Why Is the American Diet So Deadly? (2025)
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
> From this perspective, homemade jam on pain de Gonesse would be fine; Smucker’s on Wonder Bread would not, even if it contained less sugar and fat. “The thesis is that we’ve been focussing too strongly on the individual nutritional components of food,” Hall told me. “We’re starting to learn that processing really matters.”
So the pain de Gonesse goes through lots of processing to get it's unique attributes, but is not "ultra processed" yet Wonder bread is. Or is it the Smucker's jam that makes it ultraprocessed? Is home made jam ultra-processed?
Or this distinction:
> “Preparing a day’s worth of ultra-processed meals might take an hour,” he said. “Unprocessed meals could take three or four times as long.” He brought his knife down forcefully, cleaving a carrot in two, and continued: “If I’m swamped, I’d rather make the ultra-processed menu. But if I had to pick one to eat for the rest of my life? Unprocessed, no question.”
As somebody who cooks a good chunk of my family's meals, cleaving a carrot in two and taking the example earlier of making a meal of vegetables and grilled chicken is not that time consuming compared to, what exactly? What takes 3-4 hours to prepare here?
Vagueness in articles like these reinforce the idea that there's no definiton of "ultra-processed" that a regular person can use, and that it's just based on vibes and vague feelings of "quality" that are at best defined by traditions rather than by choices that are made. Even the start of the article, that the immigrant noticed that American meals had far larger portions, more salt, and more sweetness than French food, does not comport to the definitons used here.
Maybe the definition is: the food can go bad in a short amount of time, except for staples like rice or flour. Would that work? I don't know. Can I simply switch to dry kidney beans rather than the canned kidney beans, because the canned kidney beans are "ultra-processed"?
I've read sooooo much about ultra-processed food but still don't know how to use it in daily life.
Edit: and to take an example from the "official" definition: "Group 1 foods are unprocessed or minimally processed: nuts, eggs, vegetables, pasta." When people hear pasta, they think it's going to be made in a factory. I occassionally make pasta, but honestly prefer the dry stuff for its texture in most dishes, and nobody is making dried pasta at home of any good quality (see for example this amazing series of YouTube videos of an attempt at such https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLURsDaOr8hWXz_CFEfPH2... )
Adding "pasta" to the group 1 list kind of upends any intuitive understanding of the groupings.
I'm pretty certain the flour used to make standard grocery store pasta is both refined and bleached. Even if I make it at home, I'm using refined and bleached white flour.
And my understanding is that should be considered fairly processed - the refining makes it less fibrous and easier to digest, which spikes insulin levels and is bad for gut bacteria etc.
But making that judgement requires more cooking experience than a lot of people have, and executing on it requires the time & money to buy the more expensive stuff that has a shorter shelf life.
"available" is hardly a right goal
Perhaps I'm just looking for too sharp of an edge on the definition. It's just that the examples in the article are something that make me doubt the entire ontology.
I wish journalists would run their examples like these by the researchers directly to see if the journalist's conception of the idea matches the researchers.
The fact that enriched white pasta isn't included on the ultra-processed list shows that they're using some criteria outside of how processed the food is to make the list.
A lot of processing is removing fiber so foods can be eaten faster and are less satiating. Eating more fiber automatically addresses most of the problems with he American diet.
When eating out, it's practically impossible to hit goals on macronutrient categories, much less fiber goals! The best one can do is try to count calories.
Michael Pollan offers [1] guidelines: “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.” This doesn’t talk about avoiding anything, instead chasing after known good things — food. Carrots. Steak. Wheat. Things you see in a children’s book labelled “food.” If it grows in the sun and the rain then it’s food.
Thinking in terms of “ultra-processed” still leaves you captive to industry. Buy some rice and beans and forget about it.
I asked this question Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini. None of them could give me a good explanation either. One of the themes that did come through was the agents seemed to land on the idea that if something is made purposefully to make you want more of it (in a sense crave it), then its "ultra processed" which is interesting.
I then asked them what the difference between Chipolte and Taco Bell was then. It said some of the ingredients that Chipolte uses are still designed with specific flavorings and salts which would then be considered ultra processed because the point is not to make it healthier. Its to make you want it over other things that would be considered healthy.
It was an interesting conversation, and in the end, I came to the same conclusion, its impossible to tell these days where the threshold is for something to go from processed to ultra processed is.
It is hard for individuals to fight back against toxic obesogenic[1] advertisers.
Even when we communally create a helpful concept or word, it eventually gets undermined and debased by sociopathic advertising (now with extra helping hand from AI).
Aside 1: there's an art to narrowing down and selecting relevant information from AI generated responses. Plus the art of writing/rewriting good prompts. I fear many people will fail to learn to prompt intelligently (Many people haven't even learned to use search operators over decades!)
Irrelevant Aside 2: AI generated spelling mistakes are fun to look for in AI comments faking humanity. Humans make different mistakes than AI generates - "Chipolte" feels especially human!
[1] prompt: "What are some strong words meaning the opposite of benign (especially as relating to antisocial food advertising)". Aside 3: the response ended "isn’t just harm—it’s harm with intent or harm that multiplies. Accidental harm calls for correction. Engineered harm calls for reform.". A moralising or pandering AI feels systematically dangerous.
Nowadays most people have given up on cooking, for fear that cooking may require too much time and their work does not allow enough time for this.
This has also happened with me many years ago, and because of that I became obese and I stayed so for many years, despite many failed attempts to lose weight. Eventually I learned to control my weight and I returned to a normal weight after almost a year of losing weight continuously. Had I returned to my previous diet, I would have gained weight again.
Nowadays, I eat only food that I cook myself and there is one obvious difference, which matches what is said in the parent article. With my food, I eat only fixed quantities that I have planned before, once in the morning and once in the evening. After I finish eating, I have no desire to eat more, even if I think that my food is very tasty. Later, I am not hungry again before the next meal.
In the past, when I was eating industrially-produced food, it was very difficult to stop eating soon enough. Moreover, a few hours later I was hungry again. It is certain that nothing has changed with me, but only with my food, because when I eat occasionally other food, again it does not satiate me properly.
When you have to cook for a large family, that is still possible by cooking all or most of the food for an entire week in one weekend day and then reheating the food in a microwave oven in the work days.
When you cook only for yourself, it is possible to cook the food every day just before eating, if you use modern methods instead of traditional methods. I cook all my food in a microwave oven. This requires about a half of hour before a meal, but only at most 10 to 15 minutes are active, e.g. peeling, paring and slicing vegetables, mixing ingredients and washing the vessels used. The rest of the time is passive, waiting for the food to be cooked in the oven and then to cool down, when I can do other activities, e.g. work at a computer.
So even if I have to spend some time with cooking food, that is acceptable and the benefits make it worthwhile. Moreover, food that you cook yourself can be many times cheaper than the alternatives, while also being much healthier.
When talking about "ultra-processing", it is important to differentiate the processing methods that separate the useful components of food from the processing methods that either mix various ingredients and additives or transform the food through various methods, e.g. heating.
Separating the useful nutrients is not bad intrinsically and it is frequently very desirable. For instance, using whey protein concentrate or milk protein concentrate for cooking is much healthier than using any other kind of dairy, because the protein concentrate is the useful part of the milk, while both lactose and milk fat can be harmful in excess. The only danger with separated nutrients is that they facilitate abuses, e.g. the existence of pure sugar makes it easy to add too much sugar in food.
On the other hand, the processing methods that either mix additives in food or transform it, are irreversible, so they are very frequently harmful. Moreover, when you are not the one who mixes the food ingredients, you can never be certain about which is the real content of the food. Therefore this is the kind of "ultra-processing" that should be avoided.
Not all "processing" has the same purpose and the different methods of processing should not be confused. There are 2 broad classes of "processing" that are very different. The methods of processing that extract the most useful components of the sources of food are never bad by themselves, even if the availability of pure nutrients allows their bad use by choosing unbalanced recipes.
Such processing that is not bad unless its products are misused includes the extraction of oils from seeds or fruits, the grinding of seeds into flour, the filtration of the proteins from milk into protein concentrate, the precipitation of proteins and fat from milk into cheese, and so on.
The methods of processing that are bad and the only that should be called "ultra-processing", cause irreversible degradation of the food, by either mixing various food ingredients and additives into an unbalanced and unhealthy combination and by various treatments, e.g. heating, frying, boiling etc. whose effects cannot be undone to make again a healthy food.
Only the 2nd kind of processing methods must be avoided, and the way to do this is by cooking yourself, because the food that is either completely unprocessed or it has been processed only with methods of the 1st kind cannot be eaten directly, with the exception of some fruits and vegetables that have a too low content of nutrients to be able to sustain human life.
In theory, an industrial producer of food could use methods of food processing equivalent with a home cook and make healthy food. Unfortunately, this almost never happens, because it is much more profitable to make tasty but unhealthy food.
“Is this processed or unprocessed?” I asked.
Kozlosky smiled. “Ultra-processed,” she said. “Lots of participants can’t tell the difference.”
I thought I understood the study but now I'm not sure. I thought the idea was to take the exact same thing you'd get in a tv dinner and make it fresh, so no freeze drying, no preservatives, etc. Then if that food on its own causes the same pattern of health issues, we know it's simply a diet problem. It sounds like they replicated that effect. So they got evidence that ultraprocessing doesn't actually matter all that much?
It’s not that difficult: the closer the item is to its natural state, the more healthy it is.
Almost all foods need some processing to be made edible (peeling, cooking, etc), but beyond that their health vs processing ratio declines.
For example: Rice needs to be cut, threshed, and cleaned. Then you have something that’s baseline edible (brown rice). But then people remove the bran layer to make white rice, which removes health. Then they pre-cook it to make “quick cook” rice, which removes more health. Or they grind it up to make rice flour, which removes more health. Or they ferment it to make saki, which removes more health.
At what point does it become ultra processed? It doesn’t really matter. The focus should be on staying as close to the initial edible state as possible.
Some foods are healthiest to eat with no processing.
Other foods require minimal processing to be healthily edible.
Still other foods require significant processing to be healthily edible.
It's almost like....there's no simple, one-line rule you can apply to food to guarantee that you are always getting the healthiest stuff!! You actually have to apply human thought, judgement, and knowledge of the subject to it!
For snacks I eat apple with variations of butters (pure): pistachio, almonds, peanut, cashew, hazelnut.
Sometimes I eat frozen blueberries with cottage cheese and a vegan protein poweder.
The main thing is I eat basically a whole lettuce heart every meal,along with 2 tomatoes.
Fills me up.
All of this lands me on very low calories (1200), so I have been losing weight fast without starving. Arguably,my hunger has gone down substantially.
Boredom is what usually killed me, but turns out rotating between the various butters allow for enough variation
some previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42623315
Cut sugar soda, cut beer, skip 1 meal a day.
Now.
I am sure it's personal,but the difference is enormous.
It feels like, as a tourist, unless you’re making food yourself from scratch the ingredients used in most food are not good for you.
I don’t feel that way holidaying in other countries..
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/magazine/the-extraordinar...
Ultraprocessed foods aren't great, but it's yet another manufactured crisis to serve as a distraction from the Epstein files scandal and coverup, like the attack Iran will be next Thursday. What a horrible time.
And this administration rolled back existing standards to improve school lunch nutrition and their nutrition policy changes have not been science based, so they demonstrably don't care about the issue.
Past governments may have also completely botched the food guidelines, too, but it's never been as clearly botched as it is at the moment.