Americans Keep Eating Highly Processed Foods Despite Healthier Options

It turns out that despite encouragement to eat fresher foods and choose healthier options, people still gravitate back toward foods that aren't exactly good for them. Scientists have conducted a nation-wide analysis of U.S. grocery purchases and have found that highly processed foods make up more than 60 percent of the calories in food we buy.

"Many Americans have strongly held opinions and beliefs about processed foods," said Jennifer Poti, one of the researchers, in a news release. "Some consider processed foods to be tasty, convenient and affordable choices while others contend that the combination of sugar, fat, salt and flavoring in these foods promotes overeating and contributes to obesity. But until now, we didn't really have the evidence needed to settle this debate: No prior studies have examined whether highly processed foods collectively have a worse nutritional profile than minimally processed foods, using nutrition information and ingredient lists specific for barcoded food and beverage products."

In this latest study, the researchers asked over 150,000 households to use UPC barcode scanners to record all food and beverages they purchased from grocery stores for at least one year. Although items without barcodes were not included, the packaged produce such as bagged lettuce and pints of berries could be scanned. Over the average course of four years, households purchased 1.2 million items. The researchers linked each item to its nutrition information, product description and ingredient list, allowing them to rank each product's degree of processing.

"Overall, we found that not only are highly processed foods a dominant, stable part of U.S. purchasing patterns, but also that the highly-processed foods that households are purchasing are higher in fat, sugar, and salt, on average, compared to the less-processed foods that they buy," said Poti. "The unshifting dominance of ultra-processed and ready-to-eat foods as major calorie contributors to the U.S. diet and their poor nutrient profile support the need to incentivize food manufacturers to improve the nutritional quality of their products."

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