The Real Reason Ultra-Processed Foods Are Ruining Your Health

Hint: It’s not the chemicals.

If you have any interest at all in nutrition and have been conscious over the past five years or so, you are no doubt aware of a torrent of literature blaming a lot of health woes on ultra-processed foods.

If I were to show you some foods, for the most part you’d have a pretty good sense whether they were ultra-processed or not. You know what? Let’s try it.

The classic Oscar Meyer Weiner? Yup. Ultra-processed. It contains multiple additives like sodium lactate, added dextrose and glucose, and “mechanically separated meat”.

How about a handful of almonds?

Right again! Not ultra-processed. In fact, on the standard “NOVA” processing scale which goes from a score of 1 for unprocessed or minimally processed foods — to 4 (ultra-processed) a nice handful of almonds is a 1. Good job.

Doritos? Ultra-processed.

Tostitos? Only “processed”.

Containing just corn, canola oil and salt — this scores a 3 on the NOVA scale. A good example of a 2 on the NOVA scale is California Olive Ranch Olive Oil — which, yeah, you need to process olives to turn them into oil, but there’s not much more going on than that.

This is all sort of the Potter Stewart method of classifying foods. You may know this story. Stewart, a Supreme Court Justice from 1958 to 1981 famously weighed in on a censorship case. The question was whether a particularly racy French movie could be banned because it was hardcore pornography.

He admitted that it was hard to come up with a legal definition of hardcore pornography but “I know it when I see it”. And so it is with ultra-processed foods. In…