Headline is massively misleading.
The actual study cited by the article, measures this as 71% of food products offered for sale in the US, by count of unique items, are ultraprocessed.
Not that 71% of food products sold by weight or volume or dollar amount are ultraprocessed.
This is just observing that if you list all food products for sale in the US, "pear" appears on that list once but "Store Brand salty corn chips" appears 25 times.
Fair point. Here is some data on the fraction of caloric intake:
* During August 2021–August 2023, the mean percentage of total calories consumed from ultra-processed foods among those age 1 year and older was 55.0%.
* Youth ages 1–18 years consumed a higher percentage of calories from ultra-processed foods (61.9%) than adults age 19 and older (53.0%).
Source: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db536.htm
The study is from 2023 and notes that there had been a decrease during the preceding decade.
This article equates ultraprocessed foods and hyperpalatable foods (foods designed to make people want to eat them more). While many hyperpalatable foods are classified as ultraprocessed, simply being hyperpalatable does not mean it's ultraprocessed.
Worth noting that the Nova food classificationvsysten (which this article references) completely disregards the actual nutritional content of foods.
For a good primer on a lot of the misconceptions around UPFs, check out [0].
[0] https://www.harvardmagazine.com/research/harvard-ultraproces...
Food is ultraprocessed to make it cheaper, more palatable, or both. So while the definitions are orthogonal the goals align.
I agree that many hyperpalatable foods are ultraprocessed so that they can be made more cheaply, but I don't think that's reason enough to say that the, uh, process of processing foods is entirely aligned with the concept of hyperpalatability.
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It also be processed to remove ingredients that can be sold at a higher price when used in another way.
Just don't buy those foods. Buy fresh vegetables, tofu, and meat from the edges of the grocery store. Simple. Done.
Go to your grocery store and see if they have half and half or whipping cream with just milk and cream as ingredients. At lot of grocery stores I've been to don't have any cream it's a recipe with cream guar gum and a few other ingredients. They shouldn't be able to call that recipe the same name "cream". My point is even trying to just buy these ingredients is itself complicated
This isn’t hard at all. Didn’t take me three minutes. It’s even a major brand available at a variety of US supermarkets. It’s not niche or “organic”.
https://giantfood.com/product/land-o-lakes-half-half-cream-1...
I don’t buy half and half cream very often. I did not know that for a basic product they were selling items that aren’t just milk and cream. Ignorance on my part? Sure, but there is over a hundred different things I buy. It would be doing a audit everytime I go shopping.
>> doing a audit everytime I go shopping
Well, yes. You should be thinking about what you purchase and what goes into your body.
Once a product is vetted, you should be able to keep buying it with only periodic refresher checks at the ingredients.
Even if it says milk the quality still depends on what they fed the cow that produced the milk. How much Palm oil was in the cows diet and what effect does that have on the milk. Even things like was the milk taken from an infected/inflamed utter?
You go shopping thousands of times in your life.
Spend 10 seconds reading a label.
Holy crap people are lazy and entitled. You want your hand held and all the conveniences in the world so you don't have to read a label or buy a vegetable.
Yeah, the label says half milk half cream.
Tofu is heavily processed, try again.
Tofu is processed, just like butter, cheese, flour, sugar. Even milk is in a similar category if it's been pasteurized and homogenized.
This is markedly different category to ultraprocessed though.
A good proxy is looking at the number of ingredients. The fewer, the better.
Tofu is considered processed food, not ultra processed
Simple in theory, snobby in practice.
Making food from scratch is a time luxury. It often benefits from good/expensive kitchen equipment unless you want to spend even more time and labor.
Let’s take bread as an example. I can buy it from the store for a dollar or two pre-sliced with preservatives and processing, or I can make it myself, which doesn’t really save any money.
The fresh kind from the grocery store bakery with no preservatives costs more and goes bad faster.
I work two part time hourly jobs and my only way to keep up on bills is to pull extra hours.
When am I getting extra time to bake bread?
How am I getting extra money to buy a $300 stand mixer to make baking bread less painful?
Who is educating me to do all this when the industry has lobbied to keep ingredient disclosures confined to tiny fine print with no industry requirement to prominently display negative health aspects? It’s not like my grade school taught me this because I grew up in the wrong zip code.
For example, the sugar cereal has fun characters and colors at eye level of children and it has a bunch of advertising copy on it that makes nearly-false claims of its health benefits. But you’re saying “just don’t buy those foods” when trusted institutions are telling us the opposite.
We can also talk organic reduced pesticide vegetables, which cost more. Want to buy eggs from chickens that weren’t abused? Costs twice as much. Milk from cows that are farmed responsibly? Costs twice as much.
An automatic breadmaker costs less than $50 and makes perfect bread every time for 30c of flour and electricity. It takes 5 minutes to set up and you just wake up to fresh bread. That's less time than you'd waste going to the grocery store every day.
I take your point about everything else, but bread is the wrong example.
I work two part time low wage hourly jobs, where am I getting $50 for a bread maker?
Plus the Great Value white bread is 99 cents, and the packaging tells me it’s healthy.
Why am I motivated to spend my scarce money on making my own bread?
> where am I getting $50 for a bread maker
Save up? Buy it from a thrift shop? Whatever it is, it's cheaper than your previous assertion that breadbaking is impossible without a $300 stand mixer.
> Why am I motivated to spend my scarce money on making my own bread?
To save money and eat better.
Again I take your point. Being poor is mentally taxing and is the result of many things having gone wrong in one's past. Often things out of one's control. All I'm saying is bread is the wrong example to illustrate that point. Try literally any other food.
Just save up, bro. lol
I literally witnessed someone just a couple days ago try to pay for some food at my corner store with EBT, was told by the cashier it wasn’t accepted, so she emptied her basket of all the stuff she wanted and bought a single food item.
Except the item was $6 and change, and she only had 5 single dollars in her wallet. So the cashier out of sympathy just took the $5 and let her have it.
The fuck your mean, save up?
If you think bread is the wrong example then I’ll just point to the obvious high cost of fresh fruit and vegetables. An entire pound of strawberries has less than 200 calories. If you are counting pennies and dollars these kinds of healthy foods make zero logical sense to buy.
> The fuck your mean, save up?
Advice that doesn't work for everyone isn't automatically useless.
What else can a person in that situation do? I'm not asking what we as a society can do for them (plenty). I'm asking what they can do themselves, if they want to do something (and many don't, because poverty is exhausting, like I already acknowledged).
Poverty has solutions on an individual level and on a societal level. I won't judge anyone who can't or won't implement the individual choices to themselves get out of poverty because I don't know them or their situation. Even as a massively privileged person I struggle to make good personal lifestyle choices. Everyone's doing the best they can at that moment.
But equally, ignoring the existence of those choices is unhelpful.
> I’ll just point to the obvious high cost of fresh fruit and vegetables
I completely agree. It's a travesty. We should subsidize more vegetables and less corn and soybeans.
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White bread can't be made healthy. It's white bread! Try wheat bread
Can make flatbread in any crappy oven. You should be able to get a used dirty one for next to nothing. Don't even have to clean it, just let it burn empty for 45 minutes. 75C (167F) should be enough but on the highest settings it doesn't take as long.
Baking bread in a pan/pot on the stove is also doable. Research the recipes a bit.
Also, there is nothing wrong with pancakes.
In countries with a richer lower quartile (basically the Nordics) most people eat this way.
>It’s not like my grade school taught me this because I grew up in the wrong zip code.
When I was a boy they didn't even have zip codes . . .
> The fresh kind from the grocery store bakery with no preservatives costs more and goes bad faster.
Lesson #1 when you become an adult, bread goes into the freezer when you get home so that it doesn't go bad.
Frozen bread is useless! I would put bread in the refrigerator though.
What is a toaster?
Whenever food stuff comes up it becomes very apparent that most people are super ignorant about food prep. I get the vibe it's mostly on purpose so folks don't have to prep food and can just order stuff or buy cheap. Idk, but it's very normalized nowadays to know absolutely nothing about cooking/baking. Its a weird status symbol thing, maybe?
I'm not saying folks make a conscious decision to never learn how to cook or food prep. I mean as a society, there are constant excuses given to us. Over time more and more people fall victim to saying no to learning. This reinforces itself, "everytime I try something I fail", so folks never learn. It's sad to see how widespread this mentality is. We trade our skills for convenience then complain when we have no skills and the convenience has worn off.
This ignorance comes from a barely-regulated advertising industry and an inadequate and highly unequal education system, which is a lot of the point I’m trying to make.
Don’t lose sight of what it’s really like to be poor. Being poor means having very little time, and mostly thinking about survival. Learning to cook from scratch is a real hobby and something of a luxury. This isn’t the pre-industrial era where peasants had ample free time, this is an era where the poorest people have the least amount of time. They and their parents work multiple jobs for long hours with no paid time off.
It’s also a system where healthier food costs more and there’s no good societal way to offset that and make nutrition more equally accessible. (Let’s not forget the federal government recently playing political games with SNAP)
Let’s also talk about food deserts. I am an upper middle class person and I once lived on the border of one of the poorest areas of a rust belt city with declining population.
I once went into a big chain grocery store because it was close by, but it was the B tier store for the poor local population.
I shit you not, they did not carry tortellini. One of the most common pastas you can find in an American supermarket. Not fresh, not frozen, not dry. They didn’t have it. I asked an employee and they said they don’t carry it, it wasn’t out of stock or anything.
This was a full grocery store, which the community was lucky to have instead of just a corner cigarette and energy drink store, and they didn’t have a basic staple pasta.
Did they have vegetables, grains and some kind of meat? (Beef, chicken, fish?)
Tortellini are common, yes, but I wouldn't consider a grocery a food desert because of that. Food desert is the grocery never having stock of more basic things, like milk, oil, meat, that's a real food desert, and I've seen that happen in a high inflation country.
Okay, so what am I doing about the fact that buying anything in the produce section costs a lot? The dollars per calories basically makes no sense if I’m on an extreme budget.
I can buy a pack of strawberries that will last the family a day or two for $5+ and has a total of 200 calories in the entire package and we go hungry, or I can buy something processed that’s calorie dense.
Or I can buy something calorie dense and cheap like rice and beans that takes a lot of time to prep and make, which I don’t have because I work two part time jobs to pay rent - my main way to stay afloat is working long hours and overtime.
Meanwhile all the media that is presented to me tells me not to buy whole foods but to buy packaged products that are a lot more fun and tasty instead. It’s not like I am out here paying for the ad-free Netflix tier. My school and family never taught me how to cook because my school was a low income public school in a segregated society, and my parents also worked multiple jobs to make ends meet and didn’t spend a lot of time at home as a result.
A lot of 9 to 5 corporate employees really don’t understand what it’s like to be poor.
I will tell you what I did in that situation. I ate the cheap, processed, calorie dense foods, until such time as I could move to a major metropolitan area with better economic opportunities.
Moving to that area (Northern Virginia) was my focus. I did it through sheer willpower and determination.
I had to essentially abandon family and friends to do it however. But I gave myself a better life outcome.
> rice and beans that takes a lot of time to prep and make
Have you ever heard of batch cooking?
A one time investment in an instant pot solves that issue, I can get a huge batch of brown rice ready in 30 minutes, and they will last a whole week.
Beans probably work similarly with the instant pot.
why does the USA not have the concept of buying home made meals from other people? I have never heard of a lunch box service or people buying one
It's assumed that they are a bad actor, and the food is prepared under unsanitary conditions.
We have health codes and regulations to prevent commercialization of food production in potentially substandard conditions. It prevents both good and bad things.
now that is absolutely terrible isnt it, if a person wants to start a cloud kitchen even at home, they should be able to do so unless it causes a disturbance to neighbors. as long as regular inspections can be arranged, this should be a non issue for starters. i have a feeling the BIG FOOD industry has rigged this section of the law so that their authority on ultra processed food is not challenged
Pro Tip: You're going to need a floor drain in your kitchen as a first step.
> why does the USA not have the concept of buying home made meals from other people?
capitalism->companies lobby->corrupt government->zero regulation->shitty food that costs less to make, will kill you and is addictive
Up to 70% usually means 2%
Here it actually means 70%, but the paper is in a paper from mdpi which have been under criticism for predatory (i.e. fraudulent, junk-science enabling) practices.
From TFA:
"We report results of a cross-sectional assessment of the 2018 US packaged food and beverage supply by nutritional composition and indicators of healthfulness and level of processing. Data were obtained through Label Insight’s Open Data database, which represents >80% of all food and beverage products sold in the US over the past three years. Healthfulness and the level of processing, measured by the Health Star Rating (HSR) system and the NOVA classification framework, respectively, were compared across product categories and leading manufacturers. Among 230,156 food and beverage products, the mean HSR was 2.7 (standard deviation (SD) 1.4) from a possible maximum rating of 5.0, and 71% of products were classified as ultra-processed. "
In this case, it seems to be lower than the figure quoted in the report abstract[1] (emphasis mine).
> Among 230,156 food and beverage products, the mean [Health Star Rating] was 2.7 (standard deviation (SD) 1.4) from a possible maximum rating of 5.0, and 71% of products were classified as ultra-processed.
The dataset contains ~80% of food sold and inclusion in it is very probably skewed towards large volume. So the lower bound is something like 56% (if the 20% rest are not ultraprocessed)
2% definitely sounds about right for the US...bahaha
It's hard to get much more processed than sugar itself.
Out of everything else, that should be one that's easy to remember.
Pure white crystals often indicate the presence of a chemical in its most concentrated form.
Among other dangers, are the hazard of overdosing more easily, intentionally or not.
One time in Hawaii I was looking at a "Sugar in the Raw" type sugar packet. The sugar was grown in Hawaii, shipped to California for packaging, and shipped back to Hawaii, and distributed in trucks to the restaurant.
(2025) OP
More recently:
Ultra-processed foods make up more than 60% of us kids' diets
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44823288
How America got hooked on ultraprocessed foods
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45605921
California passes law to ban ultra-processed foods from school lunches
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