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Our Food is Killing Us

Most US food is highly processed, engineered to be addictive. Manufacturers know it’s unhealthy, a new lawsuit alleges. Now, 50,000 products are ranked by extent of processing.

Robert Roy Britt
Wise & Well

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cheap UPFs on a store shelf
This entire supermarket aisle is filled with cheap, addictive food no human should have to eat. Photo by the author.

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More than 70% of calories consumed by the average American, including children, come from food that’s so heavily processed it can barely be called food. Cereals, yogurts, processed meats, packaged items, ready-to-cook full meals and healthy-sounding snacks are engineered with industrialized ingredients in arguably malicious corporate laboratories that develop cheap and highly addictive products, with no regard for nutritional value or human health, critics say.

These ultra-processed foods ooze unhealthy oils, cancer-causing colorings and petroleum-based preservatives, fake flavorings, emulsifiers (whatever those are), abundant sugar and salt, and any number of unpronounceable other ingredients never intended for human consumption.

The only thing these products aren’t packed with is nutritional value.

To be blunt, our food is killing us.

Now a simmering food fight, though not particularly coordinated, has come to a…

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