Your Overall Diet May Matter More Than Processed Labels

Take It With a Grain of Salt: You’ve probably already heard the concerns about ultra-processed foods (UPFs) and their potential impact on your health. Headlines connect UPFs to just about every chronic disease out there, so it’s easy to start viewing anything that comes from a package as automatically bad. However, a new Harvard study suggests that your overall diet quality may matter more than whether the foods you eat are ultra-processed. 

The Study: Researchers followed more than 200,000 adults for decades, tracking their diets alongside chronic disease and death. They sorted participants into four groups based on diet quality and processing level, then compared health outcomes across all four. People in the healthy groups had lower risk no matter how processed their food was. People in the unhealthy groups had higher risk, again regardless of processing level.

The Takeaway: Your risk isn’t determined by whether something came from a package, as foods like fortified cereal or plant-based yogurt can still fit into a healthy diet even though they may count as ultra-processed. So don’t worry about granola bars so much; instead, pay attention to how nutrient-dense your diet is as a whole.  

Keep in Mind: Most foods that would count as unhealthy are still ultra-processed, so the label still tells you something, just not everything.