The True Cause of Your Health Problems with Highly Processed Foods

If you are interested in nutrition and have been conscious for the past five years or more, you are probably aware of the abundance of information that attributes numerous health issues to highly processed foods.

If I were to show you some foods, for the most part you’d have a fairly decent notion of whether they were ultra-processed or not. You know what? Let’s try it.

The traditional Oscar Meyer Wiener? Yup. Ultra-processed. It includes numerous additives, such as sodium lactate, additional dextrose and glucose, and “mechanically separated meat.”.

How about a handful of almonds?

Right again! Not ultra-processed. In reality, on the conventional “NOVA” processing scale, which runs from a score of 1 for unprocessed or little-processed foods to 4 (ultra-processed), a lovely handful of almonds is a 1. Good work.

Doritos? Ultra-processed.

Tostitos? Only "processed.”.

Containing simply maize, canola oil, and salt—this earns a 3 on the NOVA scale. A nice example of a 2 on the NOVA scale is California Olive Ranch Olive Oil—which, okay, you need to process olives to make them into oil, but there’s not much more going on than that.

This is all kind of the Potter Stewart approach of categorizing foods. You may recognize this tale. Stewart, a Supreme Court Justice from 1958 until 1981, notoriously weighed in on a censorship dispute. The issue was whether a particularly raunchy French movie could be prohibited because it constituted extreme pornography.

He recognized that it was hard to come up with a legal definition of hardcore pornography, but “I know it when I see it.". And so it is with ultra-processed meals. In general, we have a notion of what they are—although you may be hard-pressed to come up with a uniform description. And you may be surprised. For example, most almond milks are technically ultra-processed foods, whereas most ordinary milk isn’t. In other words, ultra-processed doesn’t automatically equal less healthful. But for the most part, ultra-processed meals are worse for you than their non-ultra-processed equivalents. Still, up until recently, judging whether foods are ultra-processed was, honestly, fairly subjective.

But there’s a new tool available that takes the guessing out of this procedure. It will be vital for academics, but also for consumers striving to eat fewer processed foods.

Because in general, ultra-processed meals are actually terrible for you. But maybe not quite for the reason you assume.

Let me show you how the conventional NOVA system identifies an ultra-processed food:

Yikes. Sounds more like creating an automobile than anything you’d want to eat.

Lots of food items don’t fall neatly into the category, however. To fix this, enter Giulia Menichetti and colleagues from Harvard writing in Nature Food, who, what else, developed a machine-learning model that can ingest any ingredient list—like the kind that appears on virtually every packaged item you buy in the grocery store—and spit out a score—they call it "FPro,” for food processing score, that tells you exactly how processed this specific food is.

They constructed the algorithm by training it on a database of meals that had been rigorously sorted into the four NOVA categories by humans. But the beautiful thing about machine learning models is that you can apply them to data they haven’t seen before. And that’s precisely what they did. Let me give you an example.

The grade runs from 0 (raw foods, practically) to 1—the most processed product conceivable. Yes, I did delve into their real database to discover what precise food items bookended the study. At a score of 0—organic ground beef, and all the way at 0.999056—a tie between Wonder White Hamburger Buns and Ball Park Everything Hamburger Buns. So I assume you go bunless on your next burger.

Less severe examples—two cheesecakes.

On the left we have Edwards Desserts Original Whipped Cheesecake and on the right Pearl River tiny no-sugar-added cheesecake. Potter Stewart doesn’t assist me as much here, albeit the large ingredient list on the left is a bit of a warning sign. They both struck me as presumably very processed. But the algorithm offers us a number—an actual score. The Edwards desserts—43 ingredients, including 26 additives—hit 0.953, while the Pearl River (14 ingredients, 5 additives) earns 0.720. The authors say releasing ratings like these will help customers make better decisions. There’s a minor issue with that argument, though—stay tuned.

We’re not here to call out particular food products. The fundamental premise of this new model is that it can function on any single item you purchase for. And it can be mechanized.

The authors utilized that automation to score every single food item offered at Whole Foods, Target, and Walmart.

Let’s look at the distribution of scores for these three supermarket chains. Overall, you find that there appear to be more goods at the upper end of the processing scale; however, Whole Foods seems to have a bit of a flatter curve. Interestingly, Target has more of its goods at the very high end of the ultra-processed scale than Wal-Mart, which would not have been my guess a priori.

These boxes show you the range of processing scores within a specific category. There’s a lot of diversity out there. Like, sure—it's hard to find cookies and biscuits that aren’t really ultra-processed, but if you search, you can get comparatively less processed spreads, coffee beverages, and yogurts.

Does all this processing come at a cost? Not to your bank account. The researchers discovered that, by and large, the more processed a meal was, the cheaper it was per calorie. That Edwards whipped cheesecake? $1.87 per serving—260 calories, or 1.4 calories per %. The Pearl River cheesecake? $4 per serving—260 calories, or 0.65 calories per %.

If you’re looking to stretch your food budget, the more processed item is better. You’ll pay in other ways, of course.

I couldn’t help it. I examined their database for the meal with the lowest cost per calorie. The winner? Betty Crocker Super-Moist German Chocolate Cake Mix. 15 cents a serving, 160 calories, or around 11 calories per cent. Impressive.

This “more processed foods are cheaper” contradiction was evident across almost all food categories. I assume this happens because, although processing needs money (machines, people, raw materials, etc.), it is done on an industrial scale, bringing individual prices down.

Now, there is no one element that makes a meal ultra-processed. It’s the sum of what goes into manufacturing a food product. But since each of the 50,000+ items in their database now had a score, the researchers could establish which single elements featured more in diets with high overall ratings. I have nicknamed these “red flag” ingredients—they may not even be all that processed individually, but they are signals that the meal has been excessively processed. If you’re reading a food label, these are usually the ones you want to look out for.

This graphic depicts the narrative focused on additional oils.

Palm and maize oil are excellent identifiers that a product is heavily processed; flaxseed and peanut oil are not so much. Once again, I looked at their raw data to see what components were at the tippy top of the red flag list, narrowing my search to ingredients that were observed across at least 10 goods. That left:

Oat mix, crust grain oat, “palm kernel oil with TBHQ for freshness," spice oil (which I can only imagine originates from Arrakis), and sorbic acid.

At the outset of this, I told you you’re correct to worry about ultra-processed meals, but you could be worried for the wrong reason. When you glance at these ingredient lists and read words like “sorbitan monostearate” or “palm kernel oil with TBHQ for freshness," you may be scared that these chemicals are somehow dangerous. And certainly, if you google enough, you may find some research in rats that indicates that this color or that preservative causes cancer or whatever. But honestly, this is not how ultra-processed meals are killing us.

It’s simpler than that.

The reason ultra-processed meals are so harmful for us is because they are easy to devour. These additives? They incorporate chemicals to keep the food fresh longer—so it remains soft if it’s intended to be soft, crunchy if it’s supposed to be crunchy. They add salts, spices, and oils that are delectable. Grains that have been stripped of fiber so that they are simpler to chew and have a better texture. These are all made by extremely knowledgeable scientists to be incredibly tasty and simple to consume.

A landmark 2019 research study recruited 20 participants and had them stay at the NIH for a month. For two weeks they had a regular diet, and for two weeks, a diet heavy in ultra-processed foods. They could eat as much or as little as they chose, and the meals they were served with were matched by macronutrients, energy density, calories, etc. The typical participant ate 500 more calories per day when randomized to the ultra-processed diet.

These foods kill us, very simply, because we can’t help but consume more of them.

There is even a phrase they use for this in the biz—cravability. That’s what they are striving for—it essentially says, “We want this to be as close to addictive as possible.”.

And it works. Look, I adore blueberries, but I don’t really have a difficulty stopping eating them once I’ve had some. Have you ever attempted to quit eating Doritos, though? It’s challenging.

That’s where I diverge with the authors here, who claim that we may utilize FPro scores to pick the better alternatives for us within a food category—the less processed cheesecake versus the more processed cheesecake. The difficulty with that approach is that the healthier one, the one with the lower score, may not taste as nice.

And we need to be cool with it. This is really how we stop the cycle of ultra-processed meals. We have to learn to love food that doesn’t slap us directly in the taste buds the instant it gets in our lips, that doesn’t deliver a dopamine spike simply from the fragrance alone. We have to learn to enjoy genuine food again.

I believe this is going to start with our kids—which is why I despise how much ultra-processed food is geared towards youngsters. They learn what tastes “good” at an early age, and such habits may be exceedingly hard to overcome. But maybe a little feedback from those FPro ratings will move us towards food that tastes more like food and less like bottled rainbows. And maybe, just maybe, we can start to learn to be glad about it.

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