Category: Health and Fitness

Julia Belluz and Kevin Hall’s essay “It’s Not You. It’s the Food.” explores the way the food industry changes our biology so that we are not at fault, in terms of a failure of moral strength or self-discipline, for our weight gain. Rather, ultraprocessed food is. Even if we try to shun the “toxic food environment,” we will find such a move difficult for several reasons. For one, what is “toxic food”? The government, at best, has given us a vague definition. Do we look to influencers? They’re trying to sell supplements more than health. 

To make their point, the authors use this analogy: “If large swatches of the population were being sickened by a poison released from an industrial plant, no one would suggest that the solution is to just offer home filters, wearables, and supplements. The only real path to restoring health would have to include mandating the removal of the poison from the environment.” 

The truth is simple, and it’s brutal: You’re on your own: You have to fight like hell to remove ultraprocessed foods from your diet. Kevin Hall’s study shows the more UPFs you eat, the more weight you gain. And the converse is true: The less UPFs you eat, the more weight you lose, especially fat and without effort. 

The authors observe that when people move to America, they get fat. The common denominator is leaving a low UPFs country to a highly concentrated one. These immigrants get fat and suffer obesity-related diseases. So much for the American Dream.

Why are UPFs the villain? Because they mess with us–our biology, our hormones, our satiety signals, our gut biome. They turn us into Fat Machines. 

In America’s rich UPF environment, 70% of available food calories “are deemed hyperpalatable and are in foods designed for the overconsumption that chronically sickens us. They’re also heavily marketed and cheap. Chronic disease hot spots are the most socioeconomically deprived, with food environments akin to toxic waste sites.”

Knowing the enemy before us, we have to ask ourselves: What do we do? The authors argue that self-discipline doesn’t cut it. We need government regulation. The problem is that we could be dead before anything gets done. Another problem is that the FDA and other institutions don’t seem to have a handle on sound health these days, and even if they did, they’ve lost the trust of the public, many of whom like to cherry-pick their information inside their social media silos. 

Nevertheless, the authors are adamant about this point: UPFs that “can drive overconsumption should be treated as recreational substances to which we must apply aggressive tax policies, front-of-pack warning labels, marketing restrictions and more, especially for foods marketed to children.”

Notice the authors didn’t say all UPFs, only the ones designed for overconsumption. Some processed foods such as canned beans, high-protein, flax-seed whole-grain bread, liquid egg whites, and whey protein powder should be spared such government labels. 

Should we wait for the government to help us in this regard? Probably not. Researcher Kevin Hill quit the N.I.H. after his UPFs studies were censored by the current administration. Not surprisingly, money is a big factor. The authors point out that the global food industry is worth $8 trillion, more than the oil and gas industry. There’s a lot of skin in the game for lobbyists who fund a plethora of politicians. 

But the science is out: We’re not at fault for our fatness. Food Inc., which makes 70% of their food hyperpalatable for overconsumption to line their pockets, bears much of the blame. Also, failure of government leadership. 

Brace yourself: Regardless of your economic status, you’re on your own. No one is going to save you. Eating in America is the Wild Wild West. 

New Yorker writer Dhruv Khullar opens “Why Is the American Diet So Deadly?” with a truth so obvious it ought to be printed on cereal boxes: Americans are eating themselves into an early grave. No other nation can match our national pride in oversized portions, recreational snacking, and ultra-processed food engineered to hit the brain the way a slot machine hits a Vegas tourist. When the rest of the world wants a modest meal, Americans want something that triggers the dopamine cannon.

Enter Guillaume Raineri, a French transplant who arrived in Maryland when his wife took a job at the National Institutes of Health. In an earnest attempt to understand American nutrition, he enrolled in a paid diet study—essentially voluntarily entering a culinary escape room. For four weeks, he lived in a controlled environment, eating three meals a day totaling about two thousand calories per meal. 

Weekdays were gentle on the palate: minimal processing, plenty of whole foods. Fridays, however, were an ambush—UPF theme nights featuring chicken nuggets and PB&J sandwiches, the American sacrament. Raineri’s body protested immediately: bloating, sluggishness, the kind of malaise that suggests your bloodstream is pleading for diplomatic immunity.

When Khullar visited, study designer Kevin Hall explained the challenge: lumping all ultra-processed foods together is like putting canned kidney beans and gummy bears in the same moral category. Food processing yields genuine benefits—less spoilage, wider availability, and the ability to feed millions at scale—but conflating all UPFs blurs important distinctions. Nutrition heavyweight Walter Willett argues that the focus shouldn’t be on UPFs as a monolith but on overall dietary patterns, especially those rooted in plant-forward whole foods and Mediterranean sensibilities. The core question Hall explores is simple but unsettling: why do people, consciously or unconsciously, eat more when given UPFs?

The findings aren’t comforting. Participants consuming UPFs ate about 500 more calories a day, experienced spikes in glucose and insulin, and gained weight. Whole-food diets did the opposite: reduced intake, increased satiety, healthier hormone profiles. This complicates the simplistic calories-in/calories-out theory that refuses to die, despite evidence showing that food quality shapes metabolism, hunger hormones, and how our bodies store energy. As Tufts nutrition dean Dariush Mozaffarian puts it, “The dirty little secret is that no one really knows what caused the obesity epidemic”—which becomes even more maddening when you realize Americans now consume slightly fewer calories than they did decades ago, yet obesity continues to climb. GLP-1 drugs may soon rewrite this script entirely.

UPFs introduce another sinister twist: they don’t just fill our stomachs, they remodel our biology. They recalibrate taste receptors, blunt satiety signals, and create a psychological and physiological FOMO for even more snacks, flavors, and novelty. Some studies, like Willett’s more granular approach, show that UPFs behave differently depending on additives—some beneficial, some neutral, some metabolic chaos grenades. 

And yet, none of this complexity prevents Americans from gorging on the worst offenders. Doritos, the poster child of engineered hedonism, sell more than a billion bags a year. When you calculate how many collective years of life are sacrificed for that neon-orange dust, you realize our species is perfectly capable of choosing pleasure over longevity.

Meanwhile, Food Inc. behaves exactly like Big Tech: both industries manufacture addictive junk because attention and appetite are profitable. Social media mirrors the food system: endless junk content, engineered outrage, and influencers who peddle easy purity. YouTube is now overrun by self-anointed nutrition gurus who command you to eat only whole foods and flee all processing. With algorithms breathing down their necks, they don’t dare utter anything nuanced—like the fact that UPFs come in subcategories, some nourishing, some harmless, some devastating. Nuance doesn’t get clicks. Absolutism does.