Are Ultra-Processed Foods Actually Bad for You? The Science Is Messier Than You Think

In today’s episode of Bite Back with Abbey Sharp, we’re kicking off Part One of our ultra-processed foods deep dive to separate the science from wellness culture fearmongering. We unpack the research linking ultra-processed foods to obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and other chronic health conditions, what the evidence actually says about food additives and gut health, and whether processing itself is really the problem. Plus, we explore the NOVA classification system, why not all ultra-processed foods are created equal, and what clinical trials reveal about their impact on calorie intake and weight gain. And stay tuned for Part Two, where we’ll investigate why certain ultra-processed foods may make us eat more, from texture and eating speed to digestion and calorie absorption. Here’s a run down of what we discussed in today’s episode: What Actually Counts as an Ultra-Processed Food? The Problem With the NOVA Classification System Do Ultra-Processed Foods Really Cause Chronic Disease? Why Not All Ultra-Processed Foods Are Created Equal Are Food Additives Really Harmful to Your Health? Do Emulsifiers and Preservatives Damage Your Gut? The Study That Changed Everything About Ultra-Processed Foods Why Ultra-Processed Foods Can Make You Eat 500 More Calories Can a Healthy Ultra-Processed Diet Still Lead to Weight Loss? The Verdict: Are Ultra-Processed Foods Actually Bad for You? 👩🏼‍💻 RESEARCH LINKS: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10899807/ https://diabetesjournals.org/care/article/46/7/1335/148548/Ultra-Processed-Food-Consumption-and-Risk-of-Type https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1542356525006986 https://researchprofiles.ku.dk/en/publications/carrageenan-and-insulin-resistance-in-humans-a-randomised-double-/ https://drc.bmj.com/content/9/1/e002336 https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/fulltext/S1550-4131(19)30248-7 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40760353/ #ultraprocessedfoods #processedfoods #foodadditives #guthealth #weightgain #nutrition #dietitian — DISCLAIMER:The content in this episode is for educational and entertainment purposes only and is never a substitute for medical advice. If you’re struggling with with your mental or physical health, please work one on one with a health care provider. If you have heard yourself in our discussion today, and are looking for support, contact the free NEDIC helpline at 1-866-NEDIC-20 or go to eatingdisorderhope.com. — 📚 GRAB MY BOOK: The Hunger Crushing Combo Method ⤵️ Learn how to reach your healthiest weight without dieting using evidence based nutrition strategies. Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0306836793?tag=hacboogrosit-20 More purchase options: https://www.abbeyskitchen.com/hunger-crushing-combo/ 🎙 LISTEN TO BITE BACK WITH ABBEY SHARP ⤵️ Real conversations about nutrition, wellness, diet culture, parenting, and the biggest food debates. https://lnk.to/Bite-Back?utm_source=hoobe&utm_medium=social ⭐ Enjoying the podcast? Follow Bite Back on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you're enjoying the show, leaving a rating or review really helps support it! ✉️ SUBSCRIBE TO MY NEWSLETTER https://abbeyskitchen.myflodesk.com/kd6ijl0y3e 🥞 FREE Hunger Crushing Combo™ E-Book https://www.abbeyskitchen.com/hunger-crushing-combo/ 💪 FREE Protein 101 Guide https://www.abbeyskitchen.com/protein-intake-recommendations/ 📖 MY FIRST COOKBOOK: The Mindful Glow Cookbook Amazon: https://amzn.to/2nev0lf 👩🏼‍💻 COACHING: 🍽️ Feeding Kids Without Diet Culture Webinar Raise confident eaters without food battles, guilt, or diet culture. https://www.abbeyskitchen.com/coaching/ 📈 Business Coaching Build and grow your online brand with proven social media and business strategies. https://www.abbeyskitchen.com/coaching/ 🤝 Personalized One-on-One Coaching Tailored support for content creation, business growth, podcasting, AI, brand partnerships, and more. https://www.abbeyskitchen.com/coaching/ 📱 FOLLOW ME @AbbeysKitchen Instagram: www.instagram.com/AbbeysKitchen TikTok: www.tiktok.com/AbbeysKitchen Facebook: www.facebook.com/AbbeysKitchen Pinterest: https://ca.pinterest.com/AbbeysKitchen 🌐 VISIT MY WEBSITE Healthy recipes, nutrition resources, parenting advice, and evidence based articles. https://www.abbeyskitchen.com 💬 If you enjoyed this episode, please leave me a comment below with your thoughts and let me know what you'd like to see next! With Science & Sass, Xoxo Abbey 🌸 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 0:32Speaker 01

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• 1:00Abbey Sharp?

  What if the real story has less to do with whether you can pronounce an ingredient and much more to do with how easily you can eat the food?

• 1:12Abbey Sharp?

  Welcome to another episode of Bite Back with Abby Sharp, where I dismantle die culture rules, call out the shellacines spitting the pseudoscience, and help you achieve food freedom for good. In an age of nutrition information saturation and good food, bad food dogma, a trip to the grocery store may now feel like a game of toxin Russian roulette. Pick up a granola bar with an emulsifier or stabilizer in it, and you've apparently ruined your child's long-term health. Somehow, some way, we've gone from pretty reasonable nutrition advice like, "Hey babe, maybe a Coca-Cola and a gas station muffin isn't a great breakfast choice," to moms

• 1:55Abbey Sharp?

  feeling like they need to make cinnamon toast crunch from scratch because the store-bought one contains an ingredient that they can't pronounce. And I think we need to talk about this because evidence-based discussions around ultra-processed foods, or UPFs as we will now call them going forward, are a perfect example of two things being true at the same time. There is a legitimate scientific signal here that diets high in certain ultra-processed foods are associated with poor health outcomes. But the internet has taken that legitimate concern and stretched it into much, much bigger claims. That ultra-processing itself is inherently toxic.

• 2:40Abbey Sharp?

  That additives are destroying your gut. That food companies have somehow hacked your brain with Xanthan gum. And that a packaged whole-grain bread is nutritionally equivalent to a 2-liter bottle of soda because they both technically fall into the same NOVA category. And that is where the science gets a lot less clean. So today in part one of this ultra-processed foods exposé, we're going to be diving deep into the research to determine the actual role of additives and ultra-processed foods in chronic disease and obesity. Then, in part two, we're going to be getting even nerdier and ask what I think is the most interesting question of all.

• 3:24Abbey Sharp?

  If some UFPs really do make us eat more, what is it about these foods that's actually doing it? The texture, energy density, the food matrix, digestion, how many calories we actually absorb from these foods? Oh yes, friends, we are going there. Okay, friends, I'm so excited for this one. And I also want to thank all of you for joining me in this discussion. If you are new here, hello. Welcome to the Nerds Are Us Club. No, but seriously, if you love deep dives on controversial nutrition topics, you will absolutely want to subscribe or follow wherever you are listening or watching. And please also do check out my short-form content at Abbey's Kitchen if you want the calls notes or some extra Abbey sass. All right, let's get into it.

• 4:09Abbey Sharp?

  Okay, so to set the stage, I need to just kind of make it super clear that processing itself is not the villain. Freezing vegetables is processing. Pasteurizing milk is processing. Grinding peanuts into peanut butter is processing. Turning soybeans into tofu is processing. So in so many ways, processing often makes food safer, more nutritious, more affordable, more convenient, and more accessible. And personally, I'm very grateful for the option to throw a few protein bars in my car for snack emergencies rather than having to carry around a cooler of chicken breasts.

• 4:50Abbey Sharp?

  But when researchers talk about ultra-processed foods, they're generally using a classification system called NOVA. NOVA separates foods into four groups based on the extent and purpose of processing. At one end, you have unprocessed or minimally-processed foods. So fruits, vegetables, eggs, meat, milk, oats, beans. Then you have processed culinary ingredients like oils, butter, sugar, and salt. Then processed foods, which are generally fairly simple combinations of those first two food groups, like cheese, canned vegetables in a brine, or a basic bread made with flour, water, yeast, and salt. And then finally, NOVA Group 4, ultra-processed foods.

• 5:34Abbey Sharp?

  So these are generally industrial formulations made using substances extracted, refined, or derived from foods, often combined with flavorings, colors, emulsifier, sweeteners, or other additives used to modify texture, appearance, or flavor. They're typically designed to be convenient, shelf-stable, and ready to eat. So yes, soda, chips, packaged cookies, instant noodles, chicken nuggets, all can fit within this category. But depending on the formulation, so could a protein-enriched whole-grain bread, a fortified high-fiber cereal, a fortified soy milk, a bean-based veggie burger, or a low-sugar Greek yogurt. And this is our first problem.

• 6:17Abbey Sharp?

  Because I can make you a brownie at home with butter, white flour, and an ungodly amount of sugar, and it would not necessarily qualify as NOVA 4, while your fiber-rich fortified bran cereal might. That doesn't mean NOVA is useless. It means NOVA is telling us something about the extent and purpose of industrial processing, not giving us a complete assessment of nutritional quality. It's not a nutrient score, it's not a toxicity meter, and two foods can land in the same NOVA category while having dramatically different nutrient profiles. And that distinction becomes very important when we look at the seemingly scary research.

• 7:00Abbey Sharp?

  So the big question we all have is, do UPFs actually cause chronic disease? Well, if you only read the headlines, the answer would seem to be yes. All of them. Heart disease, diabetes, obesity, depression, cancer, dementia, early death. Pick an organ system, and there's probably a reel somewhere telling you that your Doritos are coming for it. And to be fair, there is an impressively consistent signal in the observational research. So one huge umbrella review published in the BMJ pulled together 45 different pooled analyses representing almost 10 million people.

• 7:41Abbey Sharp?

  Higher UPF exposure was associated with worse outcomes in 32 of those 45 analyses, spanning cardiometabolic disease, mortality, mental health, and several other health outcomes. And at first glance, that sounds terrifying. But this is where we need to separate the volume of evidence from the certainty of that evidence. When a BMJ umbrella review actually graded the certainty of the evidence, only four of those 45 analyses were rated moderate certainty. The remainder were either low or very low, and none were rated as high certainty. Now, part of that is simply how grade system works.

• 8:26Abbey Sharp?

  Observational evidence generally starts at a lower certainty rating, and several analyses were further limited by inconsistency, heterogeneity, or imprecision. But there is also a very real confounding problem. Someone who eats more UPFs may also eat fewer fruits and vegetables, less fiber, more sodium, and more added sugar. There can also be differences in income, work schedules, smoking, sleep, physical activity, education, food access, and healthcare between people with very different dietary patterns. Researchers do try to statistically adjust for these things, but you cannot perfectly math your way out of an entire lifestyle.

• 9:10Abbey Sharp?

  So I absolutely think this giant body of research is a signal worth taking seriously. What I don't think we can do is say with equal confidence that ultra-processed foods cause every condition that happened to show up in an epidemiological infographic. And there's another huge clue that the UPF category itself may be too broad to tell us the whole story. Researchers have started breaking NOVA 4 into actual food categories instead of throwing everything into one enormous UPF bucket. And this is where things get really interesting. In three large U.S. cohorts, total ultra-processed food consumption was associated with a higher

• 9:55Abbey Sharp?

  risk of developing type 2 diabetes. Okay, but when

• 10:00Abbey Sharp?

  Researchers separated the UPFs into different categories. The associations were not all going in the same direction. Refined breads, sauces, spreads artificially and sugar sweetened beverages, some animal-based products and ready-to-eat meals were associated with a higher diabetes risk. But ultra-processed whole-grain breads and cereals, fruit-based products and yogurt and dairy-based products were associated with a lower diabetes risk. Now, please do not go make a TikTok saying, "Abbey Sharp says flavored yogurts prevent diabetes." Absolutely not. This is still observational research, and someone choosing a high-fiber breakfast cereal may differ in 50 other ways

• 10:45Abbey Sharp?

  from someone consuming a liter of soda every day. Also, the replacement matters as well. Like, a veggie burger replacing lentils is one nutritional comparison. A veggie burger replacing processed red meat is another. But that heterogeneity is still extremely important. Because if foods inside the same processing category are associated with health outcomes in completely different directions, that's a pretty giant clue that NOVA classification alone does not tell us everything we need to know about an individual food. Which brings us back to one of the most demonized parts of the UPF conversation. A lot of the anti-processed food discourse on wellness talk

• 11:30Abbey Sharp?

  has pointed the finger at various additives as the root cause of UPF's supposed evil. The preservatives, the gums, the long list of ingredients you can't pronounce.

• 11:46Speaker 00

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• 12:18Speaker 01

  The action's on the court, and as the official beer sponsor of the NBA, Michelob Ultra is getting fans closer to the game with a chance to win courtside seats, merch, and more. Visit michelobultra.com/courtside to enter. Michelob Ultra Courtside, 26 to 27. No purchase necessary. Open to U.S. residents 21+.. Begins on October 1, 2026 and ends on June 30, 2027. Multiple entry periods. See official rules at michelobultra.com/courtside for free entry, entry deadlines, prizes, and details.

• 12:48Abbey Sharp?

  Now, first of all, pronunciation is one of the dumbest toxicology tests available to us. Like, cyanocobalamin is vitamin B12, and tocopherol is vitamin E. Like, come on. I refuse to grade my groceries on phonics alone. That said, not every additive in every quantity gets a lifetime free pass. There have been some studies demonstrating changes to the microbiome in response to the consumption of certain additives. So, for example, in one study, researchers saw some changes in microbial composition and reduced levels of short-chain fatty acids after consuming emulsifiers. But they did not see any differences

• 13:32Abbey Sharp?

  in systemic inflammation, intestinal inflammation, or the measured cardiometabolic markers. And while I know that sounds really scary, it is important to note that your microbiome is supposed to be dynamic. Change your diet even slightly, and you can see shifts in microbial population pretty quickly. So, the microbiome changed is not automatically synonymous with the microbiome was damaged. Now, that doesn't mean I'm dismissing the additive research. Like I said, there are some genuinely interesting and potentially concerning human signals. So, for example, one small randomized crossover trial

• 14:13Abbey Sharp?

  gave 20 men caraginin or a placebo for two weeks. Overall, caraginin did not significantly worsen insulin signaling across the entire group, but it did increase one measure of intestinal permeability, and researchers found signals suggesting poorer insulin sensitivity and greater inflammation amongst participants with higher BMIs. Interesting? Absolutely. But that subgroup signal in 20 men is a very long way from proving that caraginin causes diabetes. Another preservative called propionate has been shown in a 28-person crossover trial to acutely increase glucagon and catecholamines

• 14:57Abbey Sharp?

  involved in glucose counterregulation and, in some conditions, endogenous glucose production. Again, biologically very interesting, but not evidence that eating foods containing propionate causes weight gain or diabetes in humans. So while I don't think it's scientifically responsible to say every approved additive is completely biologically inert, concluding that additives as an entire class are proven to be driving obesity and chronic disease is way ahead of the evidence. So if it's not the additives, what else about UPFs could be at play? So this brings us to probably

• 15:39Abbey Sharp?

  the most famous experimental study in this field. In a 2019 randomized control trial, NIH researcher Kevin Hall had 20 adults live in a metabolic ward. For two weeks, they ate an ultra-processed diet, and then for another two weeks, they ate an unprocessed diet. The order was randomized, and the foods they were offered were designed to match for presented calories, macronutrients, sugar, sodium, and fiber. Most importantly, participants were told to eat as much or as little as you want. In the ultra-processed diet, people spontaneously ate about 500 more calories every single day. They gained about 2 pounds over two weeks, and then they lost about the same amount

• 16:24Abbey Sharp?

  when they ate the unprocessed diet. Unlike observational research, researchers manipulated the diet. So, under those conditions, the ultra-processed diet really did cause greater caloric intake. The question, though, became, why? Was it the additives? Was there some mysterious property of industrial processing that was hijacking their brains? Perhaps some unmeasured processing-related factor contributed? But Hall's study also contains some very important clues pointing towards much less exotic explanations. For example, although the overall presented diets were matched for energy density, that matching included beverages used

• 17:09Abbey Sharp?

  to deliver fiber in the UPF condition. When researchers looked only at the solid food, the UPF foods were about 85% more energy-dense than the unprocessed foods. People also ate the UPF meals substantially faster. So Hall showed us that something about these dietary patterns can profoundly influence how much people spontaneously eat. But he did not prove that the explanation was chemicals. The hunt for the real answer sparked the next wave of research. Now, in the real world, diets higher in UPFs also tend, on average, to contain less fiber and protein and more added sugar, saturated fat, and energy-dense foods.

• 17:52Abbey Sharp?

  So yes, many common UPFs give us less satiety or nutrient bang for our caloric buck. But, and this is very important, that alone cannot explain Hall's result. Because his presented diets were specifically matched for total fiber and macronutrients. So researchers started asking a much more interesting question. What if we make the UPFs healthier? Can you build a nutritionally respectable diet that is still predominantly ultra-processed? Enter the 2025 Update Trial. In this trial, 55 adults with overweight or obesity were randomized to eat both diets in a crossover design.

• 18:36Abbey Sharp?

  Eight weeks of a predominantly minimally-processed diet and eight weeks of a predominantly ultra-processed diet, with a washout in between. And here's what makes this study so useful. Both diets were deliberately constructed to follow the UK's Eat Well Guides with recommendations around fruits and vegetables, fiber, fat, saturated fat, sugar, and salt. So it's not like we're comparing homemade lentil soup with Coke and Doritos here. We are asking whether you can construct a nutritionally respectable diet that still contains a lot of NOVA4 foods. Now, as with Hall's trial, they ate as much as they wanted, and after eight weeks, both groups lost weight. About 2% on the minimally-processed diet

• 19:21Abbey Sharp?

  and 1% on the ultra-processed diet. The equivalent of about a 1-kilogram difference. So yes, the minimally-processed diet condition produced a bit more weight loss, but the UPF diet was hardly the metabolic apocalypse that TikTok promised. People eating the UPF diet still lost weight and saw reductions in LDL cholesterol and fasting glucose. To me, that tells us something really important. Nutritional quality clearly still matters within the UPF category. A diet does not automatically become metabolically disastrous because the foods are technically highly-processed.

• 20:04Abbey Sharp?

  But I also wouldn't take "update" to mean processing is irrelevant. Because people did lose more weight and spontaneously consume about 327 fewer calories per day on the minimally-processed diet. So there may still be something about these foods that isn't fully captured by standard nutrient guidelines. The update also did not perfectly isolate ultra-processing either. The diets still differed in characteristics like energy density and physical food structure. So we cannot look at that one percentage point difference in weight loss and say...

• 20:43Speaker 03

  Aha, it was the emulsifiers.

• 20:45Abbey Sharp?

  The trial tells us that these two dietary patterns behaved differently. It does not tell us exactly which feature caused that difference. And that is where I'm going to leave you with today. Because I think this sets up what I think is actually the most interesting part of the entire UPF story. So where does that leave us with right now? This is what I think we can confidently say from part one. Number one, ultra-processed foods are a real concept that can be useful for studying our modern food environment. Two, high UPF dietary patterns are consistently associated with poor health outcomes. And in at least one highly controlled

• 21:28Abbey Sharp?

  experiment, a particular ultra-processed dietary pattern caused people to spontaneously eat dramatically more calories and gain weight. That deserves attention. But number three, NOVA 4 is an enormously and nutritionally heterogeneous category. A soft drink and a fiber-rich fortified cereal can both qualify. Observational associations differ depending on which UPF category we are actually talking about. Number four, the human evidence around individual additives is very interesting, but nowhere near strong enough to support Blaken's statements that emulsifiers, or gums, or preservatives are driving the chronic disease epidemic.

• 22:12Abbey Sharp?

  And we can construct a predominantly ultra-processed diet that still satisfies healthy eating guidelines and produces weight loss and improvements in some metabolic markers. So the question is no longer simply, are ultra-processed foods bad? The much better question is, what characteristics of some ultra-processed foods might actually be responsible for the effects we're seeing? Because what if the real story has less to do with whether you can pronounce an ingredient, and much more to do with how easily you can eat the food? How energy dense it is? How much chewing it requires? How processing changes the physical structure of food?

• 22:54Abbey Sharp?

  Or even how many of those calories our digestive system and microbiome can actually access? And that is exactly where we're going in part two. We're talking eating rate, texture, the food matrix, digestion, the microbiome, and one absolutely wild study showing that changing the physical form of essentially the same food can substantially change the number of calories that your body extracts from it. And spoiler, the answer is a hell of a lot more interesting than

• 23:27Speaker 03

  Xanthan gum made me fat.

• 23:29Abbey Sharp?

  But if you enjoyed this deep dive, make sure you subscribe so that you do not miss out on part two. Leave me a comment and tell me where you currently land on the UPF debate. And if you have a friend who's currently terrified that their supermarket bread is poisoning them, maybe some of this episode. I don't know. But until next time, signing off with Science and SaaS, I'm Abbey Sharp. Thanks for listening. And here's the legal language here, folks. But everything that you saw or heard in this episode is for entertainment and educational purposes only. It is never a replacement for medical advice. So I always recommend working one-on-one with a healthcare provider for your unique needs.

• 24:08Speaker 04

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