- Ultraprocessed foods make up 43% of American grocery purchases, with lower-income households buying significantly more despite their association with numerous health risks
- Research links ultraprocessed food consumption to 32 health conditions including heart disease, obesity, sleep issues, depression, anxiety, and metabolic dysfunction
- These products damage your health through alterations, chemical additives, and packaging that leaches endocrine-disrupting chemicals into the food itself
- Higher consumption creates a dose-dependent health risk. Each additional serving increases chances of developing chronic diseases and metabolic problems
- To improve health, minimize linoleic acid (LA) intake, rebuild gut health with whole foods, eat healthy carbohydrates, and shop wisely by choosing real food
(Mercola)—When you visit the grocery store, you’ll see hundreds of boxes and bottles lined up nicely all vying for your attention and money. While they’re tempting to try, these ultraprocessed foods and drinks put your health at risk.
Ultraprocessed foods are designed to be cost-efficient, convenient, and addictive, but unfortunately, not many people are aware of their effects. According to research, majority of the purchases made by consumers nowadays are ultraprocessed foods and drinks.
Ultraprocessed Foods Flood American Groceries and Stomachs
A study published in Public Health Nutrition analyzed nationwide grocery scanner data to reveal how much ultraprocessed foods are making their way into American homes, and which groups are most affected. Pulling data from 59,939 households that collectively scanned 33,054,687 products during 2020, the researchers were able to identify the purchasing habits of consumers across the United States.1
- A snapshot of consumer demographics — The population sample included a broad range, representing all U.S. census regions, income levels, and ethnic backgrounds. What stood out was that purchases weren’t evenly distributed — lower-income households and those with less education bought a significantly higher share of ultraprocessed foods.
- The study pulled back the curtain on the quantity of purchases — It’s mostly packaged, ready-to-eat products that have been heavily refined, stripped of nutrients, and pumped full of additives. Across the entire population, 43% of all scanned items were classified as ultraprocessed. Broken down further, 48% of all foods and 38% of all beverages fell into this category.
- The worst offenders — Sodas topped the ultraprocessed list with a shocking 90% while mixed dishes and soups came in at 81%. Meanwhile, sweets and snacks followed at 71%. Minimally processed categories like fruits and vegetables only accounted for about 12% of all purchases. In other words, real food is being pushed away.
- Not all demographic differences were as dramatic as income and education — When sorted by ethnic groups, non-Hispanic White households purchased slightly more ultraprocessed foods than Hispanic, non-Hispanic Black, and other households.
However, these differences were marginal — generally under 3%. So, while income and education clearly play a dominant role, cultural factors appear less influential at the national level.
- The COVID-19 pandemic influenced consumer habits — In 2020, lockdowns and fear-based messaging about the COVID-19 virus led to fewer grocery trips, shifting consumers toward shelf-stable foods and a spike in at-home eating.
These conditions were tailor-made for ultraprocessed foods. They’re cheap, have a long expiry date, and require little to no preparation. But these short-term conveniences have long-term costs on public health.
- Disadvantaged groups are bearing the brunt — Lower-income and less-educated households are more vulnerable to chronic disease. In other words, the very groups that need better food the most are the ones being flooded with the worst options.
To shift the trajectory, the solution isn’t just education — it’s reforming what’s offered in the first place and making real food affordable for everyone. Still, being aware is a good first step. Recognizing how Big Ag and its allies engineered and manipulated the food supply allows you to see the signs and not fall for their traps.
Eating Ultraprocessed Foods Puts You at Risk for 32 Conditions
The featured Public Health Nutrition study outlines just how much ultraprocessed food is found in many households across America. Now, a study published in The BMJ shows the implications of eating these products for your health.2
Researchers evaluated the impact of ultraprocessed food consumption on human health by reviewing 45 published meta-analyses involving 9,888,373 participants worldwide. Specifically, they sought to determine how strong the connection is between eating ultraprocessed foods and developing chronic illnesses, mental health problems, and dying earlier than expected.
- Your risk for chronic diseases increases in a dose-dependent manner — Ultraprocessed food consumption showed strong associations with worsening health outcomes throughout the reviewed database. Essentially, the higher the proportion of ultraprocessed food in the diet, the worse your health will become. This held true whether someone was dealing with obesity, cardiovascular problems, anxiety, depression, or didn’t have any of those conditions.
- A closer look at the numbers — The study found “convincing” evidence that eating more ultraprocessed foods is linked to a 50% increase in the risk of dying from heart-related causes, but that’s not all the researchers found. They noted that each time you increase your servings of ultraprocessed foods, your risk for developing other chronic diseases increases:
“Across the pooled analyses, greater exposure to ultra-processed foods, whether measured as higher versus lower consumption, additional servings per day, or a 10% increment, was consistently associated with a higher risk of adverse health outcomes (71% of outcomes).”3
- Eating ultraprocessed foods puts you at risk for dozens of health issues — The researchers uncovered evidence linking ultraprocessed foods to a whopping 32 conditions, such as obesity, sleep issues, depression, anxiety, and respiratory problems like wheezing:
“Overall, direct associations were found between exposure to ultra-processed foods and 32 (71%) health parameters spanning mortality, cancer, and mental, respiratory, cardiovascular, gastrointestinal, and metabolic health outcomes.”4
- Ultraprocessed foods erode your metabolic health — The study also highlighted patterns of health deterioration linked to ultraprocessed food consumption. For example, strong correlations between ultraprocessed food consumption and metabolic dysfunction, including insulin resistance, and obesity, were noted.
- What makes ultraprocessed foods damaging — The researchers pointed out that the synthetic nature of ultraprocessed foods is dangerous to your health:
“The adverse health outcomes associated with ultra-processed foods may not be fully explained by their nutrient composition and energy density alone but also by physical and chemical properties associated with industrial processing methods, ingredients, and by-products.
Firstly, alterations in the food matrix during intensive processing, also known as dietary reconstitution, may affect digestion, nutrient absorption, and feelings of satiety. Secondly, emerging evidence in humans shows links between exposure to additives, including non-sugar sweeteners, emulsifiers, colorants, and nitrates/nitrites, and detrimental health outcomes.”5
- Your gut microbiome is compromised — Ultraprocessed foods are loaded with additives, emulsifiers, and preservatives not found in nature and were never part of the human diet. Unsurprisingly, these products wreak havoc on your gut health:
“A recent review of experimental research found that ultra-processed weight loss formulations composed of ostensibly balanced nutrient profiles but containing different additives, including non-sugar sweeteners, may have adverse effects on the gut microbiome — which is thought to play an important function in many of the diseases studied here — and related inflammation.”6
- The packaging is also part of the problem — Ultraprocessed foods are usually wrapped in materials that leach endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) like phthalates and bisphenols into the food.
These compounds mimic hormones and disrupt the body’s endocrine signaling, affecting everything from mood to metabolism to reproductive health. It’s not just what’s in the food you need to worry about — it’s also the other chemicals the food absorbed by the time you eat it.
Taken together, these mechanisms eventually take a toll on public health, leading to increasing rates of chronic disease. The more (and longer) you eat ultraprocessed foods, the more your core biological processes break down — gut microbiome, mitochondrial function, hormonal balance — are affected. Therefore, the most obvious path is ditching these mass-produced goods for real, whole foods.
Take Control of Your Diet to Restore Your Health
Ultraprocessed foods are everywhere, and most people don’t even realize how much they’re eating. Grocery stores are purposely laid out to push these products, and food companies spend billions on advertising to keep you hooked. But once you understand how these foods damage your health, it’s easy to stop the assault on your system. That said, here are my recommendations to optimize your health:
1. Minimize your intake of linoleic acid (LA) — If you’re eating out, grabbing snacks, or using store-bought sauces, you’re likely consuming too much LA. This fat lurks in vegetable oils like soybean, canola, sunflower, and safflower. When you eat foods cooked in LA, they accumulate in your fat stores and leak toxic breakdown products that harm your cells. I recommend removing vegetable oils from your pantry and avoiding any product with “vegetable oil” or its related ingredients on the label. Instead, cook with tallow, ghee, coconut oil, or grass fed butter. It’s also wise to track your LA intake using an app like Food Buddy in my Health Coach, which is coming out this year. Keep it down to less than 5 grams a day, but if you can lower down to less than 2 grams, that’s even better.
2. Rebuild your gut health — Ultraprocessed foods destroy gut integrity by disrupting your microbiome and wearing down your intestinal barrier. I recommend you build and diversify your gut bacteria by slowly reintroducing whole fruit with pulp and fibrous veggies. If you have compromised gut function, start drinking blended fruit juice (with pulp), as this provides your gut bacteria with the necessary nutrients they need to flourish. Then, you can slowly progress to real fruits and vegetables. For a more in-depth look at doing this properly, read “How Juicing Affects Your Gut and Oral Microbiome.”
3. Eat healthy carbohydrates to heal your gut — In relation to the point above, I recommend eating healthy sources of carbohydrates to reduce your endotoxin load. These are poisonous byproducts that certain gut bacteria release when your microbiome is out of balance, especially when you eat ultraprocessed food. Start slowly by introducing whole fruits, well-cooked root vegetables, and small amounts of well-tolerated cooked starches. If your gut health is compromised, avoid raw greens and high-fiber grains until your gut is in top shape.
4. Your guide to healthy gut function — Optimal gut health creates a strong foundation for the rest of your body. To know if you’re on the right path, here are five good indicators, according to Ashley Armstrong:
- Regular bowel movements (one to three times daily)
- Minimal bloating or discomfort
- The ability to digest a wide variety of food
- Good energy levels
- Proper nutrient absorption
5. Shop the perimeter and ignore the noise — Grocery stores are set up to trick you. The outer perimeter is where you’ll find actual food — fresh fruit, vegetables, meat, and dairy. The middle aisles are a minefield of boxes, bags, and bottles engineered to hijack your appetite.
When you shop, start with real ingredients. If you don’t recognize every word on a label, skip it. You’re not buying “food.” Take back your food freedom by choosing products that don’t need a label at all.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) About Ultraprocessed Foods
Q: What are ultraprocessed foods and why are they harmful?
A: Ultraprocessed foods are industrial products made mostly from substances extracted or derived from food, plus chemical additives. They’re stripped of nutrients, loaded with vegetable oils, additives, preservatives, and emulsifiers, and they’re engineered to be addictive. Regular consumption is strongly linked to chronic diseases like Type 2 diabetes, heart disease, depression, and obesity.
Q: How much of the typical American diet is made up of ultraprocessed foods?
A: According to nationwide grocery data, 43% of all purchased food and beverages are ultraprocessed. Lower-income and less-educated households buy the highest share, often out of necessity or convenience.
Q: What are the long-term health risks of eating ultraprocessed foods?
A: Eating more ultraprocessed food increases your risk of dying from heart disease by 50% and raises your chances of developing diabetes by 12% with every 10% increase in consumption. These foods are also linked to 32 other health issues, including cancer, poor sleep, respiratory problems, anxiety, and metabolic dysfunction.
Q: How do these foods damage your body beyond just poor nutrition?
A: The damage goes far deeper than missing nutrients. Additives and emulsifiers disrupt your gut microbiome, packaging chemicals disrupt your hormones, and the food structure itself overstimulates your metabolism. These factors work together to create inflammation, insulin resistance, and mitochondrial stress that weaken your overall health.
Q: What steps can I take to avoid ultraprocessed foods?
A: Start by removing vegetable oils and processed snacks from your home. Rebuild your gut with whole fruits, healthy carbs, and cooked vegetables. Track your LA intake and aim for less than 5 grams a day (less than 2 grams is the ideal range). In addition, shop wisely by avoiding anything with unrecognizable ingredients. Remember — real foods are better for your health.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.