Is Ultra-Processed Food Really the Problem?
Processed food has become one of those phrases that sounds like it should come with a warning label. But is all processed food actually bad for us? And what does “ultra-processed” even mean?
Spend five minutes reading about nutrition online and eventually somebody will tell you to stop eating processed food.
It sounds simple enough.
Until you actually try to define processed food.
Frozen vegetables are processed. Canned tomatoes are processed. Greek yogurt is processed. Peanut butter is processed. A loaf of bread is processed. So is a frozen pizza.
Clearly, those foods aren't all the same thing.
And that's where I think the conversation about processed food gets a little more complicated — and a lot more useful.
First, what is ultra-processed food?
Most research on ultra-processed food uses something called the NOVA classification system, which groups foods according to the nature and extent of their processing.
At one end are foods that are essentially intact or minimally altered: vegetables, fruit, meat, eggs, rice, beans and so on.
At the other end are ultra-processed foods: industrial formulations that can include ingredients and additives you typically wouldn't use when cooking at home. Think soft drinks, packaged snack foods, many candies, instant noodles and certain ready-to-eat meals.
That's a useful distinction.
But it still doesn't mean every food that comes in a package belongs in the same nutritional bucket.
And that's where I think we need to use some common sense.
The research isn't something we should ignore
There is a growing body of research connecting diets high in ultra-processed foods with poorer health outcomes.
A large 2024 umbrella review published in The BMJ looked across 45 pooled analyses representing nearly 10 million participants. Greater exposure to ultra-processed foods was associated with higher risk across a number of health outcomes, particularly cardiometabolic disease, mortality and some mental-health outcomes. The researchers also emphasized an important limitation: much of the evidence was observational, and the quality of evidence varied considerably depending on the outcome.
There's also an especially interesting NIH experiment.
Researchers brought 20 adults into a controlled environment and gave them either an ultra-processed or minimally processed diet for two weeks before switching them to the other diet. The meals were designed to be matched for things like presented calories and macronutrients, and participants could eat as much as they wanted.
On the ultra-processed diet, people ate roughly 500 additional calories per day and gained weight. On the minimally processed diet, they lost weight.
That's worth paying attention to.
But it doesn't answer every question about why.
Processing may not be the whole story
Here's the distinction I think matters for an actual family kitchen:
A food being processed isn't automatically what makes it a poor choice.
Some heavily processed foods are also easy to eat quickly, highly palatable and relatively low in fiber or other components that help make meals satisfying. Ultra-processed dietary patterns can also displace foods like vegetables, fruit, legumes and seafood. Researchers are still working out which characteristics of these foods — and which combinations of characteristics — are responsible for the associations we're seeing.
That's quite different from saying:
Processed = bad.
And that's why I'm not interested in turning Dad Man into the Ingredient Police.
I don't cook everything from scratch
I'm a chef. I know how to make stock. I know how to bake bread. I know how to make mayonnaise, pasta sauce, tortillas, salad dressing and probably most of the other things sitting in my refrigerator.
But I still buy some of them. Because time is an ingredient too.
If a jar of decent pasta sauce means a parent can put together spaghetti, vegetables and a salad instead of ordering takeout because it's already 6:30, I'm perfectly comfortable calling that a win.
The question I ask isn't: “Was this made in a factory?”
It's closer to: “What job is this food doing in our meal?”
A can of beans can save 45 minutes.
Frozen vegetables can mean there are actually vegetables on the table tonight.
A good jarred marinara can turn pasta into a 20-minute dinner.
Rotisserie chicken can become soup, tacos, salad or tomorrow's lunch.
Those aren't failures to cook from scratch. They're tools.
So what do I actually look for?
I don't think families need another complicated set of food rules. Most of the time, I'm looking for something much simpler.
I want the majority of the meal built around recognizable, nutrient-dense foods: vegetables, fruit, beans, whole grains when appropriate, nuts and seeds, eggs, seafood and quality meat and poultry.
Then I use convenience foods strategically. Some are simply ingredients that somebody else prepared for me.
Others are foods I wouldn't want forming the foundation of my family's diet every day.
There's room for both.
The important thing is the overall pattern, not whether every individual item in your pantry could have existed on your great-grandmother's kitchen shelf.
The Dad Man rule: use shortcuts that help you cook
That's probably the easiest way to describe my philosophy.
Use convenience foods that make cooking real food easier. Buy the canned tomatoes. Use the frozen vegetables. Keep some good broth in the pantry.
Find a pasta sauce you actually like.
And if your kid eats a bag of chips sometimes, I'm not going to show up at your house and confiscate it.
We're trying to feed families here. Not win a purity contest.
The research gives us good reasons to build most of our diet around minimally processed, nutrient-dense foods and to be thoughtful about how much ultra-processed food we eat.
But there's a big difference between being thoughtful about processed food and being afraid of it.
And for a busy family, learning which shortcuts are worth taking might actually make eating well easier.
Dad Man's Take
Cook mostly with real, recognizable food. Use packaged foods strategically. Don't let perfect get in the way of dinner.
Because a pretty good dinner that actually makes it onto the table beats the theoretically perfect dinner you didn't have time to cook.
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