\n<\/p>\n
One day recently, my son had two long, back-to-back doctor appointments, which meant he was in the car and in waiting rooms for much of the afternoon. His lunch and snack would not have earned me a healthy-mom award: peanut-butter puffs, a grape-jelly Uncrustables sandwich, and a package of mixed-berry oat bites. All ultra-processed foods, the new boogeyman of public health.<\/p>\n
I have many years of experience as a health reporter, and I understand the importance of healthy eating. I\u2019m well aware of the fervent push by both right- and left-leaning health authorities to get Americans to eat fewer ultra-processed foods. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that parents limit their kids\u2019 consumption of ultra-processed foods, including \u201canything in a crinkly bag\u201d\u2014that is, everything my son ate that day. Removing ultra-processed foods from Americans\u2019 diets has also become a central plank of the MAHA movement, led by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who blames them for \u201cdriving the obesity epidemic.\u201d On the podcast from Levels, the glucose-monitoring company co-founded by President Donald Trump\u2019s surgeon-general nominee, Casey Means, one expert suggested that ultra-processed foods should be in a back section of the supermarket, covered in warnings about their dangers. On the internet, crunchy moms of seemingly all political stripes post recipes for homemade goldfish crackers, for example, or hand-sculpted chicken nuggets. TikTok influencers show off the unprocessed steamed cauliflower and carrot salad that they\u2019ve prepared for their toddlers. (Suspiciously missing are images of the toddlers actually eating this food.)<\/p>\n
Nevertheless, like many working parents, I find that feeding my family a diet free of ultra-processed foods is impossible. After a long day of fighting with my 18-month-old over whether he can touch the trash (no), and whether he can eat the trash (also no), sometimes all I can do is throw some (ultra-processed) mac and cheese at him and drown my own sorrows in some Trader Joe\u2019s white queso dip (also ultra-processed). The efforts to get parents to give up these types of comforts in favor of home-roasted vegetables are frustrating\u2014and unrealistic.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s true that ultra-processed foods\u2014which tend to be defined by the fact that they contain artificial ingredients and require several industrial steps to create\u2014are, on the whole, not as good for you as unprocessed foods. Diets high in ultra-processed foods are correlated with a much greater risk of mortality. A recent study of 55 overweight people found that a diet of minimally processed foods, such as chicken and vegetables, led to twice as much weight loss as one consisting of healthy-ish ultra-processed foods, such as cereal, plant-based milk, and flavored yogurt\u2014even when both diets met British nutrition guidelines. Ultra-processed foods seem to make people overeat, because they contain more calories per gram and less water and fiber than, say, fruits and vegetables, and because they tend to be what nutritionists call \u201chyperpalatable,\u201d or extremely tasty, due to their combinations of sugar, fat, and salt.<\/p>\n
Ultra-processed foods have, of course, existed for more than a century. Margarine, one of the first such concoctions, has been maligned nearly since its invention, with one turn-of-the-20th-century U.S. senator disparaging it as \u201cmatured under the chill of death, blended with vegetable oils and flavored by chemical tricks.\u201d But the term ultra-processed foods<\/em> was conceived in 2009 by the Brazilian researcher Carlos Monteiro, who had noticed changes in Brazilians\u2019 diets and wanted to warn of the increasing consumption of prepackaged foods, as the journalist Julia Belluz and the researcher Kevin Hall write in their new book, Food Intelligence<\/em>. Monteiro believed it was not sugar and fat per se that were contributing to obesity, but those components\u2019 being processed and recombined into ready-to-eat snacks. In the years after Monteiro\u2019s coinage of the term, studies about the harms of ultra-processed foods trickled into medical journals, and mainstream food experts in America and elsewhere recommended sharply limiting their consumption.<\/p>\n Most nutritionists still agree that eating a bag of corn chips is far less healthy than eating an ear of corn. But some are now acknowledging that the \u201cultra-processed\u201d category, which makes up about 60 percent of the American diet, has become too broad and difficult for many families to understand. \u201cIt\u2019s insanity to me that bran flakes is in the same category as sweets,\u201d Nicola Guess, a dietitian and researcher at the University of Oxford, told me. (Guess has consulted for companies that make plant-based meat alternatives\u2014which are also ultra-processed foods.) Jimmy Chun Yu Louie, a dietitian at Swinburne University of Technology, in Australia, pointed out in a recent review paper that tofu is sometimes categorized as an ultra-processed food, despite being \u201ca nutritionally rich protein central to many Asian cuisines for generations.\u201d He concluded, \u201cThe evidence suggests that not all UPFs are inherently \u2018bad.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Lumping soy milk and Takis in the same category has obscured the fact that although many ultra-processed foods are unhealthy, some are reasonably nutritious. Though the consumption of some ultra-processed foods is associated with \u201cevery bad outcome you can imagine,\u201d Guess said, foods such as ultra-processed yogurt, bread, and breakfast cereals can be neutral or even beneficial. In fact, in the study that found that eating minimally processed foods led to twice as much weight loss, the participants who ate somewhat-healthy ultra-processed foods also<\/em> lost weight\u2014just not as much as the people eating minimally processed food. After all, bottled salad dressing is an ultra-processed food that people use in small amounts on healthy foods such as lettuce and cucumbers, which doesn\u2019t necessarily negate the vegetables\u2019 health benefits. In a 2023 study, researchers described how it was possible to prepare a day\u2019s worth of healthy meals in which at least 80 percent of the calories were from ultra-processed foods, with a breakfast of, for instance, instant oatmeal and ultra-filtered milk, and a dinner of gluten-free pasta. Ultra-processed foods can also be essential to people with dietary restrictions: Splenda, oat milk, and protein powder are all ultra-processed. (So is baby formula, which is necessary for infants whose mothers cannot or do not wish to feed them with breast milk.)<\/p>\n More of kids\u2019 than adults\u2019 daily calories come from ultra-processed foods\u2014a fact that, if you\u2019re a parent, you probably already know. Ohhh, do you ever know. You know the head-popping befrazzlement of running late for day-care pickup and needing to just get something <\/em>into the kid before bedtime, so you reach for frozen chicken nuggets. You know what it\u2019s like to spend hours cooking homemade pasta sauce with hidden veggies for said child, who, because of their picky eating, is on the brink of scurvy, only to be told they \u201cdon\u2019t yike it.\u201d (And then to find yourself eating homemade pasta sauce with hidden veggies all week to avoid wasting it.) You know of the best-laid plans to prep homemade veggie bites on a Sunday, only to have to run your kid to urgent care that day, so you beeline instead to the holy land of ultra-processed food: Trader Joe\u2019s.<\/p>\n Unprocessed foods typically require more effort than ultra-processed foods to make palatable, and more money to buy\u2014which many overstretched, budget-strapped parents can\u2019t spend. When cooking an entirely unprocessed meal, \u201cYou have to be like, What am I going to cook? What am I shopping for?<\/em>\u201d Julia Wolfson, a Johns Hopkins University health-policy professor, told me, adding that you then also have to prep and store the food in a way that it won\u2019t go bad. \u201cIt\u2019s a lot of planning and cognitive functioning and mental energy, which is not time- or cost-neutral.\u201d Then, of course, there\u2019s the actual cooking: \u201cFor a lot of people,\u201d Wolfson said, \u201cyou\u2019ve got kids running around, you\u2019ve got stuff going on, you\u2019re multitasking.\u201d And don\u2019t forget the cleanup! In a 2024 study, Wolfson found that people who spend more time cooking consume fewer ultra-processed foods and more unprocessed foods, and other studies have found that people who spend more time cooking tend to have higher-quality diets overall. The average American, however, spends less than an hour a day preparing food.<\/p>\n Reams of studies have also found that healthy diets are more expensive than unhealthy ones\u2014sometimes as much as doubly so. \u201cMy tomato sauce that I buy with no high-fructose corn syrup and no sugar, all fresh ingredients, costs twice as much as the other ones,\u201d Christopher Gardner, a nutrition scientist at Stanford, told me. Jessica Wilson, a dietician based in Sacramento, says that many of her clients are on Medicaid or SNAP benefits, and that if they didn\u2019t eat processed foods, they would skip meals because the unprocessed alternatives are too expensive. She recommends that, rather than avoid all ultra-processed foods, her clients buy canned soups and chilis, cured meats and cheeses, boxed soup broths, and various refrigerated and frozen meals. And even in cases where an unprocessed diet is cheaper than an ultra-processed one, time also<\/em> has a cost, and many people would rather pay a company to chop or cook their foods for them.<\/p>\n Unprocessed-food moms on social media tend to gloss over the sheer amount of money and prep work involved in life without convenience foods. Gretchen Adler\u2014whose Instagram bio reads \u201cReal food. Better health.\u201d\u2014made her own sourdough pizza, ranch dressing, and honey-sweetened cake for her 4-year-old\u2019s birthday, with no mention of who was watching said 4-year-old during this culinary marathon. Ballerina Farm\u2019s Hannah Neeleman, a mom of eight, seems to spend hours a day making homemade scones and churning butter, which, thanks to the power of time-lapse videography, looks like it takes just a few minutes. But Neeleman is essentially paid to do that; being a farm-wife influencer is one of her jobs. Meanwhile, a life of constant butter-churning is \u201cnot how the vast majority of people live or even want to live,\u201d Guess, the Oxford researcher, said.<\/p>\n The dieticians and nutritionists I spoke with acknowledged that, these days, most families cannot completely avoid ultra-processed foods. Instead, these experts promote a kind of harm reduction: adding fresh vegetables to a bowl of instant ramen, say, or just minimizing the amount of saturated fat, salt, and added sugar in the ultra-processed foods you do eat. Guess tells people to worry less about things such as ultra-processed yogurt and to instead avoid the stuff that we \u201calready know is crap,\u201d such as Doritos and candy. Gardner recommended that, when evaluating an ultra-processed food, people consider how many strange-sounding ingredients it has. The fewer additives, the better. And, crucially, compare it with what you might eat instead. If the \u201cinstead\u201d is a minimally processed double bacon cheeseburger, just get the ultra-processed dressing and put it on a fresh salad. Your kids still won\u2019t touch it, but at least it\u2019ll make healthy eating a little easier for you.<\/p>\n When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting <\/em>The Atlantic.<\/em><\/p>\n