By Alliance for Natural Health International

By Rob Verkerk, Ph.D.

If you’re reading this, chances are you already try to avoid ultraprocessed foods (UPFs), recognizing UPFs contain ingredients you wouldn’t want in your own kitchen.

But many of your friends, family and wider networks may not be in the same place — and crucially, may still believe that the science is “uncertain.”

That’s because Big Food has spent many years trying to defend its position to use these ingredients and has ploughed vast sums into research and marketing, a chunk of which has been used to justify its position.

But that position is increasingly hard to defend — as we aim to show in this article, using some of the most prominent systematic reviews and meta-analyses published in mainstream, high-impact scientific journals.

Yes, there are valid criticisms of the NOVA classification system for UPFs, including heterogeneity within categories and the failure to distinguish beneficial processes such as fermentation (Lane et al., 2024; Louie, 2025).

But even these critiques acknowledge a consistent pattern: high UPF consumption tracks with worse health outcomes and poorer overall diet quality.

What has changed in the last couple of years is the strength, consistency, and mechanistic depth of the evidence.

That also means that the big journals that have been favoured by the medical industrial complex are now publishing such studies, given the weight of evidence against UPFs is simply too great to deny. These journals don’t want to risk their credibility.

Where we are today — something I hope to justify below — is that we’ve arrived at a Big Tobacco moment for Big Food — the same playbook, different story and era.

When you can no longer hide from the science

A pivotal shift came in 2025 when the highly influential peer-reviewed journal, The Lancet, published an article by Monteiro et al. along with 12 linked articles. In their opener for the series, Dr. Carlos A. Monteiro and colleagues from the University of São Paulo, Brazil, set out three biologically plausible mechanisms by which UPFs may drive harm:

• Disruption of appetite regulation, leading to overconsumption.
• Direct biological effects of additives, altered food structures, and the production of harmful byproducts.
• Systematic displacement of health-promoting, minimally processed, protective foods.

This isn’t just a question of which set of epidemiological studies you’re focusing on.

What we’re beginning to see now is a converging causal framework for how UPFs represent a classic slow-kill mechanism that underpins most of the chronic diseases we see in industrialized societies that steal years and quality from lives, and threatens to overrun health systems.

Engineered to override satiety

Among the most compelling experimental evidence comes from a tightly controlled inpatient trial led by National Institute of Health researcher Kevin Hall.

Participants consuming an ultraprocessed diet ate ~500 kcal/day more and gained weight compared with those on a minimally processed diet — despite meals being matched for calories, sugar, fat and fiber (Hall et al., 2019).

This isn’t about someone’s willpower. It’s about design — foods designed to be addictive, that create dependence. Texture, energy density and hyper-palatability appear to bypass normal satiety signalling — directly supporting Monteiro’s first hypothesis.

The epidemiology is now overwhelming

Among the strongest syntheses of evidence to date comes from a systematic review and meta-analysis of 43 observational studies (including nearly 900,000 subjects) examining UPFs and chronic disease outcomes published by Lane et al. (2021) in the peer-reviewed journal, Obesity Reviews.

The findings were striking:

• Higher UPF intake was associated with increased risk of obesity, cardiovascular disease, Type 2 diabetes and all-cause mortality.
• Associations persisted across populations and study designs.

Even allowing for residual confounding, the scale and reproducibility of these findings make dismissal increasingly untenable.

In case anyone is still in any doubt, a very recent meta-analysis and systematic review by Liang et al. (2025) published in Systematic Reviews, including 18 studies involving over 1 million subjects (and over 173,000 deaths), showed unequivocally that those who consumed the most UPFs had a 15% increase in risk of death from all causes.

Sorry, Big Food, you can no longer hide from the evidence that it’s UPFs that make up over half the total energy consumed by populations in the U.S. and U.K. (here and here), are killing consumers of its products slowly, but surely.

More to the point, the risks are dose-dependent — so any effort to eat less of it moves your risk profile in the right direction.

From pre-cradle to old age

The problem is akin to a ticking time bomb. We have yet to see the full age spectrum of industrialised societies exposed to UPFs from pre-conception to death.

What we know for sure is that young people are eating more of the stuff than older folk, and that should be a big wake-up call for individuals, families and health authorities.

The latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) from National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) illustrate this disturbingly; they show young people, especially 6- to 11-year-olds, but also 12- to 18-year-olds eat the most UPFs as a proportion of their total caloric intake (65% and 63%, respectively) — and significantly more than older folk, who still consume over 50% of their calories as UPFs, even among those with higher incomes.

The data also show that it’s the middle-income groups that consume the most, not the poorest, which likely reflects the relatively high cost of many UPFs.

The table below is drawn from the latest NHANES data (National Center for Health Statistics) published by CDC and includes data collected between 2021 and 2023:

It’s not just the amount of UPFs that people eat. It’s what they do to the body — and often the mind too, given some are neurotoxic or lead to a higher incidence of neuropsychiatric disorders.

The science is increasingly revealing that harms are not confined to any one life stage — they impact people across the lifespan:

• Children and adolescents: High UPF consumption is linked to increased adiposity, poorer metabolic health and emerging links to mental health outcomes. Early exposure may also shape lifelong food preferences (Lane et al., 2021).
• Older adults: Recent evidence links higher UPF intake with frailty, cognitive decline and increased mortality risk, suggesting acceleration of biological ageing (Shahatah et al., 2025).

But that’s not all. UPFs have also been tied to reducing fertility, elevated risks during pregnancy and the development of fetuses and infants.

Emerging research suggests UPFs may impair hormonal regulation, metabolic signalling and fertility outcomes, including in males (Paula et al., 2022; Evans et al., 2025; Preston et al., 2025). While still developing, this aligns with known effects of metabolic dysfunction and inflammation on reproductive biology.

During pregnancy, the risks extend further. Maternal UPF intake has been linked to excess gestational weight gain and altered fetal development trajectories, raising concerns about long-term metabolic programming in offspring (Paula et al., 2022; Morales-Suarez-Varela & Rocha-Velasco, 2025).

This is not just about individual health or the choices, informed or otherwise, of the individual — what parents and young people are eating will likely also influence the health of the next generation.

Coming back to the story of Big Tobacco, we learned that the industry “got away with it” up until it was no longer feasible for its leaders to deny causation.

Now, with Big Food and its addictive UPFs, we see a similar progression: the increasing evidence of consistency of effects across the entire life course is really beginning to bolster the case for causality.

Top 10 UPF ingredients to avoid:

• Added sugars/sugar syrups: Strongly linked to worse cardiometabolic outcomes when intake is high; common in UPFs and contribute to excess calorie intake and poor diet quality.
• Refined starches/refined grains: Usually indicate lower fiber and higher glycemic load; associated with poorer metabolic health in the broader UPF pattern.
• Sodium: UPFs are often sodium-dense; high sodium intake is linked to hypertension and cardiovascular risk, and UPF exposure is associated with adverse cardiovascular outcomes.
• Industrial trans fats/partially hydrogenated fats: One of the clearest diet-related harms historically linked to industrial processing; often used in UPFs, especially older formulations.
• Emulsifiers: Mechanistic evidence suggests possible effects on gut microbiota and inflammation, but human causal evidence remains limited.
• Artificial sweeteners: Evidence is mixed; concern centers on their frequent use in ultraprocessed beverages and snacks and possible effects on appetite or metabolic signaling.
• Flavor enhancers: Often increase palatability and may promote overconsumption; evidence is stronger for food-environment effects than for direct toxicity.
• Colorings: Some specific dyes have concerns in certain contexts, but overall evidence is less consistent than for sugar, salt, and fats.
• Preservatives: Common in UPFs; the main concern is the overall ultraprocessed dietary pattern rather than one preservative in isolation.
• Refined industrial oils/fat blends: Frequently used to make products energy-dense and hyper-palatable; associated with poorer cardiometabolic profiles in the UPF dietary pattern.

UPF manufacture generates killer chemicals

Critics are right: not all processing is harmful. Fermentation, freezing and cooking can enhance nutrition and safety.

But ultraprocessing is different. It involves fractionation and recombination of food components, technological additives designed to mimic real food and structural changes that alter digestion and absorption.

As Monteiro and colleagues propose in their second hypothesis, UPF manufacture may often also involve application of extreme heat or other technological processes that induce reactions that, in turn, yield new by-products. This generates chemistries that were not in the original food, and may include:

• Advanced glycation end products
• Acrylamide
• Polyaromatic hydrocarbons
• Heterocyclic amines

These chemicals — among other things — are associated with increased inflammation, neurotoxicity and cancer risk.

Even when adjusting for overall diet quality, studies continue to find independent associations between UPF intake and adverse health outcomes.

This suggests that UPFs are not merely markers of unhealthy diets—they are likely contributors to harm in their own right.

Gut disruption: a key mechanism

Mechanistic evidence increasingly points to the gut being highly susceptible to harm from UPF ingredients. As shown in a comprehensive review by Rondinella et al. (2025), common UPF components — particularly emulsifiers, artificial sweeteners and other additives in UPFs — can:

• Disrupt microbiome diversity
• Damage the intestinal barrier
• Promote systemic inflammation

This provides a biologically coherent explanation linking UPFs to chronic disease pathways — from metabolic disorders to neurodegeneration. These effects are not fully explained by nutrient content (or deficiency) alone.

Time for honesty and accountability — not ‘healthwashing’

The food industry has long argued that “there are no bad foods, only bad diets.” That argument is becoming increasingly hard to sustain. Big Food’s response? “Healthwashing.”

Despite the growing body of negative scientific findings, food manufacturers, like their tobacco counterparts of yesteryear, are becoming increasingly adept at marketing ultraprocessed products as part of a healthy lifestyle.

Labels such as “high protein,” “low fat,” “gut-friendly” or “plant-based” can create a powerful halo effect, even when the product remains highly processed.

Social media has amplified this phenomenon. Influencers, including celebrities and sports personalities, are frequently paid to promote food and drink products, blurring the line between genuine advice and advertising.

The result is a digital landscape in which UPFs are not only normalized but actively positioned as desirable wellness choices.

At a systems level, there is a need to rebuild shorter, more transparent food chains that reconnect producers and consumers. Supporting regenerative agriculture, local food networks and independent producers can play an important role in shifting the balance away from industrialized food systems.

This is where we, as consumers, can play a powerful role in creating change in our food landscape by changing what we buy and where we buy from.

Policy change is equally critical. This includes developing more robust and meaningful ways to classify food, strengthening oversight of health claims — particularly in digital spaces — and investing in independent research that is free from commercial influence.

Time to reclaim real food

The debate around UPFs is both necessary and timely. But if it is to lead to meaningful change, it must move beyond simplistic narratives and address the deeper forces shaping our food system.

It’s time for people to engage, question and advocate for a more holistic approach — one that values real food, informed choice and transparency at every level. Because ultimately, improving public health is not just about avoiding certain categories of food, but about rebuilding a system that truly nourishes both people and planet.

We cannot win this one without education. People have to know what they’re putting into their bodies and be cognisant of the “healthwashing” that Big Food uses in its marketing, advertising and labelling.

Next, we need to vote with our pockets — the message is a simple one: avoid UPFs most of the time.

Those wanting to go minimal-UPF or UPF-free need to focus on eating whole foods and ingredients that can be recognized as foods. If you want some help, a great starting point is our book “Reset Eating: Reset your health and resilience by turning what and how you eat into powerful medicine” and our Food4Health Guide.

Originally published by Alliance for Natural Health International.

Rob Verkerk, Ph.D., is the founder and the executive & scientific director for the Alliance for Natural Health International.

The post Even Big Food Can’t Ignore the Science: Ultraprocessed Foods Are Killing Us appeared first on Children’s Health Defense.

 

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