The Real Reason Ultraprocessed Foods Are Ruining Our Health

Welcome to Impact Factor, your weekly dose of commentary on a new medical study. I’m Dr F. Perry Wilson from the Yale School of Medicine.

If you have any interest at all in nutrition and have been conscious over the past 5 years or so, you are no doubt aware of a torrent of literature blaming a lot of health woes on ultraprocessed foods. 

If I were to show you some foods, for the most part you’d have a pretty good sense of whether they were ultraprocessed or not. You know what? Let’s try it.

The classic Oscar Mayer wiener? Ultraprocessed. It contains multiple additives like sodium lactate, dextrose, and glucose, and “mechanically separated meat.”

How about a handful of almonds? 

Not ultraprocessed. In fact, on the standard NOVA processing scale— which goes from a score of 1 for unprocessed or minimally processed foods to 4 (ultraprocessed) — a nice handful of almonds is a 1. 

Doritos? Ultraprocessed. 

Tostitos? Only “processed.” Containing just corn, canola oil, and salt, Tostitos scores a 3 on the NOVA scale. A good example of a 2 on the NOVA scale is California Olive Ranch olive oil. You need to process olives to turn them into oil, but there’s not much more going on than that. 

This can be called the Potter Stewart method of classifying foods. You may know this story. Stewart, a Supreme Court Justice from 1958 to 1981, famously weighed in on a censorship case. The question was whether a particularly racy French movie could be banned because it was hardcore pornography. He admitted 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 ultraprocessed foods. In general, we have a sense of what they are, but you might be hard-pressed to come up with a universal definition. And you may be surprised. For example, most almond milks are technically ultraprocessed foods, whereas most regular milk isn’t. In other words, ultraprocessed doesn’t always mean less healthy. But for the most part, ultraprocessed foods are worse for you than their less-processed alternatives. Still, up until now, deciding what foods are ultraprocessed was, honestly, somewhat subjective. 

But there’s a new tool available that takes the guesswork out of this process. It will be crucial for researchers, but also for consumers trying to eat less-processed foods. That’s because in general, ultraprocessed foods are really bad for you, but maybe not entirely for the reason you think.