How To Eat Less Ultra Processed Foods

The worst offenders: candy. Very high in added fats and sugars and extremely low in fiber, protein, and micronutrients.

*Adapted from my upcoming ebook: How to Feel Good

No doubt you’ve heard that processed foods are bad for you. And while that’s true, it’s not the whole story. Processed is different from ultra-processed, and it’s important to note that some amount of processing is good for you. Cooking is a type of processing, and cooking unlocks nutrients or even makes certain foods edible, like legumes. Ultra-processed foods are foods highly altered from their original state, often by adding salt, fat, sugar, and artificial additives.

So why is that a bad thing?

Ultra-processed foods contain more energy in the form of added sugars and oils, which physically makes it easier for us to eat more calories in less time. Our bodies just can’t keep up, we’re not used to eating calories in this dense of a package. Plus, they’re covered in salt, flavoring, and other additives that make it hard for us to stop once we start by hijacking our dopamine receptors. Sweet, fatty, and salty; our taste buds can’t get enough. And that’s on purpose; that’s what makes them hyperpalatable.

In addition to being addictive super dense energy bombs, they’re also devoid of important nutrients like fiber and essential micronutrients like vitamins and minerals.

So what’s the solution? It’s mindfulness again. It’s also about controlling your environment, but before you can control your environment you have to be aware that certain environments make it more likely that you’ll reach for ultra-processed foods.

If you spend all day at McDonald’s, it’s very likely you’ll eat the food at McDonalds. So why is it any different if you’re at home with nothing but ultra-processed foods in your kitchen? It’s not. You will eat the foods that are available to you. If you’re surrounded by ultra-processed foods then you’re going to eat ultra-processed foods.

Even though the world is filled to the brim with ultra-processed foods, there’s still the option to make good decisions about your exposure to them. You can make it less likely that you’ll be in a position to eat ultra-processed foods by keeping them off your grocery list, out of your grocery cart, and out of your kitchen. You can avoid restaurants that serve ultra-processed foods, opting to eat at home or by finding restaurants with better options.

The solution isn’t to avoid them entirely but to reduce the amount they contribute to your diet. A popular way of thinking about food is the ‘Green-Yellow-Red Light’ model. This model operates on a spectrum from red to green with green meaning “healthy, go ahead!” and red meaning “stop, don’t eat!” Fruits and veggies are green light foods because they have minimal processing, are packed with fiber and polyphenols, and are light on the calories. Red light foods are ultra-processed foods or foods that are otherwise not great for us because of their high saturated fat, sodium, and added sugar content (more on this later).

But sometimes green light foods come along with some red light foods. Using an ultra-processed salad dressing as the vehicle to deliver the green light foods of the rest of the salad isn’t such a bad thing! If not for the dressing, you may not have eaten the salad at all. Obviously try to reduce ultra-processed foods by opting for slightly better choices, but if using a little bit of red light food helps you eat more green light foods, by all means, do what you have to do to get those veggies.

It’s about making better choices more often, not perfect choices. Sometimes that means making a slightly better choice. If you find that you’re often making the red light choice then try to occasionally make the yellow light choice. Think about what foods would fill the whole spectrum. Maybe you want a dessert. Okay, so the red light food is a store-bought cake. The green light food is a strawberry. But a strawberry doesn’t exactly fill the same craving as cake does. So what’s the yellow light? Maybe a dark chocolate bar with almonds. Yeah, that might fill the craving and is definitely more nutritious than the cake. So you grab the chocolate bar instead. Congratulations, you made a better decision! More and more of those add up to lasting change. Remember, perfect is the enemy of good.