Ultra-Processed Foods

We should ideally center our diets around healthy, unprocessed plant foods, but in today’s world, most of what fills our grocery carts isn’t just processed, but ultra-processed, which is good for shelf life, but not necessarily our life.

What Are Ultra-Processed Foods?

Ultra-processed foods are industrial formulations that include food substances not used in culinary preparations, like added flavors, colors, artificial sweeteners, emulsifiers, and other additives used to imitate real foods. An example is a Frosted Grape Pop-Tart that has more grapes on the front of the box than inside it, with less grapes than salt, but may artificially taste like grapes and look like grapes because of one, two, three, four, five different food dyes.

They can’t be made at home because they’ve been physically or chemically transformed using industrial processes, typically contain little or no whole foods, are ready-to-eat or heat up, and are sugary, fatty, or salty, as well as lacking in fiber and other nutrients.

Ultra-Processed Foods to Avoid

Based on studies encompassing nearly ten million participants, greater exposure to ultra-processed food was associated with a higher risk of a variety of adverse health outcomes, including all-cause mortality––meaning living a significantly shorter life.

The most unhealthful ultra-processed foods include soft drinks, both regular and diet; meat, specifically burgers, fried chicken, fried fish, and meat pizza; salty snacks like corn chips and potato chips; and candy. When it comes to mortality specifically, the worst ultra-processed foods for us are meats, including poultry and seafood.

How Are Ultra-Processed Foods Bad for Our Health?

Given that many ultra-processed foods are high in sugar, salt, calories, fat, and artificial flavors, colorings, and more, it makes sense that higher consumption of these products is associated with increased risks of high blood pressure, cardiovascular events like heart attacks and strokes, obesity and weight gain, overall mortality, and even more dental cavities in kids. Ultra-processed food consumption has also been linked to higher risks of dementia; inflammatory bowel disease; irritable bowel syndrome; chronic kidney disease; dying from all causes put together; getting cancer; not sleeping well; suffering from anxiety, depression and other common mental disorders; wheezing; cardiovascular disease; Crohn’s disease; abdominal obesity; obesity in general; fatty liver disease; and type 2 diabetes.

What Is the Healthiest Ultra-Processed Food?

The only ultra-processed foods consistently linked to increased mortality are ultra-processed animal products such as burgers, chicken nuggets, and fish sticks. Therefore, plant-based meats (PBMs) could ironically offer a solution to the ultra-processed foods problem. Unlike other ultra-processed foods, PBMs score as healthier than the foods they are intended to substitute and similarly countervail other negative criteria typical of ultra-processed products. Compared with PBM, conventional meat has the worse nutrient profile, higher calorie density, and more missing phytonutrients, and results in less satiety and more weight gain, gut dysbiosis, and oxidative stress. Insulin resistance and inflammation outcomes are similar or superior to meat, depending on the PBM tested, and heat-induced toxins and harmful additives depend on the chemicals in question. Other advantages to PBM include lower cancer risk and enhanced food safety. The lowering of LDL cholesterol from the partial replacement of meat with PBM could alone potentially save thousands of lives a year in the United States and billions of healthcare dollars. Whole plant foods fare even better, but PBM appear to be the rare ultra-processed exception in that they are preferable to the foods they were designed to replace.

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