How Processed Foods Can Be Part of a Healthy Diet
Here’s how to recognize the ones that can make reaching your diet goals easier and which ones to avoid
You’ve heard the eating advice from doctors and dietitians—“eat less-processed foods”— more times than you can count. Research has linked diets high in these packaged foods with increased risks of heart disease, colorectal cancer, irritable bowel syndrome, and other conditions. And people who eat a diet full of processed foods tend to take in more calories—about 500 more per day, according to a 2019 study in the journal Cell Metabolism—than people who eat more whole foods, those that are as close to their natural form as possible.
Does that mean you need to eat only raw fruits and vegetables and make your own bread? No. The truth is that practically all foods are processed, even unsalted peanut butter, pre-cut butternut squash, and cheddar cheese. “It’s the extent of the processing we must focus on,” says Fang Fang Zhang, MD, PhD, a professor of nutrition at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University in Boston. Some processed foods can be part of a healthy diet and actually make healthy eating easier. Here’s what you need to know.
What Are Processed Foods?
Most of the research on processed foods uses something called the NOVA classification. This system groups foods into four categories, from unprocessed to minimally processed to ultra-processed.
Ultra-, or highly, processed foods are the ones to limit in your diet, but not every food in a can, bag, or box fits into that category. Some minimally processed and even processed foods can make following a healthy diet easier. Here’s how the categories break down:
Minimally processed: These whole foods have been cleaned, prepped, dried, pasteurized, fermented, or put through other processing that may subtract part of the food (like the removal of a nut’s outer shell) but doesn’t add any oils, fats, sugar, salt, or other substances. They include frozen fruits and vegetables, dried fruits, rolled oats, fresh or frozen meat, pasteurized milk, and unsweetened yogurt.
Finding the Balance
There’s no precise recommendation for how much ultra-processed food you can have in a healthy diet. But considering that U.S. adults get more than half of their daily calories from them alone, chances are most of us could stand to focus on scaling back. Improving the quality of your diet has proven benefits at any age.
That doesn’t necessarily mean you have to eliminate all ultra-processed foods. Rather, minimize your intake and increase the amount of unprocessed and minimally processed foods you eat. Here are a few ways to move the needle toward a less processed diet.
Read labels. It may sound obvious, but you might be surprised at the wide variety of ingredients and nutrients you’ll find in similar-sounding items. The NOVA classifications are helpful in a broad sense, but when you get down to specific food choices, it may not be clear where the line between processed and ultra-processed lies. And even within the ultra-processed food category, there’s variability. For instance, there’s a big difference between a sweetened strawberry yogurt with 5 grams of added sugars in 3.5 ounces and another with 11 grams, as well as between one that contains only milk, strawberries, cane sugar, pectin, and cultures and one with milk, cultures, natural flavor, sugar, corn starch, and artificial colors. Or compare a fresh loaf of white bread, like a baguette from a bakery, that has flour, water, yeast, and salt with a packaged loaf that has the same ingredients plus wheat gluten, sugar, and preservatives to keep it fresh.
Play a mind game. “Realize that highly processed foods are often engineered to entice you and make you want to eat more and more,” says Ashley Gearhardt, PhD, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. For some people, the desire for them can be taken to the extreme. In a 2023 report by Gearhardt and her colleagues, 13 percent of people ages 50 to 80 showed signs of addiction to highly processed foods. But becoming conscious of the fact that your taste buds are being manipulated can be a powerful tool in encouraging you to make healthier choices. Reminding yourself that a bag of chips is unlikely to satisfy before you sit down with one may make you decide to opt for something else instead, say, veggies and guacamole.
Unpack your cravings. While it’s true that less-processed foods may simply not be as craveable as ultra-processed foods, it may be helpful to take notice of what flavor and texture you’re responding to. Is it the crunch and sourness of a bag of salt and vinegar potato chips, or the melt-in-your-mouth sweetness of a soft-batch chocolate chip cookie? Are there less-processed foods (jicama sticks with lime juice? A date filled with peanut butter?) that could meet the same need?
Switch your drink. If your drink of choice is a sweetened beverage, this can be an easy place to make a change. And if plain water or seltzer seems too boring, try adding a few 100 percent fruit juice ice cubes, fresh mint, or muddled fruit to make them a little more exciting.
Learn some corner-cutting recipes. The benefit of a lot of ultra-processed foods is that they’re easy. But often the extra work required to make a less-processed dish can be pretty minimal. Frozen sweet potato fries may make for a low-lift side dish, for example, but look at Ore-Ida Sweet Potato Crinkle Cut Fries. In addition to sweet potatoes, they contain modified potato starch, dextrin, xanthan gum, and other additives. A less-processed and nearly as convenient option is buying precut sweet potatoes and tossing them with olive oil and herbs, then roasting them.
Be portion aware. De-processing your diet isn’t an all-or-nothing challenge. If there are ultra-processed foods you just can’t drop, see whether you can shrink the size of your portion. For example, if you’re attached to your favorite box of crackers, count out a smaller serving and round it out with a less-processed food like a slice of cheese or some mashed avocado with crushed red pepper flakes.
Editor’s Note: A version of this article also appeared in the June 2023 issue of Consumer Reports On Health.
