyond Classification
The UPF Debate Is Asking the Wrong Question
Much of the current debate focuses on where to draw the boundary between processed and ultra-processed food.
This is understandable. Policymakers need categories, definitions, and measurable criteria. But every attempt to refine the classification encounters the same underlying difficulty: food processing is extraordinarily heterogeneous.
Heating, fermenting, freezing, fortifying, emulsifying, preserving or reformulating food are not equivalent operations. Nor do they necessarily produce equivalent nutritional or health effects.
The danger is therefore that the search for an increasingly sophisticated definition creates an illusion of precision without necessarily improving our ability to identify risk.
And as different institutions and jurisdictions develop different approaches, another question becomes unavoidable: how many definitions of ultra-processed food can public policy sustain before classification creates more confusion than clarity?
DO NOT MISS MY TALK IN WARSAW ON PERSONALIZED PREVENTION
Processing Is a Technology, Not a Diagnosis
The debate also needs historical and practical perspective. Humans have processed food for millennia. Processing has helped make food safer, more stable, transportable, and accessible. Modern processing has extended shelf life, reduced losses, enabled fortification and made safe food available to populations at scale.
None of this means that every processed food is healthy. Some processed products can contribute to unhealthy dietary patterns, particularly when consumed frequently, in excessive quantities or as part of nutritionally poor diets.
But the reverse shortcut is equally problematic: the presence of processing cannot itself become a diagnosis of unhealthiness. That distinction matters for science. It matters even more when scientific classifications begin to migrate into regulation.
From Better Labels to Better Decisions
This is where our paper proposes a different direction. Instead of replacing one static classification with another, prevention can increasingly become dynamic and personalized.
AI, wearable devices, and digital food information can combine general nutritional knowledge with information about the product, quantity, frequency of consumption, activity, individual needs, and lifestyle.
The objective is not to tell citizens what they are allowed to eat. It is to give them better tools to understand choices and consequences.
This represents a deeper change in the philosophy of prevention: from universal categories toward contextual guidance; from passive consumers toward empowered citizens; and from one-size-fits-all interventions toward personalized prevention.
A Practical Guide for Policymakers and the Media
The paper is therefore not a defence of ultra-processed foods, nor an argument for ignoring the evidence associated with some dietary patterns.
It is an invitation to ask more useful questions before translating classifications into public policy.
What is the nutritional quality of the food? How much is consumed? How frequently? By whom? In what dietary and lifestyle context? And what would realistically replace it?
Those questions are more difficult than assigning a label. They may also bring us closer to understanding actual risk. As I write in the report:
“A definition classifies products. It does not understand people. The challenge is to identify risk better, not simply to classify food better.”
UPFs-ultra-processed-food-beyond-oversimplification-competere-pietro-paganini.docx And that leads to the central proposition behind this work: The future of prevention is not a better label. It is better decision-making.
UPFs-ultra-processed-food-beyond-oversimplification-competere-pietro-paganini.docx
