By Andrea Kane
By now, many people have heard that a diet packed with ultraprocessed foods is not good for us. They have been linked to a host of ills, including obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancer, depression, cognitive decline and stroke — they even appear to increase our chance of early death.
Ultraprocessed foods, according to the NOVA Food Classification system, are food products made with ingredients you wouldn’t normally find in a supermarket or your kitchen (such as certain individual nutrients, flavor enhancers, colors, additives, stabilizers); they might also be made using industrial manufacturing processes (such as extrusion, molding and preprocessing) not available to the home chef.
