Industry researchers challenge the presence of the creator of the concept of ultra-processed foods on a WHO committee

A petition claims that Carlos Monteiro, an international authority in the field of food and public health, cannot defend the conclusions of his own research

In May 2025, the World Health Organization (WHO) began to form a panel of experts to formulate global guidelines on the consumption of ultra-processed foods. This is an unprecedented step, recognizing the increasingly robust body of scientific evidence pointing towards the harm to health and the environment caused by this type of product.

The selection, however, ended up being inserted in an ideological dispute between researchers funded by the food industry and scientists who have changed the way the world understands food. Among them is Carlos Augusto Monteiro, from Brazil, who created the concept of ultra-processed foods and has been one of the most cited Brazilians in scientific papers for years. Clarivate, a consultancy firm specializing in scientific information, for example, identified Monteiro as one of the 17 most referenced Brazilians worldwide in 2025. 

The public call sought nutrition and epidemiology professionals with experience in evaluating studies and developing recommendations. Participation is on an individual basis, without representation by governments or institutions of origin. The work may extend for up to two years and is unpaid. Professionals linked to the commercial sector will not be able to join the group.

On November 6, 2025, the WHO announced the provisional composition of the Guideline Development Group (GDG). From that moment on, a period of comments and external contributions began. There was still time for disagreements. And indeed they came, against a single candidate: Monteiro. The relevance of the Brazilian to the field of ultra-processed food studies was the reason cited by critics for contesting his presence on the panel.

The reaction took on the form of a collective statement. At the time of writing, the document had been signed by 388 researchers, most of whom are involved in food science and technology. 

The signatories emphasize that they do not oppose “the concept of ultra-processed foods, the quality of the NOVA classification or the ongoing debate about the quality of the evidence linking so-called ultra-processed foods to health outcomes”. The rebuke is directed at the “composition of the committee and the conflicts of interest identified among the proposed members”.

The letter also questions the world’s oldest international public health organization about how conflicts of interest were considered in composing the committee. 

According to the authors, by focusing these conflicts solely on commercial ties, the screening mechanism generates a side effect: in addition to “excluding individuals” – in this case, those linked to the industry –, it leaves “crystallized predispositions” – meaning scientific consensus – in the shade, which “may also influence technical opinions and recommendations”.

The petition opens up another line of questioning. It suggests that some of the members announced have allegedly already defended Monteiro’s analytical lens on other occasions. According to them, this would be an indication of the alignment that would structure the panel. 

The objections also concern those who were left out. The signatories complain about the decision to exclude specialists in food science and technology, a field associated with the study of industrial food processing and formulation processes.

Similarly, they consider the absence of representation from the Codex Alimentarius Commission (CAC), a joint UN body responsible for establishing guiding standards for international food trade, to be problematic.

In an interview with Joio, Carlos Augusto Monteiro notes that the debate on ultra-processed foods had little impact for a long time. This began to change when evidence of harm was published in prestigious international magazines. “Today the industry itself recognizes the problem”, he states.

In the face of this, there are two ways to respond: to question the evidence, mobilizing researchers willing to question it, or change the actual business model. “The latter is evidently the most difficult.”

Signatories of the letter

One of the critics of the team selected by the WHO is Stephan Peters. Since 2015, the Dutchman has been working as manager of Dairy, Nutrition, Health and Sustainability at the Dutch Dairy Assotiation (NZO). The entity gathers all milk processing activities in the Netherlands. Its members include manufacturers of beverages, infant formula, cheese, desserts and industrial ingredients.

In a LinkedIn post, Peters explains the reasoning behind his criticism. In his view, independent evaluation is impossible when the creators of systems such as NOVA Classification and Nutri-Score become their main advocates.

Some readers endorsed the objection. Ciarán Forde and Harry Wichers, from Wageningen University & Research (Netherlands), Rafael Urrialde de Andrés, from Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain), Annet Roodenburg, from HAS University of Applied Sciences (Netherlands), and Food Safety & Nutrition Consultancy (FSN Consultancy) founder Hans Verhagen, reacted positively. All signed the letter addressed to the WHO.

One name perhaps stands out more than the others. As Joio has already shown, Forde is the coordinator of the Restructure Project, a research program financed by ultra-processed food manufacturers. He is also the author of an article that questions the use of NOVA as a basis for public policies.

The main author of the text is Irishman Mike Gibney (1948-2024), then professor at the University of Dublin, a consultant for Nestlé and one of the voices most committed to challenging the parameter devised at the University of São Paulo (USP) School of Public Health. His daughter Eileen, also a researcher, is among the authors of the petition questioning the composition of the WHO collegiate.

Double standards

Not everyone agrees with the position taken by the scientists, as is the case with Beatriz Gouveia, researcher-manager at the Brazilian Observatory of Conflicts of Interest in Food and Nutrition (ObservaCoI). The initiative was created in May 2024 to monitor conflicts of interest in food and nutrition policies.

It revisits something already recognized in the literature: there is no neutral reading of evidence. Academic trajectories, research repertoires and theoretical commitments influence the questions asked and the way results are interpreted and debated.

As these elements are part of the actual scientific process, they are not to be confused with material constraints, which can and must be prevented. The danger, Beatriz notes, is diluting the concept to the point of rendering it useless. “When everything becomes a conflict of interests, nothing can be prevented anymore.”

In this sense, taking a researcher’s prior involvement with a particular study subject as an exclusion factor is paradoxical: those who have devoted themselves most to investigating it would be seen as less able to evaluate it.

If taken to its logical conclusion, this criterion renders any form of expertise unfeasible, replacing qualified judgment with a formal neutrality which in practice does not exist. “It is obvious that there should be contradiction. The fact that plurality is geared towards health promotion is non-negotiable”, says Beatriz.

According to Monteiro, the group’s work has not yet begun and remains without definition regarding a start date. For him, the atmosphere similar to a noisy football game stems from an old situation of friction: part of the food science community feels out of place in discussions about processing and health. And it could be no other way, since “99% of research in the area is funded by ultra-processed food manufacturers”.

Nobody invests vast amounts of money to reaffirm the qualities of foods such as beans, rice, fruit or olive oil. Money tends to concentrate where there is controversy, such as in research seeking to demonstrate whether a sugar-free soft drink is less harmful than a regular one, if an ultra-processed food can be reformulated to seem healthier or whether one industrialized ingredient is preferable to another.

Northern Suzerains

This discussion is also connected to a less explicit divide. As referred to in the letter, the “intellectual conflict” argument undermines the legitimacy of certain forms of scientific production which are not limited to describing phenomena.

In countries such as Chile, Mexico and Peru, nutrition research has come to guide policies on labeling, taxation and health promotion. This knowledge was produced, to a large extent, by way of public resources, within universities and national health systems.

It is no different over here. “The trajectory of epidemiology in Brazil has never been restricted to decontextualized quantitative analyses; on the contrary, it has always been based on a radical practice of transdisciplinarity, integrating scientific rationality with the country’s complex health reality and the production of evidence for SUS, the National Health System, under the strong influence of the concepts of social health determination”, writes Maria Laura da Costa Louzada, a professor at the Department of Nutrition at FSP/USP and deputy coordinator of the Center for Epidemiological Research in Nutrition and Health (Nupens), in an article availabe in the SciELO repository.

In contrast, many of the researchers and consultants who signed the petition sent to the WHO work in institutions, professional associations and consulting firms that are part of the scientific and regulatory circuit of the so-called Global North.

Research is also largely funded by public resources in that region. At the same time, cooperation with companies, consulting activities and participation in studies paid for by the production sector are commonplace. Dialog with the industry thus becomes incorporated to everyday academic life and forums where regulations and public policies are discussed.

There is a case that illustrates this perfectly. Among the letter’s signatories is David Mela, the author of an article published in Current Developments in Nutrition magazine. The text argues that the debate on conflicts of interest in nutrition has become trapped in a binary logic, focused on links with the industry and paying little attention to other influences.

According to the author, “intellectual loyalties” to established concepts or models can also  influence how evidence is interpreted, especially when their formulators start to champion them. In these cases, he writes, classifications cease to operate as testable hypotheses or interventions and come to be treated as “established facts”.

Mela’s opinion is consistent with his career path. He is a shareholder in Unilever, where he worked until 2019. Since then, he has worked as a consultant in the fields of  carbohydrates, sugars and sweeteners, with clients including companies such as Cargill, Danone, CBC Israel and Tate & Lyle. 

In this text, Joio provides further information about Mela’s career.

The leader of the movement that originated the letter, Vincenzo Fogliano, is also no stranger to controversy. In a provocative tone, he posted a series of photos on social media, just before Christmas, showing the preparation of a slow-cooked sauce.

In the caption, he claimed to have created the “perfect ultra-processed food” after six hours of “heat treatment”, regretting that his followers could not “share” in the aroma of the dish. According to the NOVA classification, however, slow cooking, which can be done in home kitchens, has no relation to the manufacturing process of ultra-processed foods.

It is a bold provocation for somebody who was punished by Wageningen University for listing a Saudi Arabian university as his main affiliation in several academic articles, despite being employed by and actually working at Wageningen – a practice which helped to raise the position of the Saudi institution in international scientific rankings.

After an internal investigation, the university determined that Fogliano lose his position as head of his department for two years and be formally reprimanded for misconduct.

Marion Nestle is one of the researchers who rejects the proposal. Professor Emeritus of Nutrition, Food Studies and Public Health at New York University, she is the author of Unsavory truth: how food companies skew the science of what we eat, one of the most influential books on the relationship between industry, conflict of interests and food policies.

In conversation with  Joio, Marion said that it is difficult to separate resistance to NOVA from its origin. To her, if the system had emerged in the United States or in the United Kingdom, it is possible that its entry into scientific and regulatory debate would have met with less resistance. “We Americans don’t pay attention to anything happening outside the country, and definitely not Latin America”, she admitted frankly.

Dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s

This interpretation makes it difficult to define the reaction to the presence of Carlos Augusto Monteiro on the WHO committee as a mere technical disagreement. The discomfort seems to be part of a broader logic of epistemological colonialism, in which ideas, methods and analytical frameworks produced outside the US – Europe axis are submitted to a suspicion regime which is foreign to the hegemonic centers.

In 1942, sociologist Robert Merton (1910-2003) formulated four institutional imperatives that would define the ethos of modern science. One of them is disinterest. The term does not imply an absence of values or positions, but rather the primacy of the collective interests of scientific endeavor over individual private gains.

NOVA is an example of this principle in action. By proposing a new analytical horizon on food, free from commercial ties to any segment of the industry, it has brought scientific rationality closer to Brazil’s complex health reality.

This is what has come to be known as “situated knowledge”; in other words, knowledge produced from the conditions in which health, society, economy and culture are intertwined. This does not make it illegitimate or suspicious. Quite the opposite, it is what makes it useful.

If no one accuses those who have demonstrated the harms of smoking by advocating anti-smoking policies of “intellectual conflict”, there is no reason to treat this case differently.