Publisher Health

It remains a central challenge in psychiatry to reliably judge whether a patient will respond to treatment. In a new study published in the journal Biological Psychiatry, researchers from Karolinska Institutet in Sweden and the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Germany show that moment-to-moment fluctuations in brain activity can reliably predict whether patients with social anxiety disorder will be receptive to cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT).
Viable predictors of psychiatric treatment response are often sought, but remain elusive. Brain imaging techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) have shown promise, but low reliability has limited the utility of typical fMRI measures as harbingers of treatment success. Although historically considered a marker of ‘noise’ in the brain, moment-to-moment brain signal variability continues to gain momentum as a sensitive and reliable indicator of individual differences in the effectiveness of neural function. However, neural variability had not yet been examined in relation to psychiatric treatment outcomes.
To do so, the research team designed a unique study; 45 patients with social anxiety disorder had their brains imaged during passive rest and emotional face viewing (a social anxiety-relevant task) in two sessions (11 weeks apart) to capture moment-to-moment neural variability. Then, patients underwent a 9-week cognitive behavioural therapy delivered via the internet. The researchers showed that brain signal variability measured during the emotional task was the strongest and most reliable predictor of treatment outcome, despite the task only taking three minutes for patients to complete.
“Variability in brain signals is often considered measurement ‘noise,’ something to be eliminated prior to further analysis. We show first evidence that neural variability may be a reliable and efficient predictor of psychiatric treatment outcome, particularly when disorder-relevant task designs are utilized. We simply need to rethink our standard approaches in psychiatric neuroimaging to maximize clinical impact,” says lead author Dr. Kristoffer Månsson, clinical psychologist and researcher at the Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet.
In the next phase of their research, the authors will collect larger samples to examine whether brain signal variability can predict which specific treatment a patient should undergo.
“If moment-to-moment neural variability is to be worth its salt as a clinically useful predictor of treatment outcome, it needs to tell clinicians not only how much a patient will respond to a given treatment, but whether treatment A or B is better suited for them. Establishing this will be our long-term goal. In the meantime, our methods are immediately and openly available to any researcher interested in whether neural variability provides clinical utility within and beyond social anxiety disorder patients,” says senior author Dr. Douglas Garrett, leader of the Lifespan Neural Dynamics Group at the Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research in Berlin.
The study was conducted in close collaboration with the Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research and the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, Germany, and Stockholm University, Uppsala University and the Umeå Functional Brain Imaging Centre in Sweden. It was financed by the Swedish Research Council, the Swedish Brain Foundation and the German Research Foundation. No conflicts of interest have been reported.
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A team of scientists in Montreal and Paris has succeeded in identifying the gene responsible for the development of a food-dependent form of Cushing’s Syndrome, a rare disease affecting both adrenal glands.
In their study published in The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology, Dr.Isabelle Bourdeau and Dr.Peter Kamenicky identify in the gene KDM1A the mutations responsible for the development of this unusual form of the disease.
The scientists also show, for the first time, that the disease is genetically transmitted.
Bourdeau is a researcher and a Université de Montréal medical professor practising at the CHUM Research Centre (CRCHUM), while Kamenicky works at the Hôpital de Bicêtre, part of the Assistance publique-hôpitaux de Paris network in France.
Cushing’s Syndrome is caused by the overproduction of cortisol, a steroid hormone, by the two adrenal glands located above the kidneys.
“When the tissues of the human body are exposed to this excess of cortisol, the effects for those with the disease are serious: weight gain, high blood pressure, depression, osteoporosis, and heart complications, for example,” said Bourdeau, co-lead author of the study with Dr. Fanny Chasseloup, a colleague from the French team.

An extensive field study into air quality along a road lined with buildings has confirmed that hedges can help mitigate traffic-related pollution up to 1.7m, reducing the pollutants breathed by pedestrians, young children and cyclists.
The study, led by researchers at the University of Surrey’s Global Centre for Clean Air Research (GCARE), put an extensive array of instruments in and around a hedge to measure the presence of various pollutants at numerous locations, identifying the effect of the hedge at different heights and distances from the road.
This study builds a new understanding of the distribution of different air pollutants around a hedge in a shallow street canyon, where the width of the road is at least twice the height of the buildings which line it, by quantifying: the overall air pollutant concentration changes behind the hedgerow; the effect of wind speed and direction on pollutant variation in the presence of hedgerows; and the horizontal and vertical distribution of air pollutants.The insight gained will guide the improved design of green infrastructure barriers and validate microscale dispersion models. However, it revealed a complex picture dependent on many factors — wind speed and direction, hedge characteristics, type of pollutant and more — highlighting a need for more field studies to validate future modelling studies.
Measurements were taken for around six weeks along Du Cane Road near White City in West London as a part of the EPSRC-funded INHALE project which sees the University of Surrey collaborating with researchers from Imperial College London and the University of Edinburgh. This shallow street canyon was chosen for its long roadside hedge, the type of traffic and transport using the road (including cyclists), and its proximity to a ground-based air quality monitoring station. Du Cane Road has one lane in each direction and runs through a residential area.
In 2019, air pollution was ranked as the fourth leading risk factor for premature death worldwide. It is reported by the European Commission as the second-largest environmental concern after climate change because levels of air pollutants across many European cities exceed permissible limits.
Professor Prashant Kumar, Founding Director of the Global Centre for Clean Air Research (GCARE), said:
“So many factors have an impact on air quality, and there’s a dearth of detailed study on the actual impact of greenery in making the air cleaner — or dirtier. This study makes important progress, but much more research is needed to properly understand how best to help disperse air pollutants in the urban canopy layer, the layer of air extending from the ground surface up to the top of buildings and trees, in complex built-up environments such as street canyons.”
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Secondary natural substances that occur in numerous plants, bacteria and fungi can be anti-inflammatory, can ward off pathogens or even prevent the growth of cancer cells. However, making use of the riches provided by nature’s medicine cabinet and identifying new natural substances is time-consuming, costly and labour-intensive. A team of bioinformaticians at Friedrich Schiller University Jena has now developed a method that enables much faster and easier identification of small active substance molecules.
Millions of structural data items not yet deciphered
To find out which substances are contained in a biological sample such as a plant extract, a researcher analyses the sample using mass spectrometry. In this process, the molecules are broken down into fragments and their mass is determined. “The CSI:FingerID molecule search engine we developed allows us to search specifically for molecular structures that match these fragments,” says Prof. Sebastian Böcker of the University of Jena. “Whether this search is successful — i.e., whether the search result represents the correct structure — is not something we can distinguish in this way.”
There are currently huge collections of data with billions of mass spectrometry data items from millions of analyses of biological samples, the vast majority of which have not been identified as to their structure. This is where COSMIC is now coming into play, enabling structures to be deciphered automatically for a large proportion of these as yet unidentified molecules. “To this end, we use machine-learning methods,” explains Martin Hoffmann, lead author of the new publication. “First, the mass spectrum of the sample under examination is compared with the available structural data.” As a result, you get — as in a Google search — a more or less extensive list of possible hits. “Our method now indicates how confident one can be that the hit found in the first place is actually the structure we are looking for,” Hoffmann adds. To do this, COSMIC determines a score that evaluates the quality of the suggested hit and deduces whether it is correct or incorrect.
New bile acids discovered
Böcker and his team have been able to demonstrate how well their method really works, in cooperation with colleagues from the University of California, San Diego. They studied mass spectrometry data from the digestive system of mice, searching for as yet unknown bile acids. For this purpose, more than 28,000 theoretically possible bile acid structures were constructed and compared with the measurement data from the microbiome of the mice. The subsequent analysis with COSMIC yielded a total of 11 new, previously completely unknown bile acid structures. Two of these have since been confirmed using specifically synthesised reference samples.
“This shows, firstly, that our method works reliably,” emphasises Sebastian Böcker. Secondly, COSMIC makes it possible to accelerate substantially the search for new and interesting substances, because the screening can be performed completely automatically, without any manual effort and in a very short time. Böcker expects that in the coming years, it will be possible to clarify thousands of new molecular structures in this way.
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As if COVID and RSV weren’t bad enough, incidents of Lyme disease — a potentially serious disease caused by the bacteria Borrelia burgdorferi and transmitted following a bite of an infected deer tick — also are on the rise in the United States.
Lyme disease affects an estimated 300,000 people in the United States alone. Humans and animals can be infected with B. burgdorferi following the bite of an infected deer tick, also known as the black-legged tick. About 80% of those who contract the disease will develop a bulls-eye rash (erythema migrans) around or near the site of the bite anywhere from three to 30 days following the bite.
Although early antibiotic treatment is effective for most patients, some 10-20% of patients continue to suffer from symptoms that may include fatigue, muscle pain and cognitive impairment for over six months after therapy. The significance of this debilitating disease has been recently brought into focus by a set of very similar symptoms in patients with “Long COVID.”
The Oct. 2021 issue of the journal Cell features a paper, titled “A Selective Antibiotic for Lyme Disease,” on a new antibiotic developed by a team at Northeastern University in Boston led by Kim Lewis, University Distinguished Professor of Biology, that draws on research from the University of Oklahoma. The new antibiotic may not only work to cure Lyme disease but may also help eradicate its occurrence from the environment.
The OU researchers who contributed to understanding why this antibiotic is specific to this pathogen are Helen I. Zgurskaya, George Lynn Cross professor, Inga Leus, research assistant professor, and Vincent Bonifay, postdoctoral research associate, all in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Dodge Family College of Arts and Sciences. Zgurskaya also is a member of the department’s Center for Antibiotic Discovery and Resistance, whose goal is to study mechanisms of drug resistance in bacteria and develop new approaches and antibiotics effective against drug-resistant pathogens.
The antibiotics currently used to treat Lyme disease are broad-spectrum with significant effects on the human gut microbiome and the potential for increasing resistance in non-target bacteria, Zgurskaya explained, adding that the team sought to identify a compound acting with a narrower spectrum of activity against B. burgdorferi.
“A screen of soil microorganisms revealed a compound highly selective against spirochetes, including B. burgdorferi. Unexpectedly, this compound appeared to be hygromycin A, a known antimicrobial produced by Streptomyces hygroscopicus,” Zgurskaya said. “Hygromycin A targets the ribosomes and its selectivity was a mystery. Our data showed that this antibiotic is efficiently taken up by B. burgdorferi, explaining its selectivity. Hygromycin A cleared the B. burgdorferi infection in mice, including animals that ingested the compound in a bait, and was less disruptive to the fecal microbiome than clinically relevant antibiotics. This selective antibiotic holds the promise of providing a better therapeutic for treating Lyme disease and eradicating it in the environment.”
“The Dodge Family College of Arts of Sciences recognizes Helen I. Zgurskaya, Inga Leus and Vincent Bonifay, from the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry on their important work to help bring treatments to the hundreds of thousands of patients who are diagnosed with this disease each year,” said David M. Wrobel, dean. “This is an exciting example of how our faculty are instrumental in advancing positive health outcomes globally, which is fundamental to OU’s research mission.
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For bacteria, like people, lifestyle matters.
A new study from the University of Central Florida found that the environmental lifestyle that bacteria possess reveal why some go rogue and turn deadly while others remain harmless to humans.
The findings, which published recently in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, focus on Vibrio vulnificus, better known as the flesh-eating bacteria. However, what the scientists found could help create a model that may well extend to other human pathogens.
“From COVID to V. vulnificus the emergence of human pathogens is one of the most concerning public health issues facing us,” says lead author Salvador Almagro-Moreno, an assistant professor of medicine at UCF. “But we know surprisingly very little about what triggers the change from harmless to deadly. We want to answer that question using aquatic pathogens such as the agent of cholera or V. vulnificus as model systems. Our study is a big step in understanding this emergence phenomenon, and will hopefully help us predict, prevent and manage future outbreaks.”
V. vulnificus, a bacterium found in the marine environment,often causes necrotizing fasciitis, an infection in which the flesh around an open wound die, giving the bacterium the name “flesh-eating.” Consumption of raw oysters contaminated with this bacterium can also cause the more severe and life-threatening septicemia in patients with underlying health conditions such as diabetes mellitus. V. vulnificus is one of the fastest-killing human pathogens with a striking mortality rate of more than 50 percent. But not all the strains of this bacterium can kill humans and in fact, most are unable to cause harm, Almagro-Moreno says. Surprisingly, the ecological and genetic reasons behind this drastic difference have remained enigmatic for decades.
For this study, Almagro-Moreno, who provides expert opinion to the Food and Drug Administration on flesh-eating bacteria, investigated populations of V. vulnificus in the Indian River Lagoon in East Central Florida because the bacterium is endemic to this region. The aim of the study was to investigate potential genomic and ecological factors that might facilitate the emergence of deadly variants of V. vulnificus.
He and his team collected a variety of samples between 2018 and 2019 from two areas of the lagoon, which stretches more than 150 miles from Volusia to Palm Beach County. They investigated a wide range of factors that included variables like the bacterial communities in the environment, water pollutants, dissolved organic matter or the presence of algal blooms among others. Before sampling, the team developed a novel genetic marker that could rapidly screen the samples on a large scale to detect specifically V. vulnificus and discriminate between strains that can cause disease to humans and those that don’t.
“This accurate marker will aid in the detection of V. vulnificus globally, which we hope will be used by public health authorities to prevent or manage outbreaks” says Almagro-Moreno.
Moreno’s team found some striking associations between the likelihood of identifying deadly strains of the bacterium and some ecological factors and genomic determinants.
“Our results indicate how ecosystems may be generating pressures that facilitate the emergence of specific strains with pathogenic potential within a natural population,” says Almagro-Moreno. “We now have evidence that the environment plays a most critical role in shaping the emergence of this pathogen. Nonetheless, we are pathogen hunters and there is much more research to conduct. But this is a critical starting point in solving the mystery of what are the elements/ingredients that make a pathogen?”
The rest of the study team includes Mario Lopez-Perez, Jane M. Jayakumar, and Trudy-Ann Grant from UCF’s Burnett School of Biomedical Sciences. It also includes Asier Zaragoza-Solas and Pedro Cabello-Yeves from the Universidad Miguel Hernandez in Alicante, Spain.
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Materials provided by University of Central Florida. Original written by Zenaida Gonzalez Kotala. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Focusing on external sights and sounds, rather than what’s going on in your body, made running feel easier and improved performance.To make running seem easier, try paying attention to anything other than your body. That’s according to a fascinating new study of the ways in which how we focus as we move can affect how we feel as we move. The study was small and involved novice female runners, but the findings suggest that the more closely runners listen to their bodies, the more draining their running can become, both physically and psychologically. Conversely, the more runners distract themselves from what their bodies are doing as they put one foot in front of the other, the more effortless their run may feel, and the better their performance. These findings could be useful for the many runners about to toe the line at a fall marathon or other race. The results could have implications, too, for any of us who might wonder how to make our workouts feel as tolerable as they possibly can be.Exercise is not always boundless fun, as most of us know from experience. It can be physically unsettling as we begin to move and our heart rates and breathing quicken and muscles start to whinge. It has not been altogether clear, however, how best to cope with these discomforts, so that we can stay motivated to eventually become better at our chosen sport or activity.Many coaches and other authorities, including training partners and friends, will tell you to pay attention to what is going on inside of you, and to focus on the physics of your body, including your form and technique. Listen to your breathing as you move, you may have been told, or count your steps each minute, or think about the process of lifting your knee with each stride.But some research with athletes suggests that paying close attention to your body and its mechanisms may be the wrong way to make moving feel easier and make you better at your sport. In a much-cited 2003 study, for example, skilled golfers putted more adroitly if they did not think about how to putt than when they did, while expert soccer players dribbled effortlessly through cones when their minds wandered, but tended to bobble the ball if they paid attention to their footwork. (People new to soccer, though, dribbled better when they thought about what they were doing, presumably because they did not yet know how to dribble.) These results generally align with a widely held theory in exercise science known as the Constrained Action Hypothesis. It suggests our bodies know how to move better than our conscious minds do. The more we concentrate on or consciously tell our bodies what to do, this theory suggests, the less fluid and efficient our movement becomes.This idea has been borne out in other studies with people practicing a variety of activities. In a 2017 study, for instance, 44 volunteers jumped farther during a standing long jump when they focused on where to land, rather than the correct techniques for leaping, Similarly, in a 2011 study of weight training, 27 men and women activated their arm muscles more fully during biceps curls — meaning their workout was more effective — when they did not think about how to heft the weight than when they did. And in a 2015 study of competitive rowers, the 15 athletes rowed more efficiently when they let their minds attend to almost anything other than how their legs felt as they rowed. Whether a similar dynamic might play out in endurance sports, like distance running, has been mostly unknown, though. So, for the new study, which was published this month in the Journal of Motor Learning and Development, researchers at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville and Shahid Beheshti University in Tehran, Iran, decided to see whether runners would perform more effectively if they were distracted, compared to if they tuned in to what was happening with their bodies.They began by recruiting about a dozen young women. (The research took place in Iran, where studies with volunteers of both genders are discouraged, so no male runners participated.) The women were healthy, active and familiar with running, although none ran regularly. The researchers invited the women to their lab to check everyone’s fitness and top treadmill running speed.Then on subsequent lab visits, the women ran for six minutes at a time, running at about 70 percent of their top speed, while the scientists monitored their oxygen consumption, the amount of lactate in their bloodstreams and their feelings about the difficulty of each run. During one of these sessions, the women fixated intently on the muscles in their feet, as a way to turn their attention inward. During another, they counted steps, so their focus, while still on their body, was broader and more external. In a third run, they counted backward by threes, taking their minds off their bodies but not out of their heads. And finally, in a fourth session, they watched a video of a basketball game, a blunt distraction that pulled their attention completely away from running.When the scientists then compared the women’s physical and emotional reactions to each run, they found that video watching easily bested body listening. The women consumed the least oxygen and produced the least lactate when they viewed basketball and were the most distracted. Their running, physiologically, was least taxing then. They also told the researchers that when they watched the videos, they felt the least strained. Their running felt hardest, on the other hand, when they paid attention to their muscles, with the other strategies falling in between.In essence, the worst strategy for the runners was “thinking about their movements,” said Jared Porter, a professor of human movement at the University of Tennessee, who oversaw the new study. A much better option was to think of something — anything — else.As is typical of exercise science, this study was small, and the Constrained Action Hypothesis remains only a theory. But as the current findings suggest, distractions are likely to make our running more pleasant and probably faster, Dr. Porter said. So, don headphones and stream music or podcasts (while still monitoring the human and vehicular traffic around you for safety, of course). Listen to birdsong or drink in the landscape as you run outdoors, or watch television as you jog on a treadmill.“We were surprised by how significant the effects were” when people’s minds drifted away from their bodies, he said.Many factors no doubt go into how effectively we perform in a sport and how much we might enjoy our workouts. This study looked at brief bouts of running by young, inexperienced female runners. It cannot tell us if the results apply equally to men, older people, longtime runners or people in other endurance sports, like cycling and swimming. “But there is no scientific reason to think they don’t,” Dr. Porter said.

A recent statistical study has revealed some of the constraints and directions in the evolution of the structure and function of proteins. Better models of protein structural dynamics may allow researchers to understand more of this fundamental mystery in living organisms.
Proteins perform essential functions such as material transport, immunity and catalysis. The various functions of proteins have evolved gradually over the course of evolution.
Due to thermal noise, or the random motion of atoms, proteins shift their structures while performing their functions. These dynamics usually happen in short time scales, from microseconds (millionth of seconds) to milliseconds (thousandth of seconds). Meanwhile, genetic mutations may also lead to variations in protein structures, leading to the evolution of proteins. Such an evolutionary process happens generation after generation, which correspond to a much longer time scale.
“Interestingly, although being two completely different processes, the dynamics and the evolution of proteins share many similarities. However, it is not easy to verify quantitatively, and the theoretical origin of the relationship has not yet been clarified before,” said Qian-Yuan Tang, Ph.D., co-author of the research published in Physical Review Letters and a former postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Tokyo. Tang is currently a research scientist at the RIKEN Center for Brain Science in Japan.
In the recently published research, Tang and Professor Kunihiko Kaneko, a theoretical biology expert from the University of Tokyo Research Center for Complex Systems Biology, analyzed the structures of hundreds of thousands of proteins in scientific databases. These proteins can be divided into different groups based on their structural similarity. The proteins in the same group are usually the same kind of protein in different animal species. For example, the iron-carrying blood protein hemoglobin in humans, rats and fishes will be in the same group. The structural variations within a group reflect the structural evolution of the proteins. Further analysis shows that the structural variations that happened in evolution and the structural variations that happened in the functional dynamics of proteins share the same pattern.
“What we are finding is a connection between thermal noise-induced deformations and mutation-induced deformations,” said Tang.
“This correspondence between dynamics and evolution is due to the fact that structural changes of proteins due to thermal fluctuations and mutations share the same constraints,” said Kaneko.
These constraints lead to a close relation between the directions in which protein functional movement and structural evolution tend to occur. The emergence of such constraints can be explained by the fact that protein structure must be resistant to thermal noise and genetic mutations, but also must be sensitive enough to function.
A better understanding of this correspondence may provide a unified way to understand the functional behavior of proteins and analyze their evolutionary constraints. These results also give a new perspective to the design of functional living systems and artificial intelligence systems.
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A scientific team at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts has developed a new tool to help consumers, food companies, restaurants, and cafeterias choose and produce healthier foods and officials to make sound public nutrition policy.
Food Compass is a new nutrient profiling system, developed over three years, that incorporates cutting-edge science on how different characteristics of foods positively or negatively impact health. Important novel features of the system, reported Oct. 14 in Nature Food, include: Equally considering healthful vs. harmful factors in foods (many existing systems focus on harmful factors); Incorporating cutting-edge science on nutrients, food ingredients, processing characteristics, phytochemicals, and additives (existing systems focus largely on just a few nutrients); and Objectively scoring all foods, beverages, and even mixed dishes and meals using one consistent score (existing systems subjectively group and score foods differently).”Once you get beyond ‘eat your veggies, avoid soda,’ the public is pretty confused about how to identify healthier choices in the grocery store, cafeteria, and restaurant,” said the study’s lead and corresponding author, Dariush Mozaffarian, dean of the Friedman School. “Consumers, policy makers, and even industry are looking for simple tools to guide everyone toward healthier choices.”
The new Food Compass system was developed and then tested using a detailed national database of 8,032 foods and beverages consumed by Americans. It scores 54 different characteristics across nine domains representing different health-relevant aspects of foods, drinks, and mixed meals, providing for one of the most comprehensive nutrient profiling systems in the world. The characteristics and domains were selected based on nutritional attributes linked to major chronic diseases such as obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular problems, and cancer, as well as to risk of undernutrition, especially for mothers, young children, and the elderly.
Food Compass was designed so that additional attributes and scoring could evolve based on future evidence in such areas as gastrointestinal health, immune function, brain health, bone health, and physical and mental performance; as well as considerations of sustainability.
Potential uses of Food Compass include: Encouraging the food industry to develop healthier foods and reformulate the ingredients in popular processed foods and snacks; Providing food purchasing incentives for employees through worksite wellness, health care, and nutrition assistance programs; Supplying the science for local and national policies such as package labeling, taxation, warning labels, and restrictions on marketing to children; Enabling restaurants and school, business, and hospital cafeterias to present healthier food options; Informing agricultural trade policy; and Guiding institutional and individual investors on environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) investment decisions.Each food, beverage, or mixed dish receives a final Food Compass score ranging from 1 (least healthy) to 100 (most healthy). The researchers identified 70 or more as a reasonable score for foods or beverages that should be encouraged. Foods and beverages scoring 31-69 should be consumed in moderation. Anything scoring 30 or lower should be consumed minimally.
Across major food categories, the average Food Compass score was 43.2. The lowest scoring category was snacks and sweet desserts (average score 16.4). The highest scoring categories were vegetables (average score 69.1), fruits (average score 73.9, with nearly all raw fruits receiving a score of 100), and legumes, nuts, and seeds (average score 78.6). Among beverages, the average score ranged from 27.6 for sugar-sweetened sodas and energy drinks to 67 for 100% fruit or vegetable juices. Starchy vegetables scored an average of 43.2. The average score for beef was 24.9; for poultry, 42.67; and for seafood, 67.0.Food Compass is the first major nutrient profiling system to use consistent scoring across diverse food groups, which is especially important for mixed dishes. For example, in the case of pizza, many other systems have separate scoring algorithms for the wheat, meat, and cheese, but not the finished product itself. Consistent scoring of diverse items can also be helpful in assessing and comparing combinations of food and beverages that could be sold and consumed together, such as an entire shopping basket, a person’s daily diet pattern, or a portfolio of foods sold by a particular company.
“With its publicly available scoring algorithm, Food Compass can provide a nuanced approach to promoting healthy food choices-helping guide consumer behavior, nutrition policy, scientific research, food industry practices, and socially based investment decisions,” said last author Renata Micha, who did this work as a faculty member at the Friedman School and is now at the University of Thessaly.
Additional authors are Naglaa H. El-Abbadi, Meghan O’Hearn, Josh Marino, William A. Masters, Paul Jacques, Peilin Shi, and Jeffrey B. Blumberg of the Friedman School.
The study is part of the Food-PRICE (Policy Review and Intervention Cost-Effectiveness) project, a National Institutes of Health-funded research collaboration working to identify cost-effective nutrition strategies that can have the greatest impact on improving health outcomes in the United States. This work was supported by Danone and the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health under award numbers R01HL130735 and R01HL115189. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health. Please see the study for conflicts of interest.

Consumption of ultra-processed foods has increased over the past two decades across nearly all segments of the U.S. population, according to a new study by researchers at NYU School of Global Public Health.
“The overall composition of the average U.S. diet has shifted towards a more processed diet. This is concerning, as eating more ultra-processed foods is associated with poor diet quality and higher risk of several chronic diseases,” said Filippa Juul, an assistant professor and postdoctoral fellow at NYU School of Public Health and the study’s lead author. “The high and increasing consumption of ultra-processed foods in the 21st century may be a key driver of the obesity epidemic.”
Ultra-processed foods are industrially manufactured, ready-to-eat or heat, include additives, and are largely devoid of whole foods. Previous studies by researchers at NYU School of Global Public Health have found that higher consumption of ultra-processed foods is associated with obesity and heart disease.
In the new study, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Juul and her colleagues analyzed dietary data from nearly 41,000 adults who took part in the CDC’s National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey from 2001 through 2018. Participants were asked what they ate in the past 24 hours, and the researchers sorted the foods reported into four categories: Minimally processed foods (whole foods), such as vegetables, fruits, grains, meat, and dairy Processed culinary ingredients, such as olive oil, butter, sugar, and salt Processed foods, such as cheese, canned fish, and canned beans Ultra-processed foods, such as frozen pizza, soda, fast food, sweets, salty snacks, canned soup, and most breakfast cerealsThe researchers then calculated the percentage of calories consumed from each food group.
Ultra-processed food consumption grew from 53.5 percent of calories in the beginning of the period studied (2001-2002) to 57 percent at the end (2017-2018). The intake of ready-to-eat or heat meals, like frozen dinners, increased the most, while the intake of some sugary foods and drinks declined. In contrast, the consumption of whole foods decreased from 32.7 percent to 27.4 percent of calories, mostly due to people eating less meat and dairy.
People across nearly all demographic groups, regardless of income, increased their consumption of ultra-processed foods, with the exception of Hispanic adults, who ate significantly less ultra-processed foods and more whole foods compared with non-Hispanic white and Black adults. College graduates also ate significantly less ultra-processed foods. Notably, older adults (aged 60+) experienced the sharpest increase in consuming ultra-processed foods: this age group ate the least ultra-processed foods and most whole foods at the beginning of the period studied, yet ate the most ultra-processed foods and least whole foods at the end.
Given the growing intake of ultra-processed foods in the U.S. and mounting evidence linking these foods to chronic diseases, the researchers recommend implementing policies to reduce their consumption, such as revised dietary guidelines, marketing restrictions, package labeling changes, and taxes on soda and other ultra-processed foods. They also support programs and policies to increase the availability, accessibility, and affordability of whole foods, especially among disadvantaged populations.
“In the current industrial food environment, most of the foods that are marketed to us are in fact industrial formulations that are far removed from whole foods. Nevertheless, nutritional science tends to focus on the nutrient content of foods and has historically ignored the health implications of industrial food processing,” said Juul.
Moreover, while the study focused on data from before COVID-19, there are indications that the pandemic led to an increase in eating less nutritious, shelf-stable foods.
“In the early days of the pandemic, people changed their purchasing behaviors to shop less frequently, and sales of ultra-processed foods such as boxed macaroni and cheese, canned soups, and snack foods increased substantially. People may have also eaten more packaged ‘comfort foods’ as a way of coping with the uncertainty of the pandemic,” added Juul. “We look forward to examining dietary changes during this period as data become available.”
Additional study authors include Niyati Parekh and Virginia Chang of NYU School of Global Public Health and Euridice Martinez-Steele and Carlos Augusto Monteiro of the University of São Paulo.