The claimEvidence A · guideline-tier
All calories are equal (naïve CICO)
The evidence
Calories from ultra-processed food and whole food do not behave the same: five mechanisms — reward, hormones, gut microbes, eating speed and food structure — open a real calorie gap between them (Hall 2019).
The mechanism, in brief
To tell whether something is ultra-processed, ask whether a home kitchen could make it: if the ingredient list is full of things no kitchen keeps, it very likely is. The NOVA classification ignores calories and nutrients and looks only at the degree of processing.
Sources (2)
- Monteiro, C. A., Cannon, G., Moubarac, J.-C., Levy, R. B., Louzada, M. L. C., & Jaime, P. C. (2018). The UN Decade of Nutrition, the NOVA food classification and the trouble with ultra-processing. Public Health Nutrition, 21(1), 5-17.
- Monteiro, C. A., Cannon, G., Levy, R. B., Moubarac, J. C., Louzada, M. L. C., Rauber, F., et al. (2019). Ultra-processed foods: what they are and how to identify them. Public Health Nutrition, 22(5), 936-941.