Ultra-processed foods may be tasty and fast, but mounting research shows they’re quietly destroying our health from the inside out.
For many people, walking down the aisle at the supermarket can be a misleading adventure. If you stick the outer edges, you likely know exactly what you’re in for. Organic or regular. Pesticide or without. Local or national. It’s fairly cut and dry. The problem exists in the center of the market, where uncertainty lurks. Behind those colored boxes with the happy faces and the “8 different vitamins!” labels, is a mess of ingredients we can’t pronounce and for those we can, we’re left with questions of whether we want to consume them.
Food is processed in many ways. Simply cooking corn is processing it. That’s not bad. Pasteurizing milk is processing it, and that helped prevent milk borne diseases like Salmonella and Listeria. We now have processes that are less invasive that allow us to retain the nutrients in milk and even fortify it with vitamin D. What we are going to explore is the explosion of ultra processed foods (UPF) and their effects on our health.
Peeling Back the Layers of UPF
Ultra processing does three main things: it changes the food matrix, reduces the nutrient make up and includes more additives. Think about soybeans in a field and the process it goes through to become oil. The beans are separated from their shell and then heated, and the oil is usually extracted with a solvent called hexane.
Some better ones are mechanically separated and this is called cold pressing. Once the oil is extracted it is degummed with acid and then neutralized and bleached and deodorized. Whatever nutrients were in the bean are long gone, and we are left with mainly omega 6 fatty acid and no fiber. This is one of the main problems with seed oils. They are high in omega 6, and although omega 6 is an essential fatty acid, Americans are typically 20:1 in omega 6 versus omega 3. The problem with this is that omega 6 promotes inflammation by being converted to arachidonic acid and subsequently prostaglandins which are inflammatory mediators. In fact, the NSAID’s that many readers take daily are designed to inhibit the enzyme that makes these specific prostaglandins. Just through increasing your omega 3 to omega 6 ratio, you can lower your systemic inflammation by supplementing with omega 3 and limiting omega 6 intake.
It is estimated that 60 to 70 percent of calories consumed by Americans come from UPF’s. We have experienced a steady increase in childhood and adult obesity and now almost 50 percent of adults are diabetic or prediabetic. Dementia is increasing and is now considered by many as type 3 diabetes.
Autism rates have increased four-fold since 2000. Our rates of puberty are the earliest in the world with girls staring at 10 and boys at 12. Could all of these disasters be related?
The History of Processed Foods
As I have become more immersed in the health/wellness space, I wanted to take a step back and see when and where all this might have started. High fructose corn syrup has been around since the ‘70s so we can’t just pin our metabolic epidemic on that. However, in the ‘80s the U.S. Surgeon General stated that cigarettes and tobacco were not healthy. In a very wise and strategic move RJ Reynolds purchased Nabisco and Phillip Morris acquired Kraft. They could see the writing on the wall and an eventual decrease in tobacco sales, so they pivoted to the food industry. They were able to create highly palatable foods that had a good mouth feel, but very little nutritional value.
Around that same time, the USDA and DHHS published the first dietary guidelines for Americans which emphasized carbohydrates and limiting fat and protein intake. Remember the old food pyramid with 11 servings of the bread and cereal group at the base? The Mediterraneans were probably laughing as they adhered to their culinary rubric sipping red wine and sautéing vegetables in olive oil.
What really added fuel to the fire was the American Heart Association (AHA) which adopted a strong stance against saturated fats based on two large studies. The AHA thus promoted unsaturated fats like vegetable/seed oils in products like margarine and Crisco and eschewed saturated fat in meat. The AHA, however, had a significant financial conflict of interest with Proctor and Gamble (the manufacturers of Crisco) being one of their largest donors. Interestingly, one of those original large studies, called the Seven Countries Study, which vilified saturated fat, was reanalyzed in the ‘90s. It was found that sweets or carbohydrate consumption was actually linked to cardiovascular disease and not saturated fat.
The stage was set for an explosion of high-carb, low-fat foods. However low-fat ice cream and milk just didn’t taste right without the fat, so emulsifiers were added to give it a better texture. Shelf life was an issue for all these packaged foods so we needed to add preservatives. Dyes were added to improve shelf appeal. In addition, more women were joining the work force and it was easy to pick up packaged foods which were convenient for dinner. The combination of convenience coupled with the false narrative that this was somehow healthy was inculcated by healthcare providers.
Research and Education
Where has that lead us? We currently spend $4.5 trillion each year on healthcare, or a better term might be “sick care.” Spending on healthcare is two times our GDP. Its simply not sustainable. We are spending more money than any other country but yet, we are, by all metrics…sicker. How do we emancipate ourselves from this quagmire?
To help answer that question I contacted Lee Murphy, a nutrition professor at the University of Tennessee who also has her Master of Public Health. “There needs to be systematic change in the way we approach nutrition,” she told me, “from policy makers to insurance companies to teaching institutions.”
I know that when I attended medical school (now a long time ago) we had no formal instruction in nutrition, as it seemed insipid and not actionable. Even now, the mention of something holistic evokes an invidious response from many and relegated to pseudoscience. Lee teaches about 2,000 students per semester, but she lamented that nutrition has been removed as a requirement for the undergraduate nursing program.
How does our current science and research shed light on this topic? Are processed foods unhealthy? In a large measure, yes. Polysorbate 80 which is an emulsifier causes one to absorb more phthalates like DEHP. Phthalates are found in most plastics and packaging and are linked to hormone problems like lower testosterone and birth defects. Phthalate elutes from most plastics so some have chosen to use glass when available. Preservatives such as BHA, which is an antioxidant, has been linked to cancer in animal studies. Natural antioxidants could be used like vitamin E. Another common preservative— sodium benzoate—can form benzene when heated which is a known carcinogen.
Then there is high fructose corn syrup. It is found in almost everything and metabolites of fructose have been shown to inhibit three enzymes within the mitochondria that limit the production of energy from fat.
And finally there are artificial food dyes, which have no nutritional value, and yet nine are approved by the FDA. Many like Red 40 and Yellow 5 (the two most common) are made from petroleum and are linked to hyperactivity in children and hypersensitivity as well. Red 3, which has been linked to thyroid cancer in animal models, was only just banned in the U.S. as of January 2025. The remaining artificial food dyes are to be phased out by the end of 2026. This is a step in the right direction as the limited number of food dyes used outside the U.S. must be accompanied by a warning label. There is really no need for them when there are natural alternatives like beet or turmeric extract.
A simple example of the difference between the U.S. and other countries can be seen in Kellogg’s Froot Loops. In the U.S., Froot Loops are made with hydrogenated seed oils in addition to Red 40, Yellow 5 and 6, Blue 1, and BHT, while in Germany the same company makes Froot Loops with vegetable concentrates like carrots, cherries, and radishes. They are both packed with simple sugars and neither is a good choice in general, but the differences are marked.
Finding Our Way with Whole Foods
How does the government allow so much stuff to be put in our food? It would seem that there would be rigorous testing to which any food additive would be subjected before it could be allowed to be consumed. However, we have something called “generally regarded as safe” or GRAS. In this model, a manufacturer can “self-determine” or “self-affirm” to the FDA that their molecule is safe. The threshold for making this list is fairly low and fraught with financial bias.
But I don’t think that it just the toxic effects of the additives in the UPF’s. It is the fact that we tend to over-eat them. Lee Murphy echoed this fact: caloric toxicity, especially from carbs, is probably the main culprit. Plenty of research has demonstrated that we over-eat UPF’s by at least 25 percent. A study that highlights this fact compared two groups. Both groups could eat until satiated, but one group ate UPF’s and the other whole foods. The group allowed to eat UPF’s consumed 3,500 more calories per week compared to the whole food group. That equates to gaining one pound per week. That was reversed when the groups were switched. Caloric toxicity leads to increased insulin, insulin resistance, and eventually diabetes.
Whole foods have higher water content and fiber which are more filling, not to mention the positive effects on the gut microbiome. It is really hard to over eat fruit and vegetables, but I can always find more room for one more doughnut. Lee emphasizes the importance of fiber and at least five fruits or vegetables per day.
I am personally thankful for leaders like Robert Kennedy who are willing to take a top-down approach to making America healthy again. However, as consumers, we have agency over our health and food choices, but it takes intentionality. We as consumers can put pressure on the food industry to evoke change. The current model of being on our heels and waiting for disease to occur and treating it with medications is not the answer. We need to be on our toes, weight forward center of mass focusing on disease prevention which starts with proper nutrition and exercise.
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