According to the results of a study, food labels should show the nutritional content of a product, but also its degree of processing.
Is reading the nutritional composition on the label enough to understand whether a food is healthy? According to an Italian study carried out by the Department of Epidemiology and Prevention at the Irccs Neuromed in Pozzilli (IS) and published in the British Medical Journal, the answer is no. It is also necessary to assess the degree of processing that foods have undergone.
The research investigated which of the two dietary aspects better defines the risk of mortality. The researchers monitored the health of more than 22,000 people participating in the Moli-sani epidemiological project for twelve years, correlating it with their dietary habits and taking into account both nutritional aspects and those related to the degree of food processing.
"Our results," said epidemiologist Marialaura Bonaccio, lead author of the study, "confirm that the consumption of both nutritionally poor foods and ultra-processed foods significantly increases the risk of mortality, particularly from cardiovascular disease. However, when we jointly considered both the nutritional content of the diet and its degree of industrial processing, the latter emerged as the more important factor in highlighting the greatest risk of mortality." The increased risk of mortality, linked in particular to the development of cardiovascular disease, is therefore not to be attributed directly or exclusively to the low nutritional quality of certain products, but to the fact that these are also ultra-processed.
Hence the researchers' suggestion to use a labelling system for commercial products that takes this into account. While Nutri-Score, developed in France, assesses the nutritional quality of a food, the Nova classification, devised by a group of Brazilian researchers, identifies so-called ultra-processed foods — that is, foods made partly or entirely from substances not normally used in home cooking (hydrolysed proteins, maltodextrins, hydrogenated fats) and which generally contain various additives, such as colorants, preservatives, antioxidants, anti-caking agents, flavour enhancers and sweeteners. Examples include sugary fizzy drinks, pre-packaged snacks, and ready meals — among them vegetable burgers, as flagged by the WHO.
The solution proposed by the research team would therefore be to integrate the nutritional labelling system (the European Union is working to establish a uniform one for all European countries) with information on the level of food processing, in order to help consumers make more informed dietary choices. Not only that: as the researchers noted, for a healthy diet every food should be considered within the context of overall dietary patterns, as is the case with the Mediterranean diet model, based primarily on fresh or minimally processed products.