Currently browsing posts about: Ultraprocessed

I wondered what this headline from FoodNavigator-Europe meant:

Nutritional dark matter: The next frontier in food science: The discovery of ‘nutritional dark matter’ is unlocking new paths for smarter food innovation, targeted health benefits, and precision nutrition… Read more

I went right to it:

What is Nutritional Dark Matter? A summary of key insights

• Nutritional databases track only 150 of 26,000+ food compounds
• Most food chemicals remain unstudied but may impact human health
• Poor nutrition causes one in five adult deaths worldwide
• Foodomics links diet to genes, microbes, and disease mechanisms
• Industry must adapt to new science shaping future food innovation

As for foodomics, this term “brings together genomics (the role of genes), proteomics (proteins), metabolomics (cell activity) ad nutrigenomics (the interaction of genes and diet.”

Translation

• “Dark matter” refers to the chemicals in food that have not (yet?) been identified as essential to the human diet but might have physiological functions.
• “Foodomics” explains how all that might work.

Bottom line: While waiting for the scientists to investigate “dark matter,” the implications of the concept for dietary advice are obvious: Eat whole foods, processed as minimally as possible.

But we already knew that.

California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, has just signed the bill, “Pupil nutrition: restricted school foods and ultraprocessed foods of concern: prohibition.”

This bill prohibits ultra-processed foods in federally funded school meals (K-12, breakfast and lunch), as well as competitive foods sold as snacks.

This means that

From the midnight before to 30 minutes after the end of the official schoolday, at each school, the only competitive foods that may be sold to a pupil are fruit, vegetable, dairy, protein, or whole grain rich food items; foods with a fruit, vegetable, dairy, protein, or whole grain item as its first ingredient; or combination foods containing at least one-quarter cup of fruit or vegetable.

These foods must also meet the following standards:

Press reports

• Press release: Gov. Newsom signs first-in-the-nation law to ban ultraprocessed foods from school lunches
• NBC News: California becomes the first state to phase ultraprocessed food out of school meals
• CNN: California enacts nation’s first law to define and ban ultraprocessed foods
• AP News: New California laws requires schools to phase out ultraprocessed foods

The UNICEF report: Feeding Profit: How food environments are failing children.

The UNICEF press release: Obesity exceeds underweight for the first time among school-age children and adolescents globally – UNICEF: One in 10 children worldwide living with obesity. Exposure to the marketing of ultra-processed foods found to be widespread.

the prevalence of underweight among children aged 5-19 has declined since 2000, from nearly 13 per cent to 9.2 per cent, while obesity rates have increased from 3 per cent to 9.4 per cent. Obesity now exceeds underweight in all regions of the world, except sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia….According to the latest available data, 1 in 5 children and adolescents aged 5-19 globally – or 391 million – are overweight, with a large proportion of them now classified as living with obesity.

One of the report’s major findings: “Globally, obesity has overtaken underweight as the more dominant form of malnutrition among school-age children and adolescents.”

Why?

• Ultraprocessed foods aimed at children
• Marketing of such foods to children
• Unethical practices of companies making ultraprocessed foods
• Inadquate legal measures and policies to stop such marketing

What to do?  Basically, oppose the practices, and institute measures and policies.

The report is beautifully documented and lays out the issues clearly and forcefully.  It’s well worth reading.  And taking action!

So many readers have sent me notices about California’s Senate having unanimously passed a bill banning ultra-processed foods from schools—and defining what they are—that I just have to write about it.

The bill is here.  The legislative analysis is here.

Two things about this bill are noteworthy.

I.  The bill defines ultra-processed foods. 

An ultra-processed food:

Contains one or more of the following

• Surface-active agents
• Stabilizers and thickeners
• Propellents, aerating agents and gases
• Colors and coloring adjuncts
• Emulsifiers and emulsifier salts
• Flavoring agents and adjuvants
• Non-nutritive sweeteners [D-sorbitol, erythritol, hydrogenated starch hydrolysates, sucralose, isomal, lactitol, luo han fruit concentrate, maltitol, steviol glycosides, thaumatin, xylitol)

And contains one or more of:

• Saturated fat at 10% or more of calories
• A ratio of mg sodium to calories of more than 1:1
• Sugars at 10% or more of calories

II.  The bill summarizes existing California laws related to school food.  These:

• Ban foods containing brominated vegetable oil, potassium bromate, propylparaben, red dye no. 3.
• Provide free breakfasts and lunches to all students.
• Restrict foods sold outside the schools meals to those that are reasonably healthy.
• Limit fat, saturated fat, sugar, sodium, and calories in competitive foods.
• Restrict competitive beverages to drinks to those that are reasonably healthy
• Prohibit several synthetic color additives.

Comment: The bill has yet to be signed by the governor.  I hope he does.

Press accounts

• Yahoo News
• The Guardian (I’m quoted)
• Politico
• Eat Real

I was asked to write an editorial commenting on a study published a couple of weeks ago that looked at changes in weight among people participating in a comparison of ultra-processed vs. minimally processed diets.

The study: Ultraprocessed or minimally processed diets following healthy dietary guidelines on weight and cardiometabolic health: a randomized, crossover trial. Nat Med (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-025-03842-0.

The study has a long list of authors: Samuel J. Dicken, Friedrich C. Jassil, Adrian Brown, Monika Kalis, Chloe Stanley, Chaniqua Ranson, Tapiwa Ruwona, Sulmaaz Qamar, Caroline Buck, Ritwika Mallik, Nausheen Hamid, Jonathan M. Bird, Alanna Brown, Benjamin Norton, Claudia A. M. Gandini Wheeler-Kingshott, Mark Hamer, Chris van Tulleken, Kevin D. Hall, Abigail Fisher, Janine Makaronidis & Rachel L. Batterham .

It must have been a huge amount of work to conduct this trial.  I can’t even imagine.

The lead author, Sam Dicken, explained the trial and its results on X.

My editorial has just been published in Nature Medicine:  Ultra-processed diets promote excess calorie consumption (I have no idea why the editorial was not published at the same time as the study, but it is now out).

I fthought several things about the study to be especially interesting.

• Participants, all overweight or obese, lived at their homes while under study.
• They were fed ultra-processed meals for 8 weeks followed by minimally processed meals for 8 weeks, or vice versa.
• Both sets of meals were designed to meet British guidelines for healthy foods; the ultra-processed foods were all healthy.
• They were give about 4,000 calories a day and could eat as much as they wanted from that.
• Participants lost weight no matter which diet they were on.
• They lost twice as much weight on the minimally processed diet.
• They ate more calories on the ultra-processed diet in comparison to what they were eating on the minimally processed diet.

Here’s the summary from my editorial.

One of the co-authors on the study is Kevin Hall, who did a rigorously controlled clinical trial of ultra-processed v. minimally processed diets and reported participants to be unwittingly consuming 500 calories a day more on the ultra-processed.

His study has been criticized for being too short in duration: two weeks on each diet.

This study kept participants on one or the other diet for eight weeks, and got a smaller but similar result.

Dicken et al also addressed a frequent criticism of the concept of ultra-processed foods: that the category excludes healthy foods like whole wheat commercial bread, commercial yogurts, power bars, and the like.  That’s what these participants were fed when they were on the healthy ultra-processed diet.

Here’s how I concluded my editorial:

Overeating, overweight, and increased risks for chronic disease are rapidly increasing public health problems for global societies.  Dietary guidelines in the UK and the United States have had little effect on improving overall dietary intake. None of these guidelines considers the degree of processing; the findings from Dicken et al. suggest that they should.

Brazil’s dietary guidelines, issued in 2015, say “avoid ultra-processed foods.” Researchers in the United States have called for guidelines and regulatory approaches to reduce intake of ultra-processed foods.

Despite ongoing debates about their definition, classification, and effects on health, in the context of maintaining or losing weight the evidence points to a clear message: minimize intake of ultra-processed foods.

If nothing else, the study provided further evidence for this sensible dietary advice.

Dicken et al: press coverage

• New York Times
• The Guardian
• CNN  I’m quoted in this one

Ultra-processed foods (UPFs) are a big issue in nutritiion these days, because we eat so much of them, observational studies link them to poor health, and controlled clinical trials show they cause people to eat more calories from them than from minimally processed foods.

The implication of current evidence is clear: avoid eating a lot of ultra-processed foods.

These, unfortunately, are among the most convenient, least expensive, and most profitable foods in supermarkets.

Consequently, they have triggered enormous pushback from:

• Big Food companies, which want you to eat more of their ultra-processed foods, not less
• Some nutrition scientists, who don’t like the idea of excluding the small number of ultra-processed foods that have better-than-average nutritional value
• Smaller “healthy” food companies making products that meet the definition of ultra-processed (industrially produced, full of additives, etc)

Phil Baker, an Australian scientist who is the lead author on a paper in a forthcoming Lancet series on ultra-processed foods (I’m a minor co-author on a couple of them), sent me this example of critics in the smaller “healthy” category.

The critics wrote in The Conversation: Ultra-processed foods might not be the real villain in our diets – here’s what our research found 

Some UPFs do deserve concern. They’re calorie dense, aggressively marketed and often sold in oversized portions. But they’re not a smoking gun.  Labelling entire categories of food as bad based purely on their processing misses the complexity of eating behaviour.

The study:  Food-level predictors of self-reported liking and hedonic overeating: Putting ultra-processed foods in context.  Appetite Volume 213, 1 September 2025, 108029

Conclusion: “This research demonstrates how nutritional characteristics of foods contribute to self-reported liking and hedonic overeating. Considering people’s beliefs about nutrient and sensory attributes can explain more than nutrients alone, and there are negligible additive contributions from CFR [carbohydrate to fat ratio] or UPFs on food reward.”

Funding: “This study was funded by Slimming World, UK, and the School of Psychology, University of Leeds.”

Comment: And what might Slimming World be?   Oh.  It’s a subscription meal plan.

Slimming World’s Food Optimising plan is a flexible, hunger-busting way to eat real food that fits in with every taste, lifestyle, family and budget – so it’s easy to stick to and even easier to enjoy. Based on tasty, healthy foods that everyone will love, Food Optimising helps slimmers cut calories without counting them, and get real results that last.

Of needing to avoid UPFs, Slimming World says

We also feel clear guidance on the difference between what constitutes a UPF and what is a processed food but can be consumed as part of a healthy, nutritionally balanced diet is essential, to avoid misinterpretation and confusion.

This company must make “healthy” UPF meals.  As we know from a recent clinical trial, people still eat more calories from UPFs, even when they are healthy (I will write about that trial as soon as Nature Medicine publishes my accompanying editorial).

In the meantime, I still think it’s a good idea to minimize intake of UPFs and eat minimally processed foods as much as possible.

David Kessler, a physician, lawyer, and former FDA Commissioner, has done a great service for the Make America Healthy Again movement.  He has written a letter to RFK Jr presenting a Citizen’s Petition to the FDA: “Petition to Limit the Exposure of Refined
Carbohydrates used in Industrial Processing in order to Prevent Obesity, Diabetes, and Cardiovascular Disease in Children and Adults.”

His petition argues that processed refined carbohydrates should no longer be considered Generally Recognized As Safe (GRAS).

These are:

1) refined sweeteners, including corn syrup, corn solids, glucose syrups, dextrose, invert sugar, xylose, maltose, and high fructose corn syrups; and maltodextrin

2) refined flour and starches that are subjected to food extrusion technology, including wheat, corn, tapioca, oat and potato  flour, and starches that are processed by extraction or similar technology, and

3) sucrose, refined flours, or starches that are used with emulsifiers (e.g. mono- and diglycerides of fatty acids, DATEM, sodium stearoyl lactylate, polysorbates); dough conditioners and strengtheners (e.g. azodicarbonamide, L-cysteine, calcium peroxide); humectants (e.g. propylene glycol); stabilizers and gums (e.g. carboxymethylcellulose, methylcellulose); or modified starches and fillers (e.g. regelatinized starch, modified food starch, dextrins).

The carefully argued and lengthy petition makes a strong case for the unhealthy nature of processed refined carbohydrates.

Wow.

If the FDA agrees—and it has to deal with the petition within 180 days—these ingredients would no longer be GRAS and foods containing them would be considered adulterated and illegal to sell.

Here’s what I said to the press:

• This would cover an extraordinarily large percentage of foods that are ultraprocessed…an extraordinarily impressive document” (New York Times).
• Kessler has given the FDA a way to define the vast majority of ultra-processed foods. In doing so, he has handed RFK Jr a huge gift on the path to regulating these products. It’s just what MAHA has asked for. I hope they take it seriously (CNN).

Can’t wait to see how RFK Jr and the FDA handle this.

The American Heart Association (AHA) has issued its long-awaited advisory on ultra-processed foods and heart health (and the CDC, just in time, says just about everyone consumes more than half their calories as UPFs).

The AHA advisory is complicated, somewhat schizophrenic in my view.

It says UPFs are bad for you but makes a big deal over how some UPFs are good for you.

It does not seem helpful to make a big fuss over the few UPF foods that are nutritious.

I say this for two reasons: The number of foods in that category is small, and a study of the effects of “healthy” UPFs still finds that people eat more calories from them than they would from minimally processed foods (I will write about this study when Nature Medicine publishes it and my accompanying editorial).

The key statement in the AHA report:

A small number of UPF products such as whole-wheat breads and unsweetened soy milk with emulsifiers can support nutrition security in low-income and low-access communities by offering convenient, affordable, and palatable options. However, the strong evidence linking HFSS {high fat, sugar, salt] UPFs to increased cardiovascular risk underscores the need for targeted policy interventions to regulate their availability, marketing, and accessibility in disproportionately affected communities.

The operative word here is “small.” This is a trivial issue, not worth fussing about.

Obviously the AHA committee thought so too.

Here is my translation of the report’s recommendations.

1. Replace most UPFs with real foods.
2. Enact policies to reduce UPFs, like front-of-package labels and taxation.
3. Increase research funding on UPFs and heart health.
4. Get the FDA to do a better job of assessing and regulating food additives.

I can’t argue with that.  Good job!

Resources

• The CNN article on this report (I’m quoted)
• The AHA press release
• The report’s supplemental tables