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“When I tell people that chicken manufacturers can knowingly and legally sell something that can kill you, they don’t believe me,” Marler said in an interview. People are equally surprised, he said, to learn that the federal government “stamps meat ‘USDA certified,’ all along knowing that it could be contaminated with cow or chicken” feces

If the USDA approves the petition, the department would have far-reaching power to recall or seize meat for a variety of salmonella strains. It could also pull its inspectors from wayward meat plants, effectively shutting them down, a move that could cost big operations millions of dollars a day

“With E. coli, it was a wake-up call for an industry that wasn’t paying attention to that pathogen. The industry is not asleep at the wheel with salmonella,” said Mark Dopp, a vice president of the North American Meat Institute, a trade association. “We are doing everything we can think of. Declaring something to be an adulterant isn’t going to make us swim faster or harder. We are swimming as fast and hard as we can.’’

“He fought that fight and surprisingly won,” said Al Maxwell, an Atlanta-based lawyer who represents food industry clients and has gone up against Marler in hundreds of food poisoning cases. “The meat industry said the sky was going to fall if the government declared the pathogens as adulterants, but that didn’t happen. Meat got safer.”

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that salmonella bacteria causes about 1.35 million infections, 26,500 hospitalizations and 420 deaths in the United States every year.

CDC data shows that when salmonella outbreaks are linked to meat, chicken causes the most illnesses, followed by pork and then beef.

Marler contends that chicken, pork and beef start out as sterile and that salmonella does not naturally occur on meat. Humans and processing equipment, he said, spread the contamination during slaughter.

KatieRose McCullough, a food scientist with the meat institute, said unlike E. coli, salmonella can be part of the animal’s flesh — in the lymph nodes — which filter and collect potentially harmful pathogens to keep animals healthy. “You can’t remove all of it; that’s impossible,” she said.

But Marler argues that making restaurant chefs and consumers fully responsible for killing the bacteria is foolhardy. In his petition, Marler repeatedly cited research that shows how rare it is for people to follow USDA safety instructions. “You can’t put this burden on the consumer — it doesn’t work,”

Uma Valeti, the company’s CEO, said Upside has proven it can safely produce a delicious product. The company said that it has helped pioneer an industry and that it is making progress on growing larger quantities of meat, while bringing down its cost.

According to former employees, Upside has struggled to produce large quantities of meat. They said the company often scrambled to make enough for lab analysis and tastings. Upside for years worked to grow whole cuts of meat, which proved difficult in its bioreactors. It battled contamination in its labs. Traces of rodent DNA once tainted a chicken cell line, according to former employees, and confirmed by company executives.  

Today, the company is growing its marquee filet not in large bioreactors at its pilot plant but in two-liter plastic bottles akin to those used to grow cells for decades by pharmaceutical companies. 

“Roller bottles aren’t scalable. Too small, too labor-intensive,”

Upside’s pilot plant isn’t yet operating at the 50,000-pound annual capacity the company announced when it opened in 2021, according to company executives, much less its future target of 400,000 pounds. Production can accelerate once Upside receives USDA clearance, company executives said.

Industry champions said they are confident that steady scientific progress will help reduce production costs for cultivated meat, while climate change and global population growth will intensify the need for it.

“It turned out that tissue, or creating this whole-cut texture, was really challenging,” said Amy Chen, Upside’s chief operating officer

Upside also wrestled with problems common to other cultivated-meat makers, including a battle against bacteria, according to former employees.Growing meat requires meticulous sterilization because small quantities of bacteria can quickly overtake a bioreactor, ruining a batch.

The company said contamination can slow production, but doesn’t affect final cultivated products, unlike conventional meat. The company said that autoclaves sometimes require maintenance and that meat grown for consumers won’t be produced in the older building

Some industry officials think companies can surmount contamination problems, but that other hurdles will still abound, including those tied to growing the finicky cells and the high cost of supplies.  

More than 500 million years after life took hold on earth, humans are having such a drastic effect on it that we are now the dominant geologic force. This designation comes not from the usual concerned voices seeking recognition from distracted media and political elites, but from a key body within the international union of geological scientists. As these folks like to say: rocks don’t lie.

ollan is a fan, saying fake meatballs might help save the world.

the free market — judging by soaring sales and a bullish roar from Wall Street to Beyond Meat, a company that was briefly worth more than Macys or Xerox by market capitalization one day this week — is lining up with the environment on this one, as carnivores take notice.

Emissions from livestock, largely from burping cows and sheep and their manure, currently make up almost 15% of global emissions. Beef and dairy alone make up 65% of all livestock emissions.

“This is not a radical vegetarian argument; it is an argument about eating meat in sensible amounts as part of healthy, balanced diets.”

agricultural emissions will take up the entire world’s carbon budget by 2050, with livestock a major contributor. This would mean every other sector, including energy, industry and transport, would have to be zero carbon, which is described as “impossible”. The Chatham House report concludes: “Dietary change is essential if global warming is not to exceed 2C.”

Meat consumption is on track to rise 75% by 2050, and dairy 65%, compared with 40% for cereals. By 2020, China alone is expected to be eating 20m tonnes more of meat and dairy a year.

preventing

Steve Meyer, an economist with commodity firm Kerns and Associates, agreed that a one or two day disruption could cause wholesale meat prices to jump. But if the problem is resolved within a few days, he said, restaurants and grocery stores are unlikely to pass those costs onto consumers.

"Then you're probably going to have some buyers, whoever depends on JBS for their supplies, that probably could be short product," he said. In that case, for consumers, it would depend on where their local grocery store sources its meat. "If they buy it from JBS then you might see some shortages. If they don't buy it from JBS, you might not see anything at all."

Some 87 percent of the meat the researchers collected contained either normal or antibiotic-resistant enterococcus, suggesting that most of the meat came in contact with fecal material at some point.

More stark was the proportion of microbes identified that were resistant. Of all the salmonella found on raw chicken pieces sampled in 2011, 74 percent were antibiotic-resistant, while less than 50 percent of the salmonella found on chicken tested in 2002 was of a superbug variety.

“Much of the new growth in the segment is coming from younger consumers who seek foods that fit an overall lifestyle, be it for health reasons or personal ethics,” Mr. Loucks wrote. “They are not just seeking foods that mimic meat. Instead they specifically want vegetarian foods with distinctive flavors and visible, recognizable ingredients.”

“Not that long ago, electrical cars were considered nonperformers, and when Prius came out, a lot of people didn’t think there was a market for it,” said Yves Potvin, founder and chief executive of Gardein Protein International, which makes the Gardein line of meatless products. “Now people are willing to pay $70,000 for a Tesla, and more than one million Prius cars are sold each year.”

Mr. Brown is most proud of Beyond Meat’s “chicken breast” products, which are sold in strips that look like real chicken and can be pulled into shreds for chicken salad. “That was kind of the holy grail,” he said.

“It has to be just as good as, just as convenient as and maybe even cheaper than ground beef or chicken,” Mr. Brown said. “Our business is to create something better than meat; otherwise we are not going to move the needle.”

“Early indications are that demand for plant-based proteins will continue to grow,” said Tony Weisman, chief marketing officer with Dunkin’ US. He said the company intended to roll out its new Beyond Sausage sandwich nationally soon.

fast-food options including Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods are neither organic nor particularly healthy.

whether health-conscious young people will come out in droves for plant-based fast food remains to be seen.

The Impossible Whopper meal, which automatically comes with a medium fries and Coke, is a staggering 1,280 calories. There are 34 grams of fat and 1,080 grams of sodium in the sandwich alone.

“It’s difficult to say which one is healthier, because ultimately we know a burger is not a healthy choice,”

Similarly, Dunkin’s Beyond Sausage breakfast sandwich is a nutritional bomb at 470 calories, 24 grams of fat and 910 milligrams of sodium. If a person ate both in one day, they would have eaten 1,750 calories before dinner, leaving them with 250 calories for the day if they followed the recommended 2,000 calorie per day diet.

A future where Impossible Foods or Beyond Beef – or any other single-source supplier – might dominate the market also poses a problem for restaurants like Burger King. Impossible Burgers and Beyond Meat sausages are dependent on Silicon Valley intellectual property rights. It would be a huge economic risk for burger joints to shift their menus toward these products, because they would be held hostage by a single supplier with the magic ingredient.

fear experienced during slaughter significantly elevates meat's levels of stress hormones—adrenaline, cortisol, and other steroids. Studies on human consumption of artificial growth hormones, which are believed by many to affect our reproductive systems and other bodily processes, have already resulted in policy changes in many countries, including those that make up the E.U. Attention is now turning to these naturally occurring fear-induced hormones as scientists worry that their consumption causes similar problems.

Dr Peter Alexander, at the University of Edinburgh, UK, was also impressed but noted: “There may be environmental benefits, eg for biodiversity, from sustainably managed grazing and increasing animal product consumption may improve nutrition for some of the poorest globally. My personal opinion is we should interpret these results not as the need to become vegan overnight, but rather to moderate our [meat] consumption.” Poore said: “The reason I started this project was to understand if there were sustainable animal producers out there. But I have stopped consuming animal products over the last four years of this project. These impacts are not necessary to sustain our current way of life. The question is how much can we reduce them and the answer is a lot.”

But the administration is not "taking any options off the table" in response to the incident, press secretary Jen Psaki said at a press briefing earlier Wednesday, adding that there's an internal policy review process to consider any actions.

In April, the Biden administration announced a series of actions, including sanctions, against Russia for its interference in the 2020 US election, its ongoing actions in Crimea and the SolarWinds cyber attack. The attack on the software developer was one of the worst data breaches to ever hit the US government.

The JBS attack comes after a string of cyber breaches and ransomware attacks tied to nation state actors.

"I'm not going to give any further analysis on that. Other than to tell you that our view is that when there are criminal entities within a country, they certainly have a responsibility and it is a role that the government can play," she responded.

Microsoft also recently said that hackers who are part of the same Russian group behind the SolarWinds hack have struck again in the US and other countries, launching a new cyberattack on more than 150 government agencies, think tanks and other organizations.

"Ransomware right now, this is a business model," Lior Div, CEO of the security firm Cybereason told CNN's Richard Quest. "They are in it for the money and they are trying to generate as much revenue as possible for themselves. So as long as people are going to pay, they're going to keep operating in order to generate this massive amount of revenue that they are generating every year."

Cyber hygiene is necessary. Every US company and organization needs to protect itself, said Eric Goldstein, the current assistant director at CISA, in a statement.

The hack of the world's largest meat producer, JBS, a Brazilian company whose subsidiaries control a quarter of US beef processing and a large portion of pork processing, was disclosed Tuesday by the White House, which promised to re-focus on the issue and to raise it with Russia, the government thought to be harboring hackers.

You figure if nine meat plants hadn't gone dark in Arizona, Texas, Nebraska, Colorado, Wisconsin, Utah, Michigan and Pennsylvania, it seems very plausible we likely would never have heard. The US JBS headquarters is based in Greeley, Colorado, and it employs more than 66,000 people. Read about the fallout for them, from CNN's Brian Fung.

It's not clear, of course, if the company is paying the ransom. If they're getting back online this quickly, you've certainly got to assume they could have.

"We have attributed the JBS attack to REvil and Sodinokibi and are working diligently to bring the threat actors to justice. We continue to focus our efforts on imposing risk and consequences and holding the responsible cyber actors accountable," the FBI said in a statement. "A cyber attack on one is an attack on us all."

Ireland's national health service has completely shut its IT system and refuses to pay the ransom, which it said in May has disrupted everything from its Covid vaccine rollout to community health services.

The initial report presents a flexible daily diet for all food groups based on the best health science, which also limits the impact of food production on the planet

The Eat-Lancet report posits that the global food system is broken. From the numbers quoted alone, it is hard to disagree: more than 2 billion people are micronutrient deficient, and almost 1 billion go hungry, while 2.1 billion adults are overweight or obese

Unhealthy diets are, it says, “the largest global burden of disease”, and pose a greater risk to morbidity and mortality than “unsafe sex, alcohol, drug, and tobacco use combined”

we are not (yet) extinct, but we have an era named after us. And what we are eating has a lot to do with that. Food production, the report states, “is the largest source of environmental degradation”.

It has identified a daily win-win diet – good for health, good for the environment – that is loosely based on the much-lauded Mediterranean diet, but with fewer eggs, less meat and fish, and next to no sugar.

it does include a range of foodstuff types that are adaptable, in theory, to the cuisines (potato or cassava; palm-oil-based, say, or soy-rich) and primary dietary restrictions (omnivore, no pork, pescatarian, vegetarian, vegan) found across the world

the daily ration of red meat stands at 7g (with an allowable range of 0-14g); unless you are creative enough to make a small steak feed two football sides and their subs, you will only be eating one once a month.

you are allocated little more than two chicken breast fillets and three eggs every fortnight and two tins of tuna or 1.5 salmon fillets a week

Per day, you get 250g of full-fat milk products (milk, butter, yoghurt, cheese): the average splash of milk in not very milky tea is 30g

The diet functions on the basis of 2,500 kcal daily,

It is still more food – way, way more – than two billion people currently have access to.

The future served up on a plate Monday

Breakfast: Porridge (made with water) with 1 tbsp honey or maple syrup, topped with nuts and seeds, and one piece of fruit; one cup of tea or coffee with milk

Lunch: Fennel, avocado, spinach and broccoli salad with feta and mustard and plant-oil dressing with one slice of sourdough bread, plus one plain yoghurt pot with a handful of berries

Dinner: Roast red cabbage and red lentil dahl with rice

Snack: Sugar-free ricecakes with nut butter.

Tuesday Breakfast: Two eggs with two slices wholemeal toast and Marmite

Lunch: Barley or other wholegrain salad with smoked mackerel, seeds

radishes, celery, chickpeas, herbs, oil and lemon juice dressing; one piece of fruit.

Dinner: One baked sweet potato with salsa, cavolo nero, avocado, black beans, grated cheese and a dollop of sour cream.

Snack: One handful of roasted chickpeas.

Wednesday Breakfast: Two slices of wholemeal toast with one sliced banana and honey; one cup of tea or coffee with milk.

Lunch: Spicy miso noodle soup with tofu, radishes, leafy greens and poached egg (that’s your quota for two weeks used up: no eggs for you next week); small pot of plain yoghurt

Dinner: Steamed veg (kale, broccoli and carrot) with a yoghurt and fresh herb dressing and olive oil, root veg and bean mash.

Snack: Cannellini bean dip with red pepper sticks

three different factors that might be making harder for adults today to stay thin.

First, people are exposed to more chemicals that might be weight-gain inducing. Pesticides, flame retardants, and the substances in food packaging might all be altering our hormonal processes and tweaking the way our bodies put on and maintain weight.

Second, the use of prescription drugs has risen dramatically since the ‘70s and ‘80s. Prozac, the first blockbuster SSRI, came out in 1988. Antidepressants are now one of the most commonly prescribed drugs in the U.S., and many of them have been linked to weight gain.

the microbiomes of Americans might have somehow changed between the 1980s and now. It’s well known that some types of gut bacteria make a person more prone to weight gain and obesity. Americans are eating more meat than they were a few decades ago, and many animal products are treated with hormones and antibiotics in order to promote growth. All that meat might be changing gut bacteria in ways that are subtle, at first, but add up over time.

Kuk believes the proliferation of artificial sweeteners could also be playing a role.

“There's a huge weight bias against people with obesity,” she said. “They're judged as lazy and self-indulgent. That's really not the case

If our research is correct, you need to eat even less and exercise even more” just to be same weight as your parents were at your age.

A widely cited 2006 report estimated that 18% of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions were attributable to cattle, buffalo, sheep, goats, camels, pigs and poultry. However, analysis performed by Goodland, with co-writer Jeff Anhang, an environmental specialist at the World Bank Group’s International Finance Corporation, found that figure to now more accurately be 51%.

a molecule of CO2 exhaled by livestock is no more natural than one from an auto tailpipe.

Today, tens of billions more livestock are exhaling CO2 than in preindustrial days, while Earth’s photosynthetic capacity (its capacity to keep carbon out of the atmosphere by absorbing it in plant mass) has declined sharply as forest has been cleared.

One way in which this will be particularly troublesome for livestock producers will be that crops grown for feed will be refocused on biofuel sources.

the signs of a crisis that looks like the Great Depression are impossible to hide. In Anaheim, Calif., home to Disneyland, cars formed half-mile-long lines in two different directions, waiting to pick up free food. In San Antonio, 10,000 cars waited for hours to receive food from a food bank. Even still, Republicans balk at expanding access to food stamps while hunger is on the rise. Nearly one in five children 12 and younger don’t have enough to eat.

That “way of life” may also begin to look like mass homelessness. Through the first five days of April, 31 percent of tenants nationwide had failed to pay their rent

Forty-three million households rent in the U.S., but there is no public rental assistance for residents who lose the ability to afford their rent.

Many elected officials in the Republican Party have access to Covid-19 testing, quality health care and the ultimate cushion of wealth to protect them. Yet they suggest others take the “risk” of returning to work as an act of patriotism

While the recent stimulus bills doled out trillions of dollars to corporate America and the “financial sector,” the smallest allocations have provided cash, food, rent or health care for citizens. The gaps in the thin membrane of a safety net for ordinary Americans have made it impossible to do anything other than return to work.

This isn’t just malfeasance or incompetence. Part of the “American way of life” for at least some of these elected officials is keeping workers just poor enough to ensure that the “essential” work force stays shows up each day

In place of decent wages, hazard pay, robust distribution of personal protective equipment and the simplest guarantees of health and safety, these lawmakers use the threat of starvation and homelessness to keep the work force intact.

In the case of the meatpacking industry, there is not even a veil of choice, as those jobs are inexplicably labeled essential, as if life cannot go on without meat consumption

The largely immigrant and black meatpacking work force has been treated barely better than the carcasses they process. They are completely expendable. Thousands have tested positive, but the plants chug along, while employers offer the bare minimum by way of safety protections, according to workers. If there were any question about the conditions endured in meatpacking plants, consider that 145 meat inspectors have been diagnosed with Covid-19 and three have died.

Discipline in the U.S. has always included low and inconsistent unemployment and welfare combined with stark deprivation. Each has resulted in a hyper-productive work force with few benefits in comparison to America’s peer countries.

if the social distancing and closures were ever going to be successful, it would have meant providing all workers with the means to live in comfort at home while they waited out the disease. Instead, they have been offered the choice of hunger and homelessness or death and disease at work.

The governor of Iowa, Kim Reynolds, made this painfully clear when she announced that not only was Iowa reopening, but that furloughed workers in private or public employment who refused to work out of fear of being infected would lose current unemployment benefits. She described these workers’ choices as a “voluntary quit.”

This is exacerbated by the reluctance of the Trump administration to bail out state governments. That the U.S. government would funnel trillions to corporate America but balk at sending money to state governments also appears to be part of “the American way of life” that resembles the financial sector bailout in 2008.

These are also the bitter fruits of decades of public policies that have denigrated the need for a social safety net while gambling on growth to keep the heads of U.S. workers above water just enough to ward off any real complaints or protests.

During the long and uneven recovery from the Great Recession, the warped distribution of wealth led to protests and labor organizing. The crisis unfolding today is already deeper and much more catastrophic to a wider swath of workers than anything since the 1930s. The status quo is untenable.

in fact, that the birds eventually went extinct; the last known passenger pigeon died in 1914.

The Compleat Housewife would likely have been found in any well-to-do household in the late colonial era, when the mid-day “dinner” could consist of three courses, with multiple dishes per course.

Though regional, seasonal and other differences make it difficult to generalize about a typical colonial diet, the following seven foods and beverages are a small sample of what might have been found on many colonial tables.

Pickles

umble cookies—sometimes spelled “jumbal”—can be considered the ancestors of modern sugar cookies, though far less sweet. Recipes appeared in cookbooks in England as early as 1585, and the cookies became a popular staple in the colonies. “You will find recipes for jumble cookies by the thousands,” says Nahon; even Martha Washington was said to have her own.

Black pepper’s antibacterial properties make it a good preservative, and this imported spice took center stage in the pepper cake, a gingerbread-like loaf flavored with black pepper and molasses and studded with candied fruits.

Colonial Americans drank a lot of alcohol, and this popular drink-dessert dating to the 18th century combined sweetened whipped cream with wine or hard cider. The resulting frothy concoction was often served on special occasions. Amelia Simmons’ American Cookery, which in 1796 became the first cookbook by an American to be published in the United States, included a recipe for syllabub that called for the cook to flavor cider with sugar, grate nutmeg into it—and milk a cow directly into the liquor. 

Dr. Monteiro and his colleagues developed a food classification system called Nova, named after the Portuguese and Latin words for “new.” It has since been adopted by researchers across the world.

Unprocessed or minimally processed foods, like fresh or frozen fruits and vegetables, beans, lentils, meat, poultry, fish, eggs, milk, plain yogurt, rice, pasta, corn meal, flour, coffee, tea and herbs and spices.

Processed culinary ingredients, such as cooking oils, butter, sugar, honey, vinegar and salt.

If you look at the ingredient list and you see things that you wouldn’t use in home cooking, then that’s probably an ultraprocessed food,”

his group includes freshly baked bread, most cheeses and canned vegetables, beans and fish. These foods may contain preservatives that extend shelf life.

Ultraprocessed foods made using industrial methods and ingredients you wouldn’t typically find in grocery stores — like high-fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated oils and concentrated proteins like soy isolate.

They often contain additives like flavorings, colorings or emulsifiers to make them appear more attractive and palatable.

Think sodas and energy drinks, chips, candies, flavored yogurts, margarine, chicken nuggets, hot dogs, sausages, lunch meats, boxed macaroni and cheese, infant formulas and most packaged breads, plant milks, meat substitutes and breakfast cereals.

Processed foods made by combining foods from Category 1 with the ingredients of Category 2 and preserving or modifying them with relatively simple methods like canning, bottling, fermentation and baking

That has led to debate among nutrition experts about whether it’s useful for describing the healthfulness of a food, partly since many UPFs — like whole grain breads, flavored yogurts and infant formulas — can provide valuable nutrients

Most research linking UPFs to poor health is based on observational studies, in which researchers ask people about their diets and then track their health over many years.

Why might UPFs be harmful?

In a large review of studies that was published in 2024, scientists reported that consuming UPFs was associated with 32 health problems, with the most convincing evidence for heart disease-related deaths, Type 2 diabetes and common mental health issues like anxiety and depression.

Such studies are valuable, because they can look at large groups of people — the 2024 review included results from nearly 10 million — over the many years it can take for chronic health conditions to develop

She added that the consistency of the link between UPFs and health issues increased her confidence that there was a real problem with the foods.

But the observational studies also have limitations,

It’s true that there is a correlation between these foods and chronic diseases, she said, but that doesn’t mean that UPFs directly cause poor health.

Dr. O’Connor questioned whether it’s helpful to group such “starkly different” foods — like Twinkies and breakfast cereals — into one category. Certain types of ultraprocessed foods, like sodas and processed meats, are more clearly harmful than others

UPFs like flavored yogurts and whole grain breads, on the other hand, have been associated with a reduced risk of developing Type 2 diabetes.

Clinical trials are needed to test if UPFs directly cause health problems, Dr. O’Connor said. Only one such study, which was small and had some limitations, has been done, s

In that study, published in 2019, 20 adults with a range of body sizes lived in a research hospital at the National Institutes of Health for four weeks. For two weeks, they ate mainly unprocessed or minimally processed foods, and for another two weeks, they ate mainly UPFs. The diets had similar amounts of calories and nutrients, and the participants could eat as much as they wanted at each meal.

During their two weeks on the ultraprocessed diet, participants gained an average of two pounds and consumed about 500 calories more per day than they did on the unprocessed diet

During their time on the unprocessed diet, they lost about two pounds.

That finding might help explain the link between UPFs, obesity and other metabolic conditions

The Nova system notably doesn’t classify foods based on nutrients like fat, fiber, vitamins or minerals. It’s “agnostic to nutrition,”

There are many “strong opinions” about why ultraprocessed foods are unhealthy, Dr. Hall said. “But there’s actually not a lot of rigorous science” on what those mechanisms are

Because UPFs are often cheap, convenient and accessible, they’re probably displacing healthier foods from our diets

the foods could be having more direct effects on health. They can be easy to overeat — maybe because they contain hard-to-resist combinations of carbohydrates, sugars, fats and salt, are high-calorie and easy to chew

It’s also possible that resulting blood sugar spikes may damage arteries or ramp up inflammation, or that certain food additives or chemicals may interfere with hormones, cause a “leaky” intestine or disrupt the gut microbiome.

Researchers, including Dr. Hall and Dr. Davy, are beginning to conduct small clinical trials that will test some of these theories.

most researchers think there are various ways the foods are causing harm. “Rarely in nutrition is there a single factor that fully explains the relationship between foods and some health outcome,”

In 2014, Dr. Monteiro helped write new dietary guidelines for Brazil that advised people to avoid ultraprocessed foods.

Other countries like Mexico, Israel and Canada have also explicitly recommended avoiding or limiting UPFs or “highly processed foods.”

The U.S. dietary guidelines contain no such advice, but an advisory committee is currently looking into the evidence on how UPFs may affect weight gain, which could influence the 2025 guidelines.

It’s difficult to know what to do about UPFs in the United States, where so much food is already ultraprocessed and people with lower incomes can be especially dependent on them,

“At the end of the day, they are an important source of food, and food is food,” Dr. Mattei added. “We really cannot vilify them,”

While research continues, expert opinions differ on how people should approach UPFs.

the safest course is to avoid them altogether

to swap flavored yogurt for plain yogurt with fruit, for example, or to buy a fresh loaf from a local bakery instead of packaged bread, if you can afford to do so

Dr. Vadiveloo suggested a more moderate strategy, focusing on limiting UPFs that don’t provide valuable nutrients, like soda and cookies

She also recommended eating more fruits, vegetables, whole grains (ultraprocessed or not), legumes, nuts and seeds.

Cook at home as much as you can, using minimally processed foods