“People have been told so many times now that processed foods are bad,” to the point that they can start to seem “evil,” said Angela Zivkovic, PhD, a professor in the University of California, Davis’ department of nutrition.
New research suggests it’s not that simple. Your overall diet quality seems to matter more than whether you eat processed foods, said Xiaowen Wang, PhD, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health who led the new study.
For the new research … Wang’s team drew on data from three studies that followed more than 200,000 U.S. adults for decades. …
The researchers analyzed the overall quality and processing level of participants’ diets. For comparison’s sake, they focused on plant-based foods rather than those that came from animals. Then, they sorted participants into four categories:
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- Healthy and ultra-processed (for example, lots of whole-grain cereals and plant-based dairy substitutes)
- Healthy and minimally processed (oatmeal, fresh fruits and vegetables, home-cooked meals)
- Unhealthy and ultra-processed (fast food, packaged snacks, sodas)
- Unhealthy and minimally processed (white rice, potatoes, homemade desserts)
Overall diet quality, they found, was a better predictor of health problems than processing level.
