The way we eat desperately needs to change. Experts estimate diet is a bigger contributor globally to early death than smoking. In America, nearly half the adult population has Type 2 diabetes or pre-diabetes.

If you have been following recent headlines, it may seem like there’s a single culprit: ultraprocessed foods. These industrially produced foods with weird, hard-to-pronounce ingredients that you can’t find in your kitchen have been linked to Type 2 diabetes, depression, heart attacks and Alzheimer’s disease. They are “driving the obesity epidemic,” according to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., president-elect Donald Trump’s pick for health and human services secretary.

It may come as a surprise, then, that an expert committee of scientists advising on the federal government’s dietary guidelines (the set of recommendations, released every five years, that shapes nutrition education and school lunches, among other things) recently declined to take a strong position against ultraprocessed foods. The experts felt that there wasn’t enough reliable science to draw accurate conclusions.

They were right about that. The problem is that the category of ultraprocessed foods, which makes up about 60 percent of the American diet by some estimates, is so broad that it borders on useless. It lumps store-bought whole-grain bread and hummus in with cookies, potato chips and soda. While many ultraprocessed foods are associated with poor health, others, like breakfast cereals and yogurt, aren’t.

Processing can also create products suitable for people with food intolerances or ones that have a lower environmental footprint. (Full disclosure: I have consulted for food companies that I feel make beneficial products, including Beyond Meat, which makes ultraprocessed meat alternatives that I believe are better for the planet.)

The most famous study on ultraprocessed foods was a randomized trial conducted by the National Institutes of Health, which compared an unprocessed diet, high in fresh fruits and vegetables, to a diet made up of ultraprocessed foods, but matched the amount of salt, sugar and fiber in the diets. The findings: People consumed about 500 calories more per day and gained more weight on the ultraprocessed diet. If it wasn’t the salt, sugar or fiber, what caused people to eat more?

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But the move backfired in a way that few supporters expected. Californians in 2021 actually tossed nearly 50 percent more plastic bags, by weight, than when the law first passed in 2014, according to data from CalRecycle, California’s recycling agency.

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