Ultra‐processed products are becoming dominant in the global food system

By C. Monteiro, J. Moubarac, G. Cannon, S. Ng, Barry M. Popkin. Obesity Reviews, 2013

1,516 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The relationship between the global food system and the worldwide rapid increase of obesity and related diseases is not yet well understood. A reason is that the full impact of industrialized food processing on dietary patterns, including the environments of eating and drinking, remains overlooked and underestimated. Many forms of food processing are beneficial. But what is identified and defined here as ultra‐processing, a type of process that has become increasingly dominant, at first in high‐income countries, and now in middle‐income countries, creates attractive, hyper‐palatable, cheap, ready‐to‐consume food products that are characteristically energy‐dense, fatty, sugary or salty and generally obesogenic. In this study, the scale of change in purchase and sales of ultra‐processed products is examined and the context and implications are discussed. Data come from 79 high‐ and middle‐income countries, with special attention to Canada and Brazil. Results show that ultra‐processed products dominate the food supplies of high‐income countries, and that their consumption is now rapidly increasing in middle‐income countries. It is proposed here that the main driving force now shaping the global food system is transnational food manufacturing, retailing and fast food service corporations whose businesses are based on very profitable, heavily promoted ultra‐processed products, many in snack form.

Subfields: Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/af344b79312f4eca042aafc9dd726a5ac2ef71ac

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

In Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health

Citations in the corpus

Ultra-Processed Foods and Health Outcomes: A Narrative Review (2020, background): “Furthermore, UPFs have become dominant components in diets of populations worldwide [31], contributing up to more than 50% of energy intake in high-income countries [32,33], and up to 30% in middle-income countries [34,35], with consumption volumes rapidly increasing [36–38].”
The Western Diet–Microbiome-Host Interaction and Its Role in Metabolic Disease (2018, positive): “In high-income countries, ultra-processed foods are now dominating the food supply, and they are rapidly gaining ground in growing economies [5].”
Healthy and Sustainable Diets and Food Systems: the Key to Achieving Sustainable Development Goal 2? (2019, background): “Highly-processed foods are usually characteristically high in salt, trans fats and added sugar (Baker and Friel 2014; Monteiro et al., 2013).”
Anti-Inflammatory and Immunomodulatory Effects of Probiotics in Gut Inflammation: A Door to the Body (2021, background): “Among western lifestyle, the main contribution is the adherence to western-type diets (WDs) progressively expanded to low-income nations, with a concurrent increase in ICDs in areas of the planet where these diseases were rare (41, 42).”
Ultra-processed diets cause excess calorie intake and weight gain: An inpatient randomized controlled trial of ad libitum food intake (2019, background): “Ultra-pro-cessed foods have become more common worldwide (Monteiro et al., 2013; Moubarac, 2015), now constitute the majority of calories consumed in America (Martı´nez Steele et al., 2016), and have been associated with a variety of poor health outcomes (Fiolet et al., 2018; Mendonc¸a et al.,…”
Ultra-processed foods: what they are and how to identify them (2019, background): “The average growth in sales of these products amounts to about 1 % per year in high-income countries and up to 10 % per year in middle-income countries (7) .”
Big Food, Nutritionism, and Corporate Power (2017, background): “Email: gyorgys@unimelb.edu.au # 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group heart disease, are among the key health issues associated with the excess consumption of the ultraprocessed or reconstituted-processed foods manufactured by these firms (Monteiro et al., 2013).”