When my daughter started kindergarten, I was shocked when she brought home a book bag full of empty Doritos bags and muffin wrappers. She’d been buying them with her lunch card at the school canteen, along with other packaged snacks she rarely got at home.
I shouldn’t have been surprised; I’ve spent my career studying why it’s hard for children to eat healthfully in our modern food environment. Ultraprocessed foods are cheap, tasty and ubiquitous, including in schools. They make up about 70 percent of the food supply and two-thirds of the calories consumed by American children.
This year, when Arizona became one of the first states to restrict ultraprocessed foods in schools, I should have been thrilled. Studies have linked these foods to obesity, diabetes, heart disease and depression.
But I expect Arizona’s lunchrooms will still have many ultraprocessed foods.
That’s because Arizona’s law defines ultraprocessed foods very narrowly, as foods containing a handful of additives — like Red Dye No. 3, Yellow No. 5 and brominated vegetable oil — a couple of which the Food and Drug Administration banned before the bill passed.
Since January, some two dozen bills introduced across 15 states have proposed targeting ultraprocessed foods through school bans or labels. The catch? Most have equated ultraprocessing with artificial coloring, after the campaign by the health and human services secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., against artificial food dyes. Yet foods with synthetic dyes make up fewer than 10 percent of packaged ultraprocessed foods available in the United States.
These laws may even be counterproductive. By conflating ultraprocessed foods with food dyes, they create confusion and a false sense of progress. More companies may swap artificial colors with natural dyes (a trend that has been ongoing for years), but kids will end up eating the same ultraprocessed foods, just with slightly different colors.
That said, I’m sympathetic to the challenge legislators face in defining ultraprocessed foods for the purpose of guiding regulation; it’s a topic my fellow nutritionists debate endlessly.
Part of the challenge is that “ultraprocessing” is as much sociological as nutritional. It captures the way that convenient, cheap, profitable and highly tasty foods have inundated our food supply, displacing whole foods and home-cooked meals.
The idea of ultraprocessed food originated with Brazilian scientists who wanted to understand the link between the way that foods are produced, marketed and consumed and rising rates of obesity and other health problems. The scientists created a system called Nova that defined ultraprocessed foods as those that have been broken down, chemically modified and reassembled to be profitable and to keep us always wanting more.
The challenge for policymakers? For all the harm associated with diets high in ultraprocessed foods, when it comes to individual foods, “ultraprocessed” is not a perfect proxy for how healthy or unhealthy they are. For example, some whole-grain breads, low-fat yogurts and store-bought hummuses might be classified as ultraprocessed under Nova, but these foods are probably healthier than some minimally processed ones, like steaks and some brands of vanilla ice cream.
Scientists also don’t fully understand why diets high in ultraprocessed foods are so harmful. Is it because these foods tend to be high in calories, sugars and sodium? Is it because they are manufactured to hook us and keep us craving more? Or is it the effect of additives on our microbiomes? Maybe it’s the convenience of grabbing a packaged cake off the shelf rather than baking one at home. Perhaps it’s a combination of all these things.
Because of these challenges, some experts have called for abandoning the concept of ultraprocessed foods. That would be a mistake. Defining and regulating ultraprocessed foods isn’t simple, but the best evidence we have says these foods should be limited in places children learn and play. The alternative is continuing what we’ve been doing for decades, which has not worked to lower chronic disease.
Before the concept of ultraprocessed foods came on the scene, policymakers focused on regulating single food groups or nutritional content of food, like the amount of fat or sodium. As a result of the 2010 Healthy Hunger Free Kids Act, schools were required to serve more fruits, vegetables and whole grains and faced tightened limits on calories, saturated fat, sodium and sugar in snacks. Those changes modestly boosted the overall quality of lunches. They still allowed for ultraprocessed products, however, and food manufacturers quickly reformulated their products under the new thresholds. Because of the 2010 law, the Doritos my daughter brings home now have 25 percent less sodium. I suppose that’s healthier than regular Doritos, but it’s still hooking her on packaged snacks with little nutritional value.
Solely regulating nutritional content or, as in the case of Arizona, individual additives allows the food industry to play a game of Whac-a-Mole, hitting individual targets but failing to fundamentally change the nature of foods that schools serve. It also ignores the broader forces driving these diets: Schools rely on these foods because they are inexpensive, easy to prepare and fast to eat — critical components in underfunded nutrition programs that don’t have the resources to cook from scratch or the time to allow kids a longer lunch. Children become the final cog in an industrial food system that replaces whole foods with cheap and convenient substitutes.
California provides an example of a better path. When the state banned ultraprocessed foods in schools in October, it used a much broader definition than Arizona’s. The law, which will be phased in over the next decade, defines ultraprocessed foods as those that contain a wide array of additives, not just artificial colors. These include sweeteners, flavors, stabilizers, emulsifiers, foaming agents and others — all strong proxies for industrial processing. It has another requirement: The foods must be high in added sugar, sodium or saturated fat or contain nonsugar sweeteners. This stipulation means that California’s law will target the foods most likely to be unhealthy and will be less likely to include foods like whole-grain breads.
Of course, there’s more to improving diets than reducing ultraprocessed foods. Equally important will be creating policies to ensure that kids have access to healthy, minimally processed foods — and making sure school food programs have the funds, equipment, kitchen space and staff to prepare them. This means increasing meal reimbursement rates, expanding grants for kitchen infrastructure and staff training and adding incentives for local food procurement.
States like Arizona and California get one thing right: School lunches are the place to start. Fixing school lunches would help children eat healthier today while instilling a food culture and eating behaviors that could last into adulthood.
Lindsey Smith Taillie is a professor of nutrition at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and a director of the U.N.C. global food research program.
Graphics by Bhabna Banerjee. Additional research by Samantha Heller.
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