Food addiction correlates with emotional and craving reactivity to industrially prepared (ultra-processed) and home-cooked (processed) foods but not unprocessed or minimally processed foods

The NOVA classification system categorizes foods according to their level of processing to differentiate between industrially prepared, or Ultra-Processed (UP), and home-prepared, or Processed (P) and Minimally Processed (MP), foods. Whereas P and MP are recommended as part of a healthy diet, UP foods are considered unhealthy and a contributing factor to global, rising obesity rates. However, food addiction investigators include examples of both UP and P foods within their nomenclature of Highly Processed, addictive foods. Our study is the first to compare the potential addictiveness of a priori classified foods into UP vs P vs MP categories. We presented 169 women with a collection of 45 UP, P, and MP food pictures and recorded their subjective motivational reactivity to each picture. Analyses of covariance (ANCOVA) revealed that Yale Food Addiction Scale 2.0 (YFAS 2.0; Gearhardt et al., 2016) scores potentiated reactivity to both UP and P pictures, but not MP pictures. In addition, although both UP and P foods produced greater motivational reactivity than MP foods, UP foods elicited significantly greater reactivity than P foods. Our findings concur with previous suggestions that foods can be classified along a continuum of addictiveness potential, but our findings are the first to demonstrate that such classification might be accomplished by following the NOVA classification system. The findings also imply that nutrition experts may need to refine their NOVA classification system and, perhaps, even their healthy diet recommendations.

Automated summary

The NOVA classification system categorizes foods based on their level of processing. It differentiates between Ultra-Processed (UP), Processed (P), and Minimally Processed (MP) foods. UP foods are considered unhealthy and contribute to rising obesity rates, while P and MP foods are recommended as part of a healthy diet. Food addiction investigators categorize both UP and P foods as Highly Processed, addictive foods. This study compares the addictiveness of foods in the UP, P, and MP categories, finding that UP foods elicit the greatest motivational reactivity, followed by P foods.