ArticleRevista de saude publica2022
Ultra-processed food intake and diet carbon and water footprints: a national study in Brazil.
Article in Revista de saude publica, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 21 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
21 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 67 citations in OpenAlex.
- The environmental impact of diet in Latin American populations: a systematic review with meta-analysis.Public health nutrition · 2026Pooled it
- Do sustainable diets take food processing into account? A scoping review.Public health nutrition · 2026Article
- Evaluation of Food Offerings for Workers in Commercial Foodservices from the Perspective of Healthiness and Sustainability.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2026Article
- Association between ultra-processed food consumption, carbon footprint awareness and sustainable and healthy eating behaviors in adult: a cross-sectional study.BMC public health · 2025Article
- Toward Multidimensional Front-of-Pack Labels: Integrating Nutritional, Environmental, and Processing Information.Nutrients · 2025Review
- Ultraprocessed Food Consumption and Pre-Farmgate Greenhouse Gas Emissions Among United States Adults from 2007-2010.Current developments in nutrition · 2025Article
- Relationship Between Brazilian Dietary Patterns and the Global Syndemic: Data from the CUME Study.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2025Article
- Using a systems thinking approach to map the global rise of ultra-processed foods in population diets.Obesity reviews : an official journal of the International Association for the Study of Obesity · 2025Review
- Fifteen Years of NOVA Food-Processing Classification: "Friend or Foe" Among Sustainable Diet Indicators? A Scoping Review.Nutrition reviews · 2025Article
- Climate change, food insecurity, and the impacts on child health and nutrition in Brazil: proposal for a conceptual model.Cadernos de saude publica · 2025Review
- Adherence to the EAT-Public health nutrition · 2024Article
- Dietary quality and dietary greenhouse gas emissions in the USA: a comparison of the planetary health diet index, healthy eating index-2015, and dietary approaches to stop hypertension.The international journal of behavioral nutrition and physical activity · 2024Article
- The environmental impact of beef and ultra-processed food consumption in Brazil.Public health nutrition · 2024Article
- What is the purpose of ultra-processed food? An exploratory analysis of the financialisation of ultra-processed food corporations and implications for public health.Globalization and health · 2023Review
- What is on plates for school meals: focusing on animal- vs. plant-based protein foods.Nutrition research and practice · 2023Article
- Food and Nutrition Surveillance System markers predict diet quality.Revista de saude publica · 2023Article
- A novel food processing-based nutrition classification scheme for guiding policy actions applied to the Australian food supply.Frontiers in nutrition · 2023Article
- Household availability of foods from Brazilian biodiversity.Cadernos de saude publica · 2023Article
- Dietary Environmental Footprints and Their Association with Socioeconomic Factors and Food Purchase Practices: BRAZUCA Natal Study.Foods (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- Making Healthy, Sustainable Diets Accessible and Achievable: A New Framework for Assessing the Nutrition, Environmental, and Equity Impacts of Packaged Foods.Current developments in nutrition · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
8 authors at 2 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
objectiveTo study the association between ultra-processed food consumption and carbon and water footprints of the Brazilian diet.
methodsCross-sectional analysis on data collected in 2008-2009 on a probabilistic sample of the Brazilian population aged ≥ 10 years (n = 32,886). Individual food intake was assessed using two 24-hour food records, on non-consecutive days. The environmental impact of individual diets was calculated by multiplying the amount of each food by coefficients that quantify the atmospheric emissions of greenhouse gases in grams of carbon dioxide equivalent (carbon footprint) and freshwater use in liters (water footprint), both per gram or milliliter of food. The two coefficients consider the food life cycle 'from farm to fork.' Crude and adjusted linear regression models and tests for linear trends assessed the association between the ultra-processed food contribution to total energy intake (quintiles) and the diet carbon and water footprints. Potential confounders included age, sex, education, income, and region. Total energy intake was assessed as a potential mediation variable.
resultsIn the crude models, the dietary contribution of ultra-processed foods was linearly associated with the carbon and water footprints of the Brazilian diet. After adjustment for potential confounders, the association remained significant only regarding the diet water footprint, which increased by 10.1% between the lowest and highest quintile of the contribution of ultra-processed foods. Additional adjustment for total energy intake eliminated this association indicating that the dietary contribution of ultra-processed foods increases the diet water footprint by increasing energy intake.
conclusionsThe negative impact of ultra-processed foods on the diet water footprint, shown for the first time in this study, adds to the negative impacts of these foods, already demonstrated regarding dietary nutrient profiles and the risk for several chronic non-communicable diseases. This reinforces the recommendation to avoid ultra-processed foods made in the official Brazilian Dietary Guidelines and increasingly in dietary guidelines of other countries.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.