Ultra-processed America | The Week

What are ultra-processed foods? 

It’s a bit of a fuzzy area, but the gist is they’re refined foods made from ingredients not typically found in home kitchens. Brazilian researcher Carlos Augusto Monteiro popularized the term in 2009, when he classified food into four categories. At one end of the spectrum lie foods from the farm, such as vegetables, fruits, milk, eggs, and meat; at the other, ultra-processed foods, including sodas and energy drinks, one-box meals, junk foods like chips, and fast food. The addition of high-fructose corn syrup is usually a hint that a food is ultra-processed. Eating these products has been linked to diabetes, cancer, cardiovascular disease, depression, and obesity. Given that nearly one-third of teenagers and almost half of adults are prediabetic or diabetic, ultra-processed foods have become a scapegoat for America’s health problems. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. called them a “poison” that’s “driving our chronic disease epidemic,” and California just became the first state to regulate them. But public health experts disagree on the dangers they pose, with some arguing the category is meaningless because it can describe everything from corn dogs to canned black beans. “A whole lot of things that you could never imagine can be done [to food],” said University of North Carolina nutritionist Barry Popkin. “You can’t tell simply by the ingredients.” 

How much of these foods do we eat? 

About 70% of the U.S. food supply qualifies as ultra-processed, and these items made up 55% of the food Americans ate from 2021 to 2023, according to a new Centers for Disease Control report. They’ve been omnipresent in grocery stores for decades, with high-fructose corn syrup consumption increasing a hundredfold from 1970 to 1993 (see box). But Americans are actually eating less of these foods than in previous years. The mean percentage of calories consumed by adults from ultra-processed foods dropped 3 percentage points from 2018 to 2023, sinking to 53%. For kids and teens, it dropped by almost 4 points, to 61.9%. While the bulk of most people’s calories still comes from ultra-processed foods, “statistically, the decline is significant,” said the CDC’s Anne Williams. 

Are they unhealthy?