Ultra-processed foods, source of a chronic disease epidemic, make up the majority of children’s diets
Ultra-processed foods make up the bulk of what kids eat — and adults aren’t far behind, a report published Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention finds.
About 62% of kids’ and teens’ daily calories came from ultra-processed foods, the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics found, compared with 53% for adults.
The report marks the first time CDC has provided estimates about how much ultra-processed foods make up Americans’ diets.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in May cited ultra-processed foods among his list of top issues that need to be addressed to curb what he says is an epidemic of childhood chronic diseases.
Last month, the Department of Health and Human Services took the first step to formally define “ultra-processed foods” — a move, experts say, that could open the door to regulation, including what types of food are eligible for food assistance programs. Diets high in ultra-processed foods have been linked to a number of health problems, including depression, Type 2 diabetes and early death.
Previous administrations have also tried to take action on ultra-processed foods, but those efforts have focused mostly on labeling and individual ingredients — such as added sugars and trans fats — rather than on regulating or classifying foods based on their level of processing. In January, during the Biden administration, the Food and Drug Administration proposed requiring a new label on the front of most packaged food and drinks that would alert consumers to how much saturated fat, salt and added sugar they contained.
Thursday’s report was based on findings from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, from August 2021 to August 2023.
The report’s lead author, Anne Williams, a researcher with the National Center for Health Statistics, said the agency identified ultra-processed foods using the NOVA classification system — a framework developed by Brazilian researchers that’s the most commonly used tool to evaluate processed foods. NOVA defines ultra-processed products as “industrial creations” made with little — if any — whole foods.
The top source of ultra-processed foods for both kids and adults was sandwiches, such as burgers, hot dogs and PB&Js, Williams said. That was followed by baked goods, salty snacks and sugary drinks.
The report found that adults with higher incomes tended to eat fewer ultra-processed foods.
It also found that intake of ultra-processed foods for both kids and adults dropped slightly from 2017-18 to August 2021–23. For adults, the decline started even earlier, going back to 2013–14. Williams cautioned that the decline so far has been small — a 56-calorie difference over roughly a decade. [Continue reading…]
People in the United Kingdom lost twice as much weight eating meals typically made at home than they did when eating store-bought ultraprocessed food considered healthy, the latest research has found.
“This new study shows that even when an ultraprocessed diet meets nutritional guidelines, people will still lose more weight eating a minimally processed diet,” said coauthor Dr. Kevin Hall, a former senior investigator at the US National Institutes of Health who has conducted some of the world’s only controlled clinical trials on ultraprocessed foods.
“This (study) is the largest and longest randomized controlled clinical trial of ultraprocessed foods to date,” Hall added.
Hall’s past research sequestered healthy volunteers inside a clinic for a month at a time, measuring the impact of ultraprocessed food on their weight, body fat and various biomarkers of health. In a 2019 study, he found people in the United States ate about 500 calories more each day and gained weight when on an ultraprocessed diet than when eating a minimally processed diet matched by calories and nutrients.
The weight loss from minimally processed food in the new study was modest — only 2% of the person’s baseline weight, said study first author Samuel Dicken, a research fellow at the department of behavioral science and health and the Centre for Obesity Research at University College London.
“Though a 2% reduction may not seem very big, that is only over eight weeks and without people trying to actively reduce their (food) intake,” Dicken said in a statement. “If we scaled these results up over the course of a year, we’d expect to see a 13% weight reduction in men and a 9% reduction in women.” [Continue reading…]