The way we eat desperately needs to change. Experts estimate diet is a bigger contributor globally to early death than smoking. In America, nearly half the adult population has Type 2 diabetes or pre-diabetes.
If you have been following recent headlines, it may seem like there’s a single culprit: ultraprocessed foods. These industrially produced foods with weird, hard-to-pronounce ingredients that you can’t find in your kitchen have been linked to Type 2 diabetes, depression, heart attacks and Alzheimer’s disease. They are “driving the obesity epidemic,” according to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., president-elect Donald Trump’s pick for health and human services secretary.
It may come as a surprise, then, that an expert committee of scientists advising on the federal government’s dietary guidelines (the set of recommendations, released every five years, that shapes nutrition education and school lunches, among other things) recently declined to take a strong position against ultraprocessed foods. The experts felt that there wasn’t enough reliable science to draw accurate conclusions.
They were right about that. The problem is that the category of ultraprocessed foods, which makes up about 60 percent of the American diet by some estimates, is so broad that it borders on useless. It lumps store-bought whole-grain bread and hummus in with cookies, potato chips and soda. While many ultraprocessed foods are associated with poor health, others, like breakfast cereals and yogurt, aren’t.
Opinion | Is Ultraprocessing Really the Best Way to Think About Nutrition?
