Ultra Processed Foods: The Missing Narratives
What are the ideas that aren't getting enough attention in the renewed debate about ultra processed foods?
The general idea of “junk food” has been around in the cultural ether for a long time but it wasn’t until 2009 when Brazilian nutritionist Carlos Monteiro coined the phrase “ultra processed food,” did a renewed debate arise about the role that food processing has on the quality of food. Since then, more research has been conducted by Monteiro and many others, including a study published last week by the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health that suggests eating large amounts of ultra processed foods (UPFs) can lead to early death.
Big Food has been pushing back on research like this, which would devastate their businesses if fully codified across the scientific community and fully internalized by mainstream culture. Of course one of their biggest critiques of the UPF conversation is on whether UPFs are even a thing. In an opinion piece published by the Consumer Brands Association, the lobbying group for the CPG industry, the author refutes the UPF term outright and extols the virtues of food processing and its contribution to modern society and nutrition. The article makes a weak attempt to conflate simpler processing methods like freezing and pasteurizing with ultra processed foods, suggesting that if we vilify food processing in general, we are also vilifying things like frozen or pasteurized foods.
The article criticizes the fact that there is no universally agreed upon definition for what a UPF is, which is true, but that doesn’t mean there are no frameworks for how to define a UPF. Monteiro also created the Nova classification system, which attempts to categorize foods into four groups based on their level of processing. That system can be summarized like this:
The Nova Food Classification System
GROUP 1: Unprocessed or minimally processed foods. Whole foods like fresh produce, animal products, and fungi that can be processed minimally with methods like roasting, non-alcoholic fermentation, dehydrating, freezing, etc. An apple, some beef jerky, or plain yogurt are examples.
GROUP 2: Processed culinary ingredients. Refers to foods that come from group 1 that are processed industrially (e.g., not usually processed in a typical home kitchen) with methods like pressing, centrifuging, refining, etc. Olive oil, butter, and vinegar are examples.
GROUP 3: Processed foods. Relatively simple industrially made foods that use at least one item from group 2 (salt, sugar, fat, etc.) on a group 1 food and employ a preservation method like canning, bottling, or baking. Bread, cheese, and canned tuna are examples.
GROUP 4: Ultra processed foods. Industrially made foods composed of several ingredients such as sugar, fat, and salt in higher than usual proportions along with ingredients not commonly used in typical home kitchens such as high-fructose corn syrup and protein isolates. Group 1 foods are either absent or present as a very small proportion of the entire formulation. Carbonated soft drinks, hot dogs, and instant soup powders are examples.
But of course this is not a universally accepted way to define a UPF, because why would Big Food agree to this definition when so many of their cash cows fall squarely into the group 4 definition of an ultra processed food? There may never even be a universally agreed upon definition of a UPF simply because it’s in Big Food’s interest to never formally define it. You can’t regulate and warn consumers about ultra processed foods if they don’t technically exist. But finding widespread consensus across the industry on how to define a UPF is a foundational goal that needs to happen in order to have a productive dialogue about the issue. Otherwise Big Food may stall the process by dragging on a years long debate on semantics about what a UPF is.
The Dose Makes the Poison
The Nova classification system focuses on the spectrum of food processing but does not directly consider nutritional quality. For example, infant formula falls into the ultra processed food category, despite the fact that it can be highly nutritious to a child, especially if formula is the best available option. But the implication is that the more highly processed a food is, the easier it is to eat large quantities of it and more it can spike one’s blood sugar, as almost all UPFs lack things like fiber that moderate nutrient absorption. It’s as if industrial food machinery has pre-digested these foods so that their component sugars, fats, and carbohydrates can be rapidly mainlined into a person’s bloodstream.
For the things we ingest, the dose makes the poison. The total nutritional impact of a food is a function of its consumption frequency and quantity. For a person who primarily eats a healthy diet, eating a hot dog and a handful of Doritos with a Coke at a 4th of July barbecue is probably not going to negatively affect their health much, assuming they don’t do it that often.
But unfortunately, this kind of restrained indulgence has become more rare as calories from UPFs represent 57% of total calories consumed by Americans as of 2018, which is up from 53.5% in 2002. Research cited in 2023 places the proportion slightly higher at 58%. Again, the high levels of processing in UPFs make it easier for the body to ingest large amounts of calories in a convenient, ubiquitous form factor. When it comes to calorie absorption, eating whole, minimally processed foods is like slowly sipping a glass of wine throughout an evening, while eating ultra processed foods is like pounding shots at the bar—super easy to quickly over indulge.
It’s up for debate what the total nexus of drivers are that have contributed to the rise in UPF calories consumed. But Big Food has certainly helped this along by capturing or creating more eating “occasions” in a person’s daily diet. Because it’s not a sustainable business if people only eat Doritos and Coke on the 4th of July. The continued profit growth expectations from shareholders require Big Food to convince people to consume more of their stuff.
If your main product is ultra processed breakfast cereal, there’s a finite limit of how much of it you can sell for the “breakfast occasion” once you’ve maxed out your distribution footprint and won over as many customers as you can. So you suggest new occasions to eat breakfast cereal, like as a snack or for dinner, as the CEO of Kellogg cringingly suggested live on CNBC recently. Brand managers in the industry call these eating occasions “dayparts” and frequently devise marketing strategies to “capture more dayparts” or “create new dayparts,” which is exactly what the breakfast for dinner ploy was about.
The endless stream of headlines within food industry news over the past decade about the rise in snacking behavior has been music to the ears of CPG brand marketers. If consumers only ate three meals a day, that’s only three day parts a brand can compete for. But with snacking, there is no widely accepted cadence and suddenly there may be four, five, six, maybe even seven different “snacking occasions” that a brand could compete for. More occasions = more revenue. I’m not sure how much of the rise of snacking has been attributed to natural consumer behavior shifts versus Big Food using marketing to encourage snacking behavior, but I don’t know anyone working in CPG who’s upset about the shift toward more frequent eating throughout the day.
Food Processing Intentions Matter
The intention and context behind using ultra processed methods or ingredients matters when assessing how good or bad the food is for human health. Sophisticated food processing can be used nefariously to make junk food highly irresistible for children, but can also be critically important for preparing extended shelf life food rations for emergency situations. Like any tool, industrial food processing can be used in helpful and harmful ways.
For example, highly modified food starches like xanthan gum (derived from a bacteria found on vegetables) and carrageenan (derived from seaweed) are hydrocolloids that bind to water in food and are frequently used to thicken sauces or anything that has significant water content, which is almost all food. They are generally regarded as safe by the FDA, but still get a horrible rap in the public eye because many people simply can’t pronounce them.
However, they are typically used in incredibly low doses. A 0.1% dose of xanthan gum (meaning, 1000g of liquid requires just 1g of xanthan gum to thicken) can turn a watery sauce into something with the texture of honey that can coat the back of a spoon. You saw a lot of high-end modernist chefs start using these ingredients in their restaurant kitchens, like WD-50 and Alinea, back in the early 2000s, more or less to great effect. In some cases, a chef could even make a sauce “healthier” by thickening it with a minuscule amount of xanthan gum instead of using butter or flour.
But around that same time, when the Greek Yogurt boom began with trailblazers like Fage and Chobani, established Big Food yogurt brands were stumbling to catch up with the trend and took shortcuts using these industrial food starches to thicken their yogurt. The main difference between Greek and non-Greek style yogurt is that the Greek stuff is strained (or spun in a centrifuge) to remove the low nutrition liquid whey, leaving behind a much thicker and more nutritionally dense Greek yogurt. It could take up to 4 gallons of whole milk to make 1 gallon of Greek Yogurt after straining away the whey, which made for a more expensive final product. Competitors trying to keep costs down wouldn’t strain as much whey out (sometimes none at all) and add the food starches to thicken the base yogurt and pass it off as “Greek style” yogurt. It was a shortcut, plain and simple.
So while restaurant chefs and Big Yogurt were both using highly processed food starch to thicken things, the former was using it with a culinary intention on something consumed in low quantities like a sauce, while Big Food was using it to shortchange the consumer and make a more profitable Greek yogurt. These are not the same situation at all. The Nova model even states that an ultra processed food uses “processes and ingredients designed to create highly profitable, convenient, tasteful alternatives to all other Nova food groups and to freshly prepared dishes and meals.” The use of these UPF processing methods and ingredients is not for some sort of artistic, culinary statement, it’s to simply increase product margins.
The Ubiquity of Extruded Foods
One of the most popular category of ultra processed foods is extruded foods. Extrusion is a process by which a starchy ingredient, like potato or corn, is ground down and processed into a mush that’s forced through a machine called an extruder, which applies heat and pressure to the mush to turn it into a chip or puff. Cheap tortilla chips (that aren’t made from tortillas at all), puffed snacks like Cheetos or Veggie Straws, and cereals like Corn Puffs or Cheerios, are all examples of extruded snacks, which are considered UPFs according to the Nova system. These foods are highly shelf stable, can be easily flavored with a wide range of high potency synthetic seasonings, and are often very lightweight relative to their retail price, which makes them easy to distribute and gives brands great unit economics.
Veggie Straws are a UPF that stands out as a particularly onerous example of subtle subterfuge since the name and branding literally screams “veggies” on the front of the package, yet the product is merely an extruded potato stick (the same method used to make a Lay’s or Ruffles potato chip) coated in dehydrated spinach and tomato powder. The whole aura of the product is to give consumers a guilt-free feeling that they’re eating something with vegetables in it, but barely has any of the nutritive properties of vegetables at all. A bag of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos is processed in virtually the same way, but never tries to convince consumers that it’s health food. You almost have to respect the honesty of a Cheeto, not overplaying their hand and knowing what they are, versus trying to pretend like something they’re not like a Veggie Straw.
Things like Veggie Straws, Cheerios, Pirate’s Booty, and many other extruded snacks have been indispensable for parents to feed to their kids for decades. I’m a parent to a young toddler and am definitely guilty of feeding things like this to her as occasional snacks. They’re satisfying to munch on, easy to chew for young ones, and kind of dissolve in their mouths, which reduces the risk of choking hazard. But it’s gotten to the point in society where 67% of the total calories consumed by kids and teens aged 2-19 come from ultra processed foods like these.
And extruded snacks are just a tiny piece of the UPF pie being marketed at youth, from rapper Travis Scott hawking McDonald’s, to Dunkin’ Donuts partnering with Ice Spice, to SpongeBob Squarepants fruit snacks. It’s one thing if a well-informed adult willingly chooses to eat UPFs, aware of its nutritional quality, and takes accountability for whatever health effect it might have on them. But it’s borderline criminal to try and embed the idea of junk food into a young person’s psyche before they’ve had a chance to form their own understanding of their bodies and general nutrition science. UPFs are great at appealing directly to our most raw, visceral food desires that can override our more logical, executive functions. It’s hard enough for fully formed adults to constantly fight this battle between what the head and the stomach wants. But for a growing child who hasn’t developed their sense of self-control yet, the siren call of these hedonistic foods can be overwhelming.
Carrots or Sticks?
So what do we do about [gestures widely] all of this? The debate about UPFs has been humming along in Washington DC, with the federal government agreeing to examine the link between obesity and ultra processed foods for the first time. If they agree that UPFs are a contributor to obesity, it could have widespread effects on things like public school lunch programs, which are currently allowed to serve students UPFs like Cheez-Its and Lunchables.
Unsurprisingly, the food industry is pushing back with lobbying and making statements like this:
“Efforts to restrict access based on the willful misunderstanding of and misapplied generalizations about processing stands to tell consumers we don’t trust their judgement, value their time or recognize that they’ve been reaching for these products because they know what they are, and they mean something to them. Let’s let consumers decide how they want to fill their cabinets and what they want in life’s big moments.”
-David Chavern, president and CEO of the Consumer Brands Association (Source)
It’s the classic argument of “let the consumer decide” and keep government out of their lives. It’s a logical position for the consumer packaged goods industry to take, as they know better than anyone else that mainstream consumers rarely make food decisions logically. Big Food understands how to tug at eaters’ emotions in a multitude of ways, from decades of tear jerking or laugh riot inducing commercials to precisely seasoned snacks that are designed for maximum craveability and repeat purchase for “life’s big moments.” Tony the Tiger and Toucan Sam were never meant to be logical voices of reason, because they know that’s not how their customers make food choices. And Big Food knows that as long as the government stands aside and lets the consumer decide, they know exactly how to push the right emotional buttons to win their loyalty.
While I do think the effect of UPFs on obesity should be taken into account into federal nutrition guidelines that influence school food programs, I do not think government regulation alone can solve the problem in an enduring way. Even if they outright banned all processed food in schools today, it would not eliminate the cultural craving for these foods and kids would just double down on their snacking once school lets out. If there’s anything kids of all generations have historically proved they can do, it’s figuring out how to get the thing that their parents and teachers prohibit them from having.
The movement toward healthier eating can’t just fixate on suppressing unhealthy eating, it needs to focus much more on enhancing the appeal of healthy foods in a more sophisticated, modern way. Flavor and culture made UPFs irresistibly alluring to eaters over many decades and for unprocessed or minimally processed foods to take their throne, it has to be through flavor and culture too. Chefs, food scientists, farmers, and plant breeders need to work together to break the glass ceiling of flavor that has been built by monocultured crops bred for yield and consistency, not flavor.
I honestly don’t blame anyone for choosing a bag of chips over a bag of baby carrots, because baby carrots in America taste like shit, but it doesn’t have to be that way. The apple industry worked hard to create the unprecedentedly delicious Honeycrisp apple, which is a playbook that the rest of the fruit and vegetable industry should adopt for its products. Imagine if the average supermarket carrot was three times more juicy, sweet, and flavorful than they are today and what that could do for the healthy eating movement. If you fix the flavor, then your marketing job gets easier. Whole fruits and vegetables are going against products that were formulated in a lab to precisely hit the bliss points for all eaters. The produce industry has been bringing a toothpick to a gunfight when it comes to competing with big CPG companies on flavor. We can’t expect people to suddenly eat more fruits and vegetables if produce growers aren’t working just as hard as the Dorito and Cheeto people to make an irresistible product.
Culturally, the deck is stacked against makers of unprocessed or minimally processed foods foods, but it also doesn’t have to be that way. Big Food has the advantage of a perfectly consistent, standardized product, with widespread distribution that justifies large marketing and advertising budgets. These war chests can fuel campaigns that precisely target the intended consumer wherever their attention may be. Big Food’s marketing has been so successful that it’s become a part of the cultural fabric, as anyone who remembers the Coca-Cola Polar Bears from their youth or can’t get the “Beeeeee Kaayyyy Have It Your Way” jingle out of their head after watching any amount of NFL football on television.
The “Got Milk?” campaign of the early 1990s is one notable example of how a minimally processed food got their act together to make a cultural imprint. While it didn’t boost milk sales nationwide, outside of California, it became culturally ubiquitous in the United States, which at least proves that you can win mainstream cultural relevance with a simple, minimally processed food product (”Beef: It’s What’s For Dinner” and “Pork: The Other White Meat” are other notable examples).
Growers of minimally processed foods need to pool their resources to create modern versions of the “Got Milk?” campaign in ways that make the most sense for today’s cultural environment. I don’t know what that might look like, but I know it’ll probably look a lot different than the Got Milk? ads of yesteryear. But many of the world’s most creative advertisers and effective storytellers are toiling away right now on one ultra processed food brand or another and its only a matter of money to focus their talents on products that are far healthier for consumers. If Big Carrot or Big Cabbage wants to win eating occasions from consumers, they’re going to need to find a way to compete with SpongeBob, Ice Spice, and Travis Scott for attention.
And healthy food makers need to find more ways to make themselves relevant to every spectrum of the socioeconomic ladder. It is not a victory for healthy eating if the only ones who can participate in it are upper middle class and wealthy white people who shop at Erewhon for $20 vanity smoothies. Those people aren’t the ones buying the bags of ultra processed snacks in droves anyway. Good eating needs to be culturally relevant but also accessible to all.
All the regulatory guidelines and scientific research won’t matter if a cultural push toward healthy eating is not successful. People don’t eat statistics, they eat food. And the people making the processed food that’s providing 67% of the calories to our children are winning over stomachs with irresistible flavor and cultural relevance. If having the statistics on how eating UPFs are bad for you were enough, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. Don’t abandon the science, but for the sake of the public’s health, the healthy food movement needs to lean harder into winning people’s hearts, not just their minds.
Mise: On the Future of Food
Ultra processed foods is one of the five core topics discussed in Mise: On the Future of Food. In the book, I show how society’s relationship with UPFs and healthy food may shape the future of our food system in four scenarios.
To dive deeper and wider on the topic of UPFs, as well as many other topics like AI in food, regenerative agriculture, and green energy, grab your copy of Mise now at mise.market.
