Purpose This study aimed at evaluating the effectiveness of a nutritional counselling intervention based on encouraging the consumption of unprocessed and minimally processed foods, rather than ultra-processed products, and the practice of physical activities to prevent excessive gestational weight gain in overweight pregnant women. Methods This was a two-armed, parallel, randomized controlled trial conducted in primary health units of a Brazilian municipality from 2018 to 2021. Overweight, adult pregnant women (n = 350) were randomly assigned to control (CG) or intervention groups (IG). The intervention consisted of three individualized nutritional counselling sessions based on encouraging the consumption of unprocessed and minimally processed foods rather than ultra-processed products, following the NOVA food classification system, and the practice of physical activities. The primary outcome was the proportion of women whose weekly gestational weight gain (GWG) exceeded the Institute of Medicine guidelines. Adjusted logistic regression models were employed. Results Complete data on weight gain were available for 121 women of the IG and 139 of the CG. In modified intentionto-treat analysis, there was a lower chance of the IG women having excessive GWG [OR 0.56 (95% CI 0.32, 0.98), p = .04], when compared to the CG. No between-group differences were observed for the other maternal outcomes investigated. Conclusion The present study was unprecedented in demonstrating that nutritional counselling based on the NOVA food classification system, together with encouraging the practice of physical activity, is effective in preventing excessive weight gain in overweight pregnant women. Trial registration Registered on July 30th 2018 at Brazilian Registry of Clinical Trials (RBR-2w9bhc).

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The aim was to investigate the relationship between the energy contribution (E%) of foods according to the degree of industrial processing and the energy-adjusted dietary inflammatory index (E-DII) in pregnancy. Two 24-hour dietary recalls were obtained from each of the 784 pregnant women. Adjusted linear regression models allowed observing an inverse association between E-DII scores and E% from minimally processed foods β = -0.049 (95%CI -0.055– -0.042) and a direct association with the E% of ultra-processed foods β = 0.052 (95%CI 0.045–0.058), indicating a relationship between the dietary inflammatory potential and the degree of industrial processing of foods.