Even when Americans try to eat healthy, we somehow manage to out-calorie the rest of the developed world. The average person in Japan or South Korea sits down to a modest meal of whole grains, fish, and vegetables; we, meanwhile, reach for something wrapped, fried, or flavored in a lab. The problem isn’t just our portion — it’s that so much of what we eat has been engineered for shelf life, not survival.
Our daily diets are a Frankenstein’s pantry: fast food, deli meats, snack cakes, sodas. Preservatives masquerading as ingredients. Artificial colors and flavors standing in for the real thing. The result is a nation quietly killing itself with convenience, one ultra-processed bite at a time.
Ultra-processed foods — UPFs, in the clinical parlance — now account for roughly 60 percent of an American adult’s calories each day, and closer to 70 percent for children. That’s alarming AF.
But the story of processed food in America isn’t simply one of bad choices — it’s one of access, or lack thereof. For millions of families, particularly Black and brown ones, the option to “just eat healthier” doesn’t exist. Fresh, unprocessed foods are increasingly expensive, while food deserts stretch across neighborhoods where grocery stores have long since given way to dollar menus and corner marts.
The consequences are as predictable as they are devastating. Diets built on UPFs have been linked to hypertension, Type 2 diabetes, obesity, and cancers ranging from colorectal to pancreatic. And for men, the picture gets even darker: those same UPFs are loaded with endocrine-disrupting chemicals that interfere with testosterone and sperm quality.
In a recent Cell Metabolism paper, University of Copenhagen molecular biologist Romain Barrès noted that global sperm counts have dropped nearly 60 percent since the 1970s — an era that also happens to mark the rise of ultra-processed food consumption. “Our results demonstrate that consumption of UPF itself, irrespective of excess caloric intake, is detrimental to human health,” Barrès and his team wrote.
Their findings echo research from Yale’s Equity Research and Innovation Center, where Dr. Carole R. Oladele has documented how UPFs compound the already disproportionate rates of hypertension among Black adults.
So where does that leave the average American consumer? Caught between inflation and addiction. Told to “shop the perimeter” of the grocery store when the center aisles are all we can afford. Encouraged to eat organic when “organic” has become another word for “unreachable.”
The advice is as hollow as the calories it condemns. Eat smaller portions, they say. Grow your own food. Watch a YouTube video on gardening. But when corporations engineer addiction and price nutrition out of reach, personal responsibility becomes a cruel joke.
Because at the end of the day, the biggest thing being processed in America might not be our food—it’s us.