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.
I have many years of experience as a health reporter, and I understand the importance of healthy eating. I’m 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’ consumption of ultra-processed foods, including “anything in a crinkly bag”—that is, everything my son ate that day. Removing ultra-processed foods from Americans’ 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 “driving the obesity epidemic.” On the podcast from Levels, the glucose-monitoring company co-founded by President Donald Trump’s 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’ve prepared for their toddlers. (Suspiciously missing are images of the toddlers actually eating this food.)
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’s 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—and unrealistic.
It’s true that ultra-processed foods—which tend to be defined by the fact that they contain artificial ingredients and require several industrial steps to create—are, 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—even 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 “hyperpalatable,” or extremely tasty, due to their combinations of sugar, fat, and salt.
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 “matured under the chill of death, blended with vegetable oils and flavored by chemical tricks.” But the term ultra-processed foods was conceived in 2009 by the Brazilian researcher Carlos Monteiro, who had noticed changes in Brazilians’ 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. Monteiro believed it was not sugar and fat per se that were contributing to obesity, but those components’ being processed and recombined into ready-to-eat snacks. In the years after Monteiro’s 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.
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 “ultra-processed” category, which makes up about 60 percent of the American diet, has become too broad and difficult for many families to understand. “It’s insanity to me that bran flakes is in the same category as sweets,” Nicola Guess, a dietitian and researcher at the University of Oxford, told me. (Guess has consulted for companies that make plant-based meat alternatives—which 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 “a nutritionally rich protein central to many Asian cuisines for generations.” He concluded, “The evidence suggests that not all UPFs are inherently ‘bad.’”
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 “every bad outcome you can imagine,” 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 lost weight—just 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’t necessarily negate the vegetables’ health benefits. In a 2023 study, researchers described how it was possible to prepare a day’s 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.)
More of kids’ than adults’ daily calories come from ultra-processed foods—a fact that, if you’re 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 into the kid before bedtime, so you reach for frozen chicken nuggets. You know what it’s 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 “don’t yike it.” (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’s.
Unprocessed foods typically require more effort than ultra-processed foods to make palatable, and more money to buy—which many overstretched, budget-strapped parents can’t spend. When cooking an entirely unprocessed meal, “You have to be like, What am I going to cook? What am I shopping for?” 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’t go bad. “It’s a lot of planning and cognitive functioning and mental energy, which is not time- or cost-neutral.” Then, of course, there’s the actual cooking: “For a lot of people,” Wolfson said, “you’ve got kids running around, you’ve got stuff going on, you’re multitasking.” And don’t 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.
Reams of studies have also found that healthy diets are more expensive than unhealthy ones—sometimes as much as doubly so. “My 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,” 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’t 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 has a cost, and many people would rather pay a company to chop or cook their foods for them.
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—whose Instagram bio reads “Real food. Better health.”—made her own sourdough pizza, ranch dressing, and honey-sweetened cake for her 4-year-old’s birthday, with no mention of who was watching said 4-year-old during this culinary marathon. Ballerina Farm’s 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 “not how the vast majority of people live or even want to live,” Guess, the Oxford researcher, said.
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 “already know is crap,” 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 “instead” is a minimally processed double bacon cheeseburger, just get the ultra-processed dressing and put it on a fresh salad. Your kids still won’t touch it, but at least it’ll make healthy eating a little easier for you.
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