Dr. Matt Teegarden likes to compare apples to apples. Or, at the very least, he wants studies on ultra-processed foods to compare apples to applesauce—not just apples to orange juice. That distinction, he argued in a Wednesday seminar hosted by the Institute of Food Technologists, is crucial in parsing the nutritional complexity of modern food processing. As it stands, many of the most-cited studies on the topic conflate categories in ways that obscure rather than illuminate the role of processing in nutrition.
The conversation around ultra-processed foods (UPFs) has accelerated in recent years, with public health advocates and consumers alike turning to the NOVA classification system to decode the complexities of modern food production. But Teegarden, a food scientist and chemist, alongside Dr. Susanne Bügel, a professor at the University of Copenhagen, suggests that the system is oversimplified, failing to account for the nuances of nutrition, formulation and processing methods.
