Almost three-quarters of packaged consumables sold in the United States are ultraprocessed. The vast majority of ultraprocessed packaged products for sale in the supermarket are placed in the center aisles. They comprise most of the menus at chain restaurants including, but not limited to, drive-through and “fast-food” establishments. At this point, they may safely be said to have edged out consumption of nourishing food in the United States. 

According to the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, one way to identify ultraprocessed items is to read labels. Canned beans, frozen vegetables, nut butters, cooked brown rice, and canned tuna, sardines, or salmon are not ultraprocessed. Regarding minimally processed products (e.g., olive oil, old-fashioned pickles, pure yogurt), although they may be produced in factories, they have also been consumed by human beings for millennia. They were invented long before the 20th century and usually contain nothing (e.g., flavor enhancers, artificial colors, foaming or bulking agents) that my great-grandparents would not have recognized as food. In recent years I have been pleased to see packaged olives, guacamole, unsweetened applesauce, and chickpeas in tomato sauce on the shelves. These are a far cry from the thousands of ultraprocessed items for sale at the average supermarket.

Plant-based foods like whole grains, fruits, vegetables, beans, nuts and seeds constitute the primary dietary source of all-important fiber and phytonutrients. Researchers have reported that a diet rich in vegetables (especially green leafy ones), beans, nuts, fruit, whole grains, eggs, fish or chicken (the latter of which would ideally be well nourished themselves), greatly reduced the risk of dementia in the population of individuals they were studying. At the grocery store, you will find most of these nourishing foods around the outer walls of grocery stores. Have you ever heard the recommendation to buy food around the edges of the store? It’s an effective, though inadvertent, way to limit the number of ultraprocessed items in your grocery cart.

With few, if any, phytonutrients, and little or no fiber, ultraprocessed items are an exceedingly poor source of nutrition. This is one of the reasons that you don’t feel full after you eat it: Your brain knows it wasn’t nourished yet, and it’s still hungry!

Fiber serves not only to enhance gut motility — by pressing outward on gut wall muscles as it passes through — but also as an important food source for normal gut bacteria. These bacteria break down fiber into short-chain fatty acids, which appear to nourish your brain. Individuals with depression and other brain illnesses have been shown to have fewer short chain fatty acids in their gut, and to harbor a less diverse community of bacteria overall. 

Non-food artificial sweeteners and emulsifiers (e.g., carboxymethylcellulose, polysorbate-80, aspartame, saccharin, and fructose) added during ultraprocessing are also thought to negatively affect the health of gut bacteria. Sugar has been linked with reduced bacterial diversity and chronic inflammation. 

Processed food, junk food, fast food. Any time you have to modify “food,” it probably isn’t. Any time you have to tell people when or how to use a product, like TV dinners, breakfast cereal, breakfast bars, breakfast sandwiches, coffee whiteners, salad dressing, or lunch meats, it probably isn’t food either. It may be convenient, but so is peanut butter.

One researcher was quoted as having said that we do not fully understand the role of food processing on mental health. I do not know that we ever will: waiting for definitive results feels to me like setting out a picnic on the train tracks.

On both individual and population levels, ultraprocessing raises healthcare costs associated with malnutrition, obesity, and all their associated diagnoses. Is it radical to suggest that a nourishing diet may offset the detrimental effects of ultraprocessing? While these issues are complex, it is only when we as a society commit to subsidizing apples, avocados, sweet potatoes, greens, and beans that all the members of our society will begin to benefit from improvements to our health, nutrition, and wellbeing.

This essay is a part two of a two-part column on ultraprocessed products, the first part of which appeared here last week. It also appeared in the Cleveland Jewish News (CJN) earlier this month.