Foods Processed with Ultra-Smart Methods
Paul VanRaden
December 14, 2025
The U.S. government announced
a plan to investigate and better define ultra-processed
foods (UPF), which include processed meats and most sliced breads, both of
which have I eaten every day for decades. When testifying to Congress to become
the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F
Kennedy, Jr told us that they (UPF) are poison. My nutrition research tries
to benefit all people, but mostly poorer people, and I wanted to learn if my
diet is poison. Many nutritionists say
we should buy “foods that have only a few pronounceable, recognizable
ingredients.” The more I read about food processing, the more wrong the false
statements from the Secretary of Health seem. The best article was from authors
in Bangladesh and Indonesia who take food even more seriously than I do, and
they believe in science much more than does RFK, Jr.
Food gives you the energy and nutrients you need to live a
healthy life. The goal of processing is to get nutrients from the farm to you
without spoiling and in a form easy to store, easy to prepare, easy to eat,
with pleasant flavor, and little waste. For about 30 years, I always position my
cereal boxes side by side with their nutrition facts and ingredient lists
facing me. Since 2015, each label says “Trans fat = 0 grams” after the
U.S. Food and Drug Administration banned trans-fat as an ingredient in food
because it clogged arteries. Some countries banned or limited trans-fat before
the U.S. and about 60
countries now do. The bans may have reduced
heart attacks and strokes by 6%. Over 20 years, U.S. consumers may benefit
by $140 billion at cost of $5 billion to food processors. Scientists carefully
study which ingredients help or hurt us.
Give us this day our
daily bread
My nutrition research goal is to get the most value per dollar of food.
Two years ago I switched from whole wheat to 12-grain bread because the
calories per dollar were similar, but the 12-grain bread had 3 grams protein
per slice whereas whole wheat had only 2 grams. But after rechecking my math,
the 12-grain bread was a silly mistake because the 12-grain slices were bigger
and cost more per slice. Whole wheat bread beats 12-grain bread on both calorie
cost (678 vs. 618 calories/$) and fiber cost (23 vs. 19 grams/$). For several
decades I have not bought white bread because it has < 1 gram of fiber per
slice and my diet needs more fiber.
The whole wheat bread in my refrigerator has these
ingredients: whole wheat flour, water, brown sugar, wheat gluten, yeast, contains 2% or less
of each of the following: salt, soybean oil, cultured wheat flour, dough
conditioners, vinegar, monocalcium phosphate, and soy lecithin. Dough conditioners
contain one or more of the following: sodium stearoyl lactylate, calcium
stearoyl lactylate, mono and diglycerides, calcium peroxide, calcium iodate,
datem, enzymes, and ascorbic acid. That lets the baker switch ingredients
depending on price or supply without printing new labels when the dough
conditioner changes a little. Some bakers replace
the dough conditioner emulsifiers listed above with enzymes because those
sound better to consumers even if current ingredients are all known to safe and
helpful.
The 12-grain bread had those same ingredients plus 14 more
grain products: flax seeds, rye meal, rolled oatmeal, barley flakes, triticale
flour, sunflower seeds, hulled millet, Khorasan wheat flour, whole milled
yellow corn, whole rye flour, brown rice flour, buckwheat flour, toasted
amaranth flour, whole spelt flour (wheat). It also included canola oil and
raisin juice concentrate.
The rule about fewer ingredients is not useful. I always
prefer buying foods with several vitamins and minerals mixed in so I do not
need to take them separately. Along with durum semolina wheat, my enriched
spaghetti includes niacin, ferrous sulfate, thiamin mononitrate, riboflavin,
and folic acid as the only added ingredients. Some consumers may not realize
that those are just vitamins and minerals that we all need. The 12-grain bread
I bought was tastier, but taste does not count in my diet. This week I am back
to fewer ingredients and just wheat not by choice, but by slightly lower cost.
But man cannot live by bread alone (Matthew 4:4).
Processed meats
One slice of bologna and one hot dog have been in my daily
diet since the early 1980s when I moved out of the college dormitory. Bologna
has these ingredients listed: mechanically separated
chicken, water, corn syrup, modified food starch, pork, contains 2% or less
of: potassium lactate, salt, dextrose, sodium phosphates, sodium
diacetate, beef, garlic powder, sodium erythorbate, sodium nitrite, spice
extractives including onion, and sodium lactate. Hotdogs have these
ingredients listed: mechanically separated chicken, pork, water, beef, salt,
corn syrup solids, modified corn starch, sodium
phosphate, paprika, onion powder, garlic
powder, sugar, sodium erythorbate, potassium acetate
and diacetate, paprika
extract, sodium nitrite, sodium bicarbonate, and
propylene glycol.
Beef and pork always require mechanical separation using an
electric saw to split the carcass into its left and right halves. Chickens have
smaller muscles and bones, so using machines
to separate the bones is much more affordable than hiring people to do that
repetitive work by hand. Often, the most expensive cuts of meat are sold
separately, and the smaller pieces are combined into nuggets, hot dogs, or
bologna. If you are rich, you can afford the best cuts of meat. If you are
poor, you may still be able to afford the leftover parts that I eat. Nearly
100% of the foods that I buy get eaten, not wasted, because they are
scientifically designed not to spoil quickly.
Sodium nitrite is an antioxidant that prevents oxidation and
prevents food poisoning (botulism). The following paragraphs are based on a
complete scientific review of 84 articles from Shakil et al (2022).
They stated: “Regular nitric oxide and nitrite production may help to prevent
cardiovascular diseases like hypertension, atherosclerosis, and stroke… An
acceptable daily intake (ADI) of 0.07 mg nitrite per kg of body weight was set
by… the World Health Organization (WHO)… Usually, 10–15 ppm of residual nitrite
is recommended… No evidence has been found to support the connection between
cancer risk and processed meats consumption. Only high exposure to nitrites
from various sources has been attributed to the elevated risk of health
problems”. Cooking hotdogs >130 degrees C can cause harmful nitrosamines,
but my hotdogs only get boiled <100 degrees, not grilled, and seem very
safe.
Sodium phosphate, sodium erythorbate, potassium acetate and
diacetate, sodium bicarbonate, and propylene glycol are all listed as common,
safe ingredients by FDA. “Lactate,
sorbate, acetate, and benzoate are some important organic acids that have been
widely used as food additives for many years. The rationale for employing
organic acids is that they have the potential to lower pH to a level that
prevents bacteria from proliferating… The most important impact of sodium
lactate in meats is its capability to extend the shelf life... by 1 to 2 weeks
or up to 3 or 4 times longer when refrigerated… Sorbate, propionate, and
benzoate are commonly recorded as ‘safe additives’ and… prevent the growth of
mold in numerous foods.”
“No
single alternative that provides the multi-functions of nitrite in meat
products has yet been found. The employment of ‘hurdle technology’ in meat
curing is one proposed solution to this issue where low amounts of nitrite are
mixed with other ingredients.” So, to keep cured meat from spoiling, processors
could add more ingredients, not fewer. “Nitrate is abundant in leafy green
vegetables. Vegetables such as celery, lettuce, cress, spinach, rucola, etc.,
have been found to contain more than 2500 mg nitrate/kg. As nitrate can be
reduced to nitrite by several microorganisms, these vegetables can be utilized
as a partial or whole alternative to chemical nitrite in meat curing.” If you
eat vegetables, your stomach may convert the nitrate into nitrite anyway, but
without the benefit of reducing spoiling or extending shelf life.
“Treatment with high pressure (100–800 MPa) is used uniformly
to meat products at moderate temperature (less than
45 °C) as an anti-microbial process with the purpose of extending the shelf
life… The cell membrane of microorganisms is most vulnerable to pressure
damage.” This pressure
post-processing is now being used for many meat products that previously
were difficult to store. Fewer additives may be needed when pressure treatment
is used, leading to even fewer food recalls.
Food recalls for UPF have been less often than for fresh
products. Cucumbers, onions in hamburgers, liverwurst, and chocolate bars with
mushrooms each had major
recalls in 2024. Very few people die directly from contaminated foods, but
a few thousand of the 300 million Americans may get sick each year. One source
listed the 19
biggest single recalls by food volume being peanuts, ice cream, peanut
butter, ground turkey, chicken, chicken and turkey, frozen hamburgers, pot
pies, cookie dough, frozen chicken nuggets, cereal, eggs, salad, salad, humus,
flour, cantaloupes, frozen vegetables, and pasta salad. Large recalls of UPF
are rare.
Joey
Chestnut has won many hotdog eating contests by eating about 70 hotdogs and
white bread buns in 12 minutes without getting sick. I would not recommend
eating so many, but he did for about 20 years including this year and still
seems healthy, so processed meats for sure are not poison. Even very large
doses can be ok.
Cereals and prepared
dinners
The cereals that I buy have very simple ingredient lists
except that the shredded wheat includes tocopherols (vitamin E) to maintain
freshness and the oat circles have calcium carbonate for thickening
and trisodium phosphate to stabilize the pH or to help the ingredients blend.
The 6 or 7 added vitamins and minerals added to each cereal are listed
separately after the ingredients which speeds viewing at the grocery store.
Cereal in a box should not qualify as UPF or poison.
The macaroni and cheese package lists vitamins and minerals
twice: once in the enriched macaroni ingredients and once in the enriched wheat
flour added. The cheese seasoning package has 13 ingredients: dairy solids,
whey, salt, modified corn starch, natural flavors, contains 2% or less of: annatto
extract added for color, soybean oil to reduce dusting,
cheddar cheese powder made of pasteurized milk, cheese culture, salt, enzymes, sodium
phosphate, and silicon dioxin to reduce caking. The added explanations help show that
extra ingredients help the processing and improve the final result. This
prepared dinner would surely be called UPF, but all of its ingredients are
safe, much cheaper, and will keep much longer than including fresh cheese.
My pasta sauce has ingredients: tomato paste, water, diced
tomatoes, tomato juice, citric acid, calcium chloride,
sugar, contains 2% or less of beef, beef stock, soybean oil, salt, garlic,
onion powder, yeast extract, parsley flakes, and spices. Again, citric acid and
calcium chloride are common food ingredients with no known harm when added to
preserve or change the firmness of foods. This pasta sauce might be considered
UPF but is mainly just 1 preserved vegetable with flavors added. I do not plan
to grow and process and can my own tomatoes like my family did when I was 12.
Those were kind of plain and would not have sold well. I may stop buying pasta
sauce because its calories are the most expensive food I buy.
Milk and ice cream
The whole milk that I buy has 2 ingredients: milk and vitamin
D. Processors first test the milk from every farm every day to make sure it
contains no antibiotics and they pay a premium for healthier milk as measured
by somatic cell counts. Processing plants then remove a little of the butterfat
since cows now make milk averaging about 4.7% fat but the standard is 3.5%.
Processors then homogenize the milk to keep the cream dispersed instead of
always rising to the top and then pasteurize it, raising the temperature very
briefly, and then refrigerate the milk again.
Pasteurization kills germs that could make the milk spoil or
make you ill but that is way
too much processing for RFK, Jr who also promotes drinking unprocessed, raw
milk. Research at the Centers for Disease Control and FDA “shows that people
are 800 times more likely to become infected drinking raw milk rather than
pasteurized milk.” The Secretary of Health does not mind if you or he gets
sick. In the 1960s and 1970s, my family pasteurized the milk we drank from our
own cows but did not homogenize it. Our family of 8 often kept 2 gallons in our
refrigerator and let the cream rise to the top. Then we dipped the cream from
one gallon into the other so some of us (mostly the girls) could choose skim
milk, and some (mostly the boys) could choose 7% butterfat milk, or we would
make ice cream.
The ice cream ingredients are skim
milk, cream, sugar, corn syrup, pecan pieces roasted in cottonseed oil, butter,
and salt, whey, contains 1% or less of natural flavors,
locust bean gum, guar gum, carrageenan, annatto (color), and caramel (color).
All of those are normal, safe ingredients. Ice cream is almost as affordable
per calorie as whole milk simply because of its nutrient density. Whole milk
includes about 85% water and thus has more cost to transport from the cow to
me, analogous to drinking orange juice from concentrate vs. hauling the orange
juice or oranges to you.
Is ice cream an ultra-processed food? Does UPF mean anything
useful? The whole idea sounds useless to me. Too much or too little processing
of cow feed does make a difference. Fiber length and not just fiber quantity
affects rumination and how often cows will chew their cud, which help their
digestion. My parents sometimes told us kids to slow down and chew our food,
but our cooked food requires much less chewing than raw hay does to get all the
nutrients. Cows ultra-process their feed by chewing it 8 or more hours per day.
Human diets should have some fiber, some protein, vitamins, and minerals, and
each food package reports how much you get.
Any number of safe ingredients can be mixed and still be
safe, unless they chemically interact. Some nutritionists complain that UPF are
so tasty that they are addictive, but that seems separate from any issue about
processing. That is like blaming Colonel Sanders that his secret blend of 14
herbs and spices is too tasty. Shame on him. I could buy cooked chicken with or
without the spices if it was cheaper than hot dogs and bologna, but those are
both very easy to prepare at home and keep longer.
RFK, Jr.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. showed in 2014 that he wants totally
unprocessed food even if he does not eat it. He found a road-killed bear,
put it in the trunk of his car, went to a fancy dinner, decided not to butcher
the bear, and dumped it in New York City’s Central Park and wasted other
people’s time in trying to solve the mystery. He has no direct training in
health and was a long-time illegal drug user. In 2010, doctors found a tapeworm
in his brain, which is a rare condition in the U.S., probably because he ate
uncooked meat or roadkill. RFK, Jr has helped improve laws and win court cases
to protect the environment and prevent pollution, but his conspiracy theories
such as UPF seem more like a wild goose chase at best, or a dead bear hunt at
worst.
In 2024, RFK, Jr. ran as a Democratic candidate for U.S.
president, then as an independent and asked both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump
for a high federal job in exchange for endorsing either of them. Getting his 1%
or 2% of the votes could have changed the election result. Previously he had called Trump a
"terrible human being", a "discredit to democracy", and
"probably a sociopath" but then endorsed Trump to receive a job
that he was not qualified for. Many
of RFK, Jr’s own family agree that he is now destroying the U.S.
government’s health system while he also helps destroy the environment by
ignoring global warming and climate science. A few people can make a living
just from their name, but in the process, RFK, Jr. is damaging the good image
his father had.
Conclusions
I was addicted to 12-grain bread and had a 1-loaf-per-week
habit this past year. But after recalculating its cost per gram of fiber and
cost per calorie, I returned to 1-grain whole wheat bread this week. I miss the
taste of ultra-processed 12-grain bread but feel better now that I only support
the wheat farmers and not those growers of less efficient grains. Some modern
food has so many tasty ingredients that you can eat too much. Whether 12-grain
or 1-grain, I always limit myself to 2 slices of bread, 1 slice of bologna, 1
cooked hotdog, and 1 serving of ice cream per day.
Instead of following gut instinct or your taste buds, you can
study science to understand nutrition better. Eating too many or too few
calories or too much sugar or junk food can cause poor health. Advanced science
has made processed foods very safe, affordable, nutritious, and convenient.
Food processing helps feed the world and may be the greatest thing since sliced
bread.
Return to Human
Nutrition for the Hungry
References
What
Are Ultra-Processed Foods?
RFK Jr. Says
Ultra-Processed Foods are 'Poison'
HHS,
FDA and USDA Address the Health Risks of Ultra-Processed Foods | USDA
U.S. Food
and Drug Administration. 2015. The
FDA takes step to remove artificial trans fats in processed foods. U.S.
Department of Health and Human Services, U.S. Food and Drug Administration, FDA
News Release, June 16.
Trans
Fat: What It Is and Why It’s Harmful
Trans fat regulation
- Wikipedia
Trans
Fat Bans Linked to Reduction in Heart Attack and Stroke - 2017
Trans
Fat Nearly Eliminated From All U.S. Food - NYC Food Policy Center
Replacing
Emulsifiers With Enzymes for Clean Label, Cost‑Effective Dough
Improvement
Mechanically
Separated Poultry – American Meat Association
What
Is Mechanically Separated Chicken? - Chef's Resource
Nitrites in Cured
Meats, Health Risk Issues, Alternatives to Nitrites: A Review - PMC
HPP
for Cooked Meats: Revolutionizing Food Quality and Safety - Hiperbaric
RFK
Jr. isn't making raw milk advocates happy | Food Safety News
Food
Recalls in 2024: Revealing the Statistics - FSNS
RFK
Jr. confesses he left a dead bear in Central Park 10 years ago : NPR
Robert F. Kennedy
Jr. - Wikipedia
Fellow
Kennedys call on RFK Jr. to resign as health secretary - POLITICO