Nutrition researcher Kevin Hall is both a committed scientist and a realist. He knows: it’s pretty near-impossible for us to avoid ultra-processed foods entirely, given the food environment we live in.
Hall has studied diet and metabolism for years. He spearheaded some of the biggest and most influential studies upending long-held nutrition dogmas in his lab at the National Institutes of Health, until he stepped down last year.
Over the course of his 21-year career at the NIH, he made remarkable discoveries about the metabolisms of “The Biggest Loser” contestants, pitted low-fat against low-carb diets (spoiler alert: no clear winner there), and discovered that people really do eat more calories and gain more weight when they’re offered ultra-processed meals. That watershed news sparked the current craze for “whole” and “real” food and “clean” eating plans.
Still, Hall says you don’t need to be so rigid with your food rules to eat well. He maintains that not all ultra-processed foods are equally bad.
“There are plenty of ultra-processed foods that are available to folks that are still reasonable in terms of their nutritional profile,” Hall told Business Insider, when his new book, “Food Intelligence” was released in 2025.
“The example that I use a lot is marinara sauce that we buy,” he said. “It’s ultra-processed. It has additives to increase the shelf life.”
Ready-to-heat sauce makes it easier for Hall and his family to craft simple, quick, nutritious meals on busy school nights. The best part of the strategy, he says, is that it nudges his family into eating more vegetables.
Vegetables fill you up, without adding many calories
Hall’s most recent research on ultra-processed foods suggests mixing veggies into a dinner with other ultra-processed components is a great way to boost the nutrition and calorie profile. Ultra-processed foods tend to be very calorie-dense, whereas veggies are not.
“When you make a meal, even if it contains some ultra-processed products, and even if those ultra-processed products might not have very low numbers of calories per gram, by mixing in vegetables, it’s lowering the overall calorie density of the meal,” he said.
Hall’s latest nutrition study, completed in late 2025, suggests that people don’t necessarily have to gain weight when they’re eating ultra-processed diets, as long as their convenience foods are relatively nutritious and complemented by plenty of veggies. Vegetables are, famously, full of vitamins and minerals, but they’re also generally pretty low-calorie, and yet filling due to their high fiber content. (Some people call these “high-volume foods” and they’re great for weight loss.)
Hall mixes ultra-processed tomato sauce with veggies and whole grains for a quick meal that’s nutritious and delicious
Hall’s quick draw dinner solution has three main components:
1. The store-bought sauce
Hall refused to specify which brand is his personal favorite, but he said he makes sure whatever sauce he picks out is both low in added sugar and relatively low in sodium.
2. Some whole-grain pasta
Complex carbs are a great source of dietary fiber, helping you stay fuller for longer after a meal, in addition to other nutrition benefits from the vitamins and minerals packed inside.
3. The magic ingredient: grilled vegetables
The veggies can be fresh or frozen. Hall likes to grill his before he adds them to the pasta.
Hall simply incorporates the grilled veggies into the pasta, then pours the jarred marinara on top “so you don’t have to make it from scratch,” he said. “That marinara sauce is ultra-processed, but it’s made a much more tasty meal that now has lots of vegetables in it and the whole grain pasta. And so you’re using ultra-processed products to help make it easier for people to stick to the kinds of diets that nutrition scientists have recommended for a very long time.”
If an ultra-processed food allows you easier, more inexpensive access to a tasty meal that’s low in added sugar with more whole grains and vegetables than you would otherwise eat, Hall says that’s a definitive win.
“Just because something’s ultra-processed does not necessarily mean that you want to ban it or you want to get rid of that type of food,” he said.
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