It’s understandable if you’re tempted to throw out your protein bars and pouches of baby food and commit to a life of toting Tupperwares filled with quinoa and carrot sticks. But are ultraprocessed foods really that bad? Or is this just the latest nutritional panic?
This question gets to the forefront of research efforts to understand how processing food might make it unhealthy. It’s not as simple as a rogue ingredient wreaking havoc on the body. Though laboratory studies in animals and petri dishes do suggest that some food additives (or contaminants from processing or packaging) could potentially contribute to chronic diseases in humans, these substances likely represent only a small piece of the puzzle.
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For one, the people who eat ultraprocessed foods may be systematically different from people who have more time and money to cook and prepare whole foods (or pay someone else to prepare them). Another issue is that as a nation tends to eat more industrialized foods, they tend to change in other ways—such as adopting more sedentary lifestyles.
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In other words, despite loads of research, it’s still unclear whether the processing itself is bad, or whether ultraprocessed foods just tend to be Trojan horses for poor nutrition.
