As the world navigates emerging scientific, regulatory and industry-centric approaches to the Ultraprocessed Food debate, Adrianne DeLuca (Nosh assistant managing editor, newsletters) is diving into how each is addressing the challenge. In a typical regulatory environment, legislators look to federally-funded, clinical studies to inform industry guidance. But when it comes to guidance around ultraprocessed food (UPF), many of those gold-standard studies (read: long-term, comprehensive and double-blind clinical trials) are just getting started. The term “ultraprocessed food” wasn’t even coined until 2009, when the NOVA Food Classification system was developed by a team of nutrition researchers in Brazil. But food has been processed for safe storage and consumption since virtually the Stone Age. With the advent of industrial-scale food manufacturing (and all of the ingredients created with it), shelf lives got longer, meaning that food could be distributed further. But to everyday consumers, it was still food; there wasn’t much call to consider how these changes could be impacting health outcomes down the road. With terminology less than two decades old, but an industry nearly a century in operation, the science community is now rushing to catch up with a concept as broad and complex as the ingredient lists it has become synonymous with. Researchers at the National Institute of Health (NIH) have dug into the addictiveness of UPFs in addition to sharing intermediary findings on the relationship between a food’s energy density, hyperpalatability, calorie consumption and subsequent weight gain or loss. But, as the agency’s work has been curtailed by the current administration’s budget attacks, UPF research falls in an interesting spot. Current health department leadership blames these products for the many issues plaguing Americans’ health, so where will this all balance out? Check out the full story on Nosh for a brief breakdown of what we know so far, what questions scientists are currently trying to answer and what we can expect in the year ahead when it comes to UPFs. | 
