Shopping for yogurt, bread and granola bars might feel like a healthy decision. The dairy seems like a calcium-boosting choice for kids, the whole-grain bread looks better than the white bread, and granola bars appear so much better for you than chips or gummy bears – and in many ways, they are.
But a growing number of grocery-store foods – even ones that appear healthy – are what scientists today call “ultra-processed”: fruit-flavored yogurts packed full of sugars, flavorings and thickeners like guar and carob bean gum; or packaged bread, with ingredients like soy lecithin and monoglycerides slipped in alongside the flour and water.
These industrially formulated products, which are often high in fats, starches, sugars and additives, make up 73% of the US food supply today. Yet research is increasingly tying ultra-processed foods to a myriad of health concerns, like diabetes, obesity, cancer and depression. Despite those risks, the average American gets more than 60% of their daily calories from ultra-processed foods – more than in any other country in the world.
A new way of thinking about nutrition
The phrase “ultra-processed foods” made its first appearance in 2009 when the Brazilian nutritionist Carlos Augusto Monteiro published a paper that made a bold argument: “The issue is not food, nor nutrients, so much as processing.”
Most food is processed in some way, whether that’s an apple that’s been waxed to shine brighter at the grocery store or milk that’s been pasteurized for safety. Processing in and of itself isn’t bad – in fact, vitamin enrichment and preserving techniques (like canning and fermenting) made the food supply safer and rid much of the world of hunger by ensuring that shelf-stable, nutritious foods are available year-round.
But while some food is “minimally processed” (like shelled nuts or washed vegetables) and other food is simply “processed” (think tinned fish, frozen vegetables or cheese), Monteiro identified another type of processing that emerged in the 1980s and 90s – ultra processed foods (like many breakfast cereals, packaged snacks and sugary beverages) – which, he wrote, are industrially formulated to be “edible, palatable and habit-forming”.
For years, nutritionists had focused on the nutrients in food – potassium and fiber were good, while sugar, salt and saturated fat could be concerning in high amounts. But in the early 2000s, Monteiro and his colleagues at the University of São Paulo noticed that rates of diet-related diseases (like obesity and type 2 diabetes) were rising, even though Brazilians were buying less sugar.
They posited that while eating large amounts of sugar wasn’t necessarily good for consumers, there was more to it than that. While fruit, like mangoes and bananas, are high in sugar, no one eats a dozen of them in one sitting. But something about ultra-processed foods, like candy bars and packaged cookies, made it difficult to eat just one. Scientists would later wonder whether that had to do with the “food matrix”, or chemical and molecular structure of food: the sugars in whole foods like fruit are packaged alongside dietary fiber and vitamins that make them recognizable and more satisfying to our bodies.
