Your grocery store is a bewildering sea of overly processed food. Here’s why and what to do

That’s something scientists can’t determine. In fact, none of us can, because how these foods are made is proprietary to each manufacturer, which closely guards recipes and “bliss point” algorithms from competitors and the public.

I tried to obtain access to a major food company’s production site on several occasions to understand how potato chips and other foods are made. Six months later, I gave up.

“Food companies today, they’ve closed off their processing plants,” Popkin said. “So we’ve never been able to have a clinical study studying what happens if you eat real corn versus deconstructed corn.”

But wait — I buy organic versions of the veggie straws, doesn’t that help? Unfortunately, no. Buying organic does reduce pesticide levels, but that’s not part of ultraprocessing. Turning even an organic vegetable into refined flakes and powders may destroy the plant’s food matrix — cell walls that hold nutrients — and like our Humpty Dumpty, that food must be put back together again.

Many experts have tried to simplify the chore of avoiding ultraprocessing by advising consumers to choose foods with no more than five ingredients or avoid foods with ingredients you can’t pronounce or can’t find at home.

Those are great suggestions if you have time to read labels. It’s also not a complete solution. Let’s look at my favorite potato chip, which only has three ingredients on the label: potatoes, salt and oil. Does that mean this potato chip is now good for me? Or is it still a junk food even though it isn’t ultraprocessed by the NOVA definition?

Those convenient, kid-friendly frozen chicken nuggets are easy to identify as ultraprocessed. And here’s a startling fact: Nuggets typically contain transglutaminase, which the industry calls “meat glue.” It’s an enzyme that helps combine parts of an animal or different animals into one product — hot dogs, sausages and deli meats are common examples. (Hint: If the food packaging reads “formed” or “reformed,” it likely contains transglutaminase.)

Transglutaminase isn’t easy to pronounce, and it’s not an ingredient you’ll have at home. Yet the FDA and US Department of Agriculture have no problem with it because it dissipates when cooked.

This next challenge is harder: Are most breads on grocery store shelves ultraprocessed by NOVA standards? Unless it’s freshly baked from scratch, the answer is “most likely,” although experts disagree.

From the NOVA perspective, if a bread lasts longer than a week or so without mold, it may have a synthetic preservative in it. Common additives in bread include calcium propionate, an artificial preservative linked to behavior problems in children; potassium sorbate, another synthetic preservative linked to skin and respiratory issues in people who are sensitive to it; and BHA (butylated hydroxyanisole) and BHT (butylated hydroxytoluene), two more artificial preservatives that may be linked to hormone and reproductive disruption and cancer.

But what if the bread is made with whole wheat or whole grains you can actually see and taste? It may still be ultraprocessed, but isn’t it better for you? That is still a fiercely debated question.

Now, here’s a tricky one: plant-based meat substitutes. Ultraprocessed to their core, many experts say these alt meats are still better for us than red and processed meats full of saturated fats or nitrates.

“The fat composition of beef is so undesirable for health that it’s very easy to be better than that,” leading nutrition researcher Dr. Walter Willett told me earlier this year.

“Animal products not only have too much saturated fat but lack polyunsaturated fat, fiber and many of the minerals and vitamins available in plants,” said Willett, professor of epidemiology and nutrition at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School in Boston.

Many of the alt-meat products have dramatically improved their nutritional profiles since they first hit the market. Recent studies analyzed by the Physicians Association for Nutrition, or PAN International, found plant-based meats were dramatically lower in saturated fat, a little lower in overall calories, equal in protein, dramatically higher in fiber (beef has no fiber), and a bit higher in salt and sugar than conventional meat.

There’s also the role of plant-based meat in saving the planet. According to the Good Food Institute, which promotes alternative proteins and coauthored the report, replacing a beef burger with a plant-based patty can reduce greenhouse gas emissions by up to 98% and land use by up to 97%.

I could go on and on, but here’s the bottom line: Deciding what is “ultraprocessed and bad for your health” and “ultraprocessed, but OK to eat” is really complicated — especially for a society unwilling or unable to give up inexpensive, convenient food.

A lot of huffing and puffing going on…

Fortunately, the world is taking action. In mid-May, the World Health Organization put out a global clarion call for scientists to help define and create guidelines for ultraprocessed food consumption. Once the panel is chosen, the work is expected to take two years.

A week later, the Trump Administration released its first “Make America Healthy Again” report, calling for action on ultraprocessed foods they say are a danger to our children’s health. An August 15 leaked version of the second report — which was supposed to announce specific policy actions — instead called for the government to “continue efforts to develop a U.S. government-wide definition.” The final report, released in September, provided no additional action.

“Unfortunately, the final MAHA report is all promises and has no teeth,” University of Carolina’s Popkin told me at the time. “In my opinion, it shows the food, agricultural, and pharmaceutical industries got to the White House and won the day.”

Andrew Nixon, deputy assistant secretary for media relations at the US Department of Health and Human Services, told me in an email the administration is confronting the UPF challenge, which is a “major driver of the nation’s chronic disease epidemic.”

“Replacing them with real, whole foods is one of the most effective ways to Make America Healthy Again,” Nixon said. “We remain committed to serving the American people, not special interests or outside critics, by delivering radical transparency and upholding gold-standard science.”

Other groups have stepped into the void. The American Heart Association, for example, divided ultraprocessed food into three categories — least healthy, moderately healthy and healthy.

Understandably, the AHA is most concerned with how foods impact the heart. High-fat red and processed meats fall within the “least healthy” category in the AHA report — as they should, considering their role in heart disease and colon cancer. However, red meat is also the least processed food in that category.

And yet, that’s the point: Regulating ultraprocessed foods by additives alone — without also addressing the health concerns of too much sugar, salt and saturated fat (hello, beef tallow!) — won’t improve the nation’s food supply and our deteriorating health.

In an effort to fix that, Monteiro is campaigning for researchers and government officials to add more ingredients to the NOVA definition often used in creating food policy.

“Our proposal now is to target any food with an excess of sodium, saturated fat or sugar, along with synthetic colors, flavors and non-nutritive sweeteners,” Monteiro told me when I reported on a recent three-part series in the journal The Lancet. He and Popkin coauthored the articles with 41 other internationally known scientists.

However, there is a missing element, according to Harvard’s Willett: “The huge blind spot of refined grains, which is the largest source of calories in the US and most countries at this time — this is not considered to be an UPF.”

The Lancet series blasted the food industry, claiming global corporations continued to aggressively market and extensively profit from new and existing UPF products despite increasing evidence of harm to public health.

“The food industry doesn’t want to lose their cash cow, so they’re willing to put millions into fighting government restrictions on ultraprocessed food as well as funding nutritionists who’ll say there’s no evidence of harm,” Popkin said.

The International Food & Beverage Alliance, founded in 2008 by leading food and nonalcoholic beverage companies, told me in an email when the Lancet series published that health authorities worldwide have rejected the concept of ultraprocessed food due to its lack of scientific consensus.

“The policy and advocacy recommendations of this series go far beyond the available evidence — proposing new regulatory action based on ‘processing’ or additive ‘markers’ and calling for the exclusion of industry from policymaking,” said IFBA Secretary-General Rocco Renaldi.

California made history in early October by enacting the first law in the United States to define and ultimately ban problematic ultraprocessed foods in public schools.

Not only does the California legislation define ultraprocessed food — not an easy task as you have seen — it requires public health officials and scientists to decide which UPFs are most harmful to human health. An “ultraprocessed food of concern” would then be phased out of the school food supply. That’s impressive, considering California is projected to serve over 1 billion meals to schoolchildren in the 2025–26 school year.

California has also led the way in laws banning food dyes, potassium bromate, a possible carcinogen once widely used in breads, brominated vegetable oil and propylparaben.

“Here in California, we are actually doing the work to protect our kids’ health, and we’ve been doing it since well before anyone had ever heard of the MAHA movement,” said Jesse Gabriel, the Democratic California Assemblymember who introduced several of the bills, in an October 9 press conference.

What’s so promising about the legislation is the scope of the effort. California lawmakers have considered many of the ways in which both junk and ultraprocessed foods may be harmful to human health — ingredients such as nonnutritive sweeteners; additives such as emulsifiers, stabilizers and thickeners; flavor enhancers; a host of food dyes and more.

American scientific research on the harms of UPF additives is in its infancy, but the new law has taken that into account. Additives banned, restricted or required to carry a warning by other local, state, federal or international jurisdictions will be in the analysis. That’s key, as the European Union and other countries have already regulated many additives still allowed in the US.

Food modified to contain high amounts of saturated fat, sodium and added sugar can also be rejected, according to the law. This will help target industry strategies that may contribute to an addiction to ultraprocessed foods — an increasing concern for American children raised on UPFs.

The downside? The law won’t provide final details on which UPFs are most concerning until June 2028, and it won’t have all UPFs out of school lunches until 2035. I’m hopeful there will be useful updates as the process rolls along.

While we wait for definitive action (don’t hold your breath), we still have to navigate the grocery store. Of course, the best way is to buy everything fresh and cook at home. But like you, I’m far too busy to do as much of that as I would like — plus my kids are grown and the pressure to set a good example is gone (although my new grandson may change that).

Instead, I stock up on frozen veggies — many are flash frozen and have the same nutrients as when first picked. Low-sodium canned beans and other legumes keep me from having to cook dry beans from scratch.

When I buy fresh produce, I try to buy organic if my budget allows. That’s especially true for crops in the 2025 “Dirty Dozen,” an annual list of foods with the most (and least) pesticides created by the Environmental Working Group, a health advocacy group.

I also do my best to avoid veggies and salad greens packaged in chemical-laden plastics (that’s a whole other problem I write about). I especially stay away from precut veggies (loss of nutrients) and foods sold in black plastic containers (read about those here.) That’s really hard because they are everywhere!

When it comes to ready-to-heat-and-eat meals, I look for whole chicken breasts, sliced beef and pork, chicken or steak kebabs, and stews with real chunks of meat. (Here’s a tip: If the package says the meat is cooked “sous vide,” I’ve found it’s more likely to be whole meat.)

As for the rest of the grocery store — the nearly 70% which is ultraprocessed — I do my best. I don’t know all the names of additives — much less which are harmful or beneficial — so that’s not very helpful to me. I could just as easily discard a food enriched with pantothenic acid (vitamin B5), pyridoxine (vitamin B6) or cobalamin (vitamin B12) as I could one with azodicarbonamide, a bleaching agent in bread banned in the EU due to cancer concerns.

Instead, I put on my detective hat, turn the product over, and read — starting with the nutrition label. Many people go straight to carbohydrates, but carbs are not necessarily the enemy — in whole foods they come naturally, along with fiber, vitamins and minerals. Foods which are overly processed, however, may need to increase levels of added sugars, salt and fat to make the food “hyperpalatable” and hard to resist.

A tablespoonful of ketchup, for example, can contain 4 grams (1 teaspoon) of added sugar, while spaghetti and pizza sauces are notoriously high in added sugar as well. If you search the shelves, however, there are low-salt, no sugar and no artificial sweetener options.

And this is important — the percentages on the nutrition label are only for one serving. Let’s take honey peanut butter, part of a typical PB&J lunch for my kids while they were growing up.

The label says one serving — two tablespoons of peanut butter — has 13 grams of sugar (2.5 teaspoons). So if I put 3 servings on the sandwich — that’s an incredible 39 grams or 7.3 teaspoons of sugar (not counting the jelly) in what many of us consider a healthy meal for a child.

(OK, you may know this, yes. But truthfully, how often do you stop and look at serving size? Yeah, me neither.)

I then move to the ingredients listed in the order of prevalence. I look for signs of overprocessing (powdered veggies, of course). Additives are always at the bottom, but other culprits rise to the occasion. If sugar is first, second or third on the list, I tend to consider the food a dessert. If ingredients at the top are healthy and sugar is toward the bottom of the list, I’m not overly concerned.

Here’s a great example: An extremely popular organic bread in grocery stores has 35 ingredients — the first 21 are whole grains and seeds. The loaf has no synthetic additives, but it does have 4 grams of added sugar per serving in the form of organic molasses. Would you consider that a junk food? An ultraprocessed food overly laden with sugar? Or is it healthy? You decide.

Yet you shouldn’t have to decide, experts say. You should be able to go to your grocery store and buy foods that are good for you without having to play detective.

“The rise of ultra-processed foods (UPFs) in human diets is being driven by the growing economic and political power of the UPF industry,” wrote the authors of the third Lancet paper. “Curbing corporate power in food systems begins with governance reform.”

Otherwise, they added, UPFs may well “replace all other food groups” in the not-so-distant future.

Yes, there will always be junk food, and yes, we will all succumb at times. But if the majority of our food was regulated to be as whole, fresh, and devoid of added sugar, salt, fat, additives and processing as possible, we would be a much healthier nation — and world.

I’m not holding my breath.