Ultra-processed foods are everywhere. Here’s how to avoid them
NPR’s LifeKit, Jun 2023
SEGARRA: …From NPR. Hey, everybody. It’s Marielle. Next time you’re at the supermarket, pick up some packaged foods and look over the ingredient list. You’ll start to notice a lot of the same things – high levels of salt and fat.
MARIA GODOY, BYLINE: Added sugars, added colorings, added flavorings, hydrolyzed protein isolates, high fructose corn syrup, bulking agents like maltodextrin, for instance. These are all sort of the types of ingredients you’d see in an ultra-processed food – carrageenan, you know, those kinds of things.
SEGARRA: That’s Maria Godoy, a health correspondent at NPR. She’s been reporting on the health effects of ultra-processed, industrially made foods.
GODOY: These are foods that are made with ingredients derived from foods, and then you reassemble them to create a product that’s tasty, cheap, convenient and shelf stable, which means they last a long time.
SEGARRA: And as you may have noticed, they’re also hard to resist. So we tend to overeat them. Most of what we eat in America today is ultra-processed.
GODOY: There was a recent study that put it at 73% of the U.S. food supply is ultra processed. There’s other research suggesting it’s 57% of what most adults eat, and it’s, like, 67% of what kids eat. So it really is everywhere.
SEGARRA: On this episode of LIFE KIT, we talk about how to recognize ultra-processed foods, why you might want to eat less of them and how to actually do that…
