ArticleNutrition reviews2025
Fifteen Years of NOVA Food-Processing Classification: "Friend or Foe" Among Sustainable Diet Indicators? A Scoping Review.
Article in Nutrition reviews, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Universal Subconstructs of a Healthy Diet for Children and Adolescents: A Critical Review.Advances in nutrition (Bethesda, Md.) · 2025Pooled it
- Beyond Nutrients: NOVA-Defined Dietary Patterns in Crohn's Disease and Healthy Adults.Nutrients · 2026Trial
- Influence of Rural and Urban Environments on Lifestyle, Dietary Patterns, and Oral Health Among Adolescents in Mallorca: A Cross-Sectional Study.Children (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Identifying the most sustainable foods using two different approaches: a priori versus a posteriori.European journal of clinical nutrition · 2026Article
- Do sustainable diets take food processing into account? A scoping review.Public health nutrition · 2026Article
- Large Language Models for Real-World Nutrition Assessment: Structured Prompts, Multi-Model Validation and Expert Oversight.Nutrients · 2025Article
- Exploring the relationship between consumption of ultra-processed foods and osteoporosis risk: a prospective cohort study.European journal of nutrition · 2025Article
- Effects of Ultra-Processed Foods and Food Additives on Disease Activity in Adults with Inflammatory Bowel Disease: A Scoping Review.Journal of clinical medicine · 2025Review
- Toward Multidimensional Front-of-Pack Labels: Integrating Nutritional, Environmental, and Processing Information.Nutrients · 2025Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
Abstract
It has been 15 years since the introduction of the NOVA food-processing classification. While it was designed to identify ultra-processed foods linked to noncommunicable diseases, the NOVA system has a holistic concept that fits with sustainable nutrition. However, NOVA's connection to other sustainable diet indicators has not been thoroughly explored. The aim was to summarize the research and methodological context of using the NOVA system with other sustainable diet indicators and to investigate NOVA's synergies and discordance with them. A scoping review was conducted based on the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses-Extension for Scoping Reviews (PRISMA-ScR). Studies published between 2009 and 2023 were collected from the Web of Science, Scopus, and PubMed databases. 1612 studies were initially screened; in the selected studies (n = 77), the NOVA system was applied in addition to other sustainable diet indicator(s). The studies were analyzed within a qualitative data analysis framework. 77 studies were analyzed in which healthiness (n = 66), environmental pressure (n = 9), affordability (n = 11), other processing classifications (n = 6), and other sustainable diet indicators (n = 10) were applied with NOVA. Among them, the identified relationships between the NOVA system and other healthfulness indicators were synergistic in the majority of studies (n = 70/93). For environmental pressure indicators, a mixed picture was observed; the NOVA classification was predominantly synergistic with greenhouse gas emissions (n = 8/13), while it was mostly discordant with fresh water use (n = 8/12). Economic affordability was also found to be discordant with the NOVA classification in the majority of studies (n = 10/16). To complete the NOVA classification with nutrient profiling would be beneficial to identify healthy diets. In the case of the integration of NOVA into sustainable nutrition research, environmental pressure and economic affordability indicators should be controlled to reach optimal trade-offs for more sustainable diets. The application of NOVA is gaining relevance; thus, its methodological adaptation to sustainable nutrition research is necessary.
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Registered trials
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