Carlos A Monteiro is Emeritus Professor of Nutrition and Public Health at the University of São Paulo, Brazil, and founder of the Center for Epidemiological Studies in Health and Nutrition (Nupens).[2] In 2010, Monteiro and his research team coined the term "ultra-processed food" (UPF), which refers to ready meals made with industrial additives that bear little resemblance to vegetables, fruits or meat.[1] Subsequently, they developed the Nova classification system, which groups foods according to their degree of processing and enables comparative research on the health effects of ultra-processed foods.[2] Monteiro and his team proved that consumption of ultra-processed foods is associated with an increase in obesity and chronic diseases such as diabetes.[1][5] His team's research found that independent of the country's traditional culinary habits, replacing traditional foods with ultra-processed products led to poor health.[4] The concept of ultra-processed foods has become an important research topic, with 332 scientific papers published on the topic in 2022, compared to only 40 per year in the early 2000s.[4] Monteiro's research pointed out that the problem is not only in individual nutrients, but in the type of food in which they are found.[3]