Seriously.

Today cocaine is practically the cultural shorthand for addiction. Early addiction researchers were deeply confused by it, not because the evidence wasn’t there, but because they were using the wrong template for what addiction was supposed to look like.

At the time, addiction was largely understood through alcohol and opioids. Researchers expected dramatic physical withdrawal. Vomiting. Sweating. Severe physiological dependence. Obvious intoxication.

Cocaine didn’t fit neatly into that model.

People using cocaine often looked functional. They weren’t stumbling around drunk. They weren’t going through the kind of terrifying withdrawal associated with heroin or alcohol. In fact, some people using cocaine looked energized and productive.

For years, scientists underestimated its addictive potential because they were looking for the wrong signs.

We made the same mistake with cigarettes.

That one feels even more absurd in hindsight.

People smoked while driving their kids to school. While working in hospitals. Pregnant women were told to smoke in moderation. Cigarettes were so deeply woven into ordinary life that they didn’t even register as dangerous. Smokers didn’t appear the way people expected addiction to look.

Tobacco didn’t initially match the public’s mental image of addiction, and we missed what was happening right in front of us.

Cigarettes would go on to become one of the deadliest addictive products in human history.

Then came gambling.

For years, people resisted the idea that gambling could be addictive because there was no drug being ingested at all. It was framed as a “compulsion,” almost as if that made it fundamentally different.

Eventually the evidence became impossible to ignore. Gambling hijacks the same core reward and motivation systems involved in substance addiction. The craving, the loss of control, the inability to stop even when it’s destroying your life, the brain doesn’t care whether the trigger was a substance or a slot machine.

Now?

You can’t watch a sporting event without being flooded with advertisements for the casino in your pocket.

Hindsight always feels obvious.

That’s the thing about addictive products. We consistently fail to recognize them when they’re legal, cheap, and completely woven into everyday life.

One of the ideas that keeps getting us into trouble is assuming that “natural” means “not addictive.”

Tobacco is a plant.

Cocaine comes from coca leaves.

Alcohol emerged from fermentation long before modern industry existed.

The naturalness of the raw ingredient is almost beside the point. What matters is what you do with it, how you refine it, concentrate it, get it into the body faster, and optimize it for repeated use. That’s what turned a tobacco leaf into the most deadly drug in human history.

That is where things change.

The human reward system did not evolve around cocaine or cigarettes.

It evolved around food.

Food is one of the most biologically important rewards humans encounter. Sweetness signaled energy. Salt signaled essential minerals. Fat signaled dense nourishment during times of scarcity. Our brains evolved to pay attention to these signals because survival depended on it. That system is not some side feature of human biology. It is absolutely foundational to how we’re wired.

What happens when corporations learn to engineer directly against that system?

What happens when they can concentrate rewarding ingredients to levels that don’t exist anywhere in nature, engineer a mouthfeel and flavor burst that fades just fast enough to make you want more, remove the natural stopping cues, and then put those products at every gas station and checkout line and vending machine?

I’ve been asking this question since my clinical training at Yale to become a psychologist, where I worked with people preparing for weight loss surgery and struggling with binge eating.

Repeatedly, they would confess to me they felt addicted to certain foods.

Not broccoli.

Not apples.

The same categories came up again and again: pizza, chips, donuts, cookies, chocolate, ice cream, candy, fast food, sugary drinks.

People described craving these foods intensely. Feeling out of control around them. Hiding their eating. Trying desperately to cut down and repeatedly failing to do so even when their health was compromised.

One of the most striking things was how often they felt ashamed or embarrassed to even say it out loud. Overconsumption felt like a personal failure. What makes us so certain it is?

Food companies are not accidentally stumbling into products people struggle to stop consuming. They are investing enormous amounts of money into engineering foods for “moreishness.” Moreish products are designed to encourage people to keep eating rather than feel satisfied enough to stop. Then they are marketed aggressively, especially to kids.

When we refuse to engage with the possibility that some ultra-processed foods may be addictive, those industries benefit. Meanwhile millions of people are left blaming themselves:

“Why can’t I just have one handful of chips instead of the whole damn bag?”

Maybe the problem is not simply weak willpower.

Maybe these products are functioning exactly as designed, and we are making the same mistake we’ve made before.

We’ve been wrong about this kind of thing before, more than once, at enormous cost. We looked at cigarettes for decades and called them a habit.

I think we should be humble enough to consider we might be doing it again.

Junk food.

Fast food.

Unhealthy food.

Ultraprocessed food.

Does a bag of cookies by any other name smell as sweet?

In other words- are all of these things the same?

The answer, like many things in nutrition, is yes…. and also no.

These terms all describe a type of food that we intuitively understand to be unhealthy: foods that tend to be packaged or handed to us out of a drive-through window, cheap, and often high in salt, sugar, and fat. In other words, foods that make you do this:

But the term “ultraprocessed” is relatively new, coined in 2009 by Brazilian scientist Carlos Monteiro, and since used in hundreds of scientific studies. Rather describing a single nutritional aspect of foods (like low-fat or low-sugar), “ultraprocessed” is a more holistic way of characterizing foods that:

- Contain few or no whole- food ingredients

- Have gone through intense physical and chemical processing to make them have longer shelf lives, more convenience (i.e. ready-to-eat), and look, smell, and taste better

- Are often cheap, convenient, and highly marketed

The thing that is unique about the concept of “ultraprocessed” is how it focuses not just on the physical properties of foods but their role in the food system.

Typically, ultraprocessed foods (UPFs for short), are made by for-profit companies—in many cases large, publicly traded transnational corporations, who are structurally incentivized to maximize shareholder returns quarter over quarter, year over year.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it begs the question:

How do these companies continue to grow? Even after we’re already buying all the burgers, the fries, and the snacks?

There are 3 main strategies:

The “If you pop, you just can’t stop” phenomenon.

Companies use colors, flavors, other additives, sugar, salt and fat to make foods look, smell, and taste better than less processed food. These foods are engineered to make you crave them, delivering the flavor, salt, and sweetness our bodies are evolutionarily hardwired to desire.

That’s why it’s hard to stop eating them, even if we want to.

(See: me, on a road trip, with a bag of Salt ‘n’ Vinegars).

Creating a “Hungry, why wait?” mentality.

Companies create brand relationships that start as early as toddlerhood.

It’s why we get warm and fuzzy feelings when we see those foods in the store or why our children have a tantrum begging for the Frozen-branded fruit snacks.

(And it’s why my husband and I can both still sing the “Pizza on a bagel” jingle 30 years later).

Marketing also perpetuates the message that we need more food at more times— which is a main reason why portion size, snacking, and fast food consumption all increased rapidly at the end of the 20th century and have remained high. Ads convince us that we have needs (to quench our thirst, for a fourth meal, to be ‘satisfied’) that only junk food can answer.

The “everywhere, anytime” culture.

These foods are everywhere. Seventy percent of packaged foods in the US are ultraprocessed. Even 2/3 of infant and toddler foods are ultraprocessed! These foods are also shelf-stable and easily portable, meaning we can keep in them in our pantry and in our cars for constant snacking.

On top of all of this— these foods tend to be cheaper than the non-ultraprocessed equivalents.

All of this—the price, marketing, ubiquity, and engineering—create a ‘perfect storm’ that keeps us buying more.

So why is it so hard to define them?

There are already hundreds of scientific studies using the definition above. Yet, the federal government is making headlines for its attempts to formally define ultraprocessed food—and the food industry is fighting back.

Why is this even a question?

There are 2 reasons:

1- Ultraprocessed foods are complex! Identifying them requires knowing something about how they are made, which isn’t usually information available on a food package.

2- The scientific definition includes includes a lot of foods that people traditionally considered “healthy,” but also are made using the same kinds of processes and ingredients as ultraprocessed foods

And as a result, nutrition nerds like me are losing their minds over the details.

Are sliced whole grain breads ultraprocessed?

Fruity low-fat yogurt?

Grapefruit-flavored sparkling water?

(That last one’s not at all highly personal *cough cough*).

It’s basically like the “is a hot dog a sandwich” debate on steroids.

However, unlike the hot dog debate, the stakes here are high. How we define ultraprocessed foods matters for questions like:

What meals gets served in school lunches?

What foods do dietitians recommend to patients?

What types of foods are allowed in the food stamp program?

In other words, this definition will inform food policy for millions of US consumers, with enormous implications for health.

Some good news

Last week, the research non-profit Healthy Eating Research released a report in which a national panel of experts recommended a definition of ultraprocessed foods for policy (in full disclosure, I was a co-chair and have spent most of the last year eating, sleeping, and breathing this topic).

The TLDR is that ultraprocessed foods can be identified by their ingredients:

• Cosmetic additives (things like natural or artificial colors and flavors, sweeteners, emulsifiers, and other ingredients that make foods taste, smell, and look better)

• Non-culinary ingredients- a fancy way to say things you wouldn’t typically find in a home kitchen, like high fructose corn syrup or protein isolates

However, we also recommended to exempt from policy foods that meet the FDA’s definition for “healthy” (i.e., those containing adequate whole food with low amounts of sugar, sodium, or saturated fat).

This approach addresses the 2 original problems, making it easy to quickly identify ultraprocessed foods with information on food packages and avoiding including foods that may have nutritional benefits.

Of course, the big question still is: what will the government decide? This could shape up to be one of the biggest landmarks in food policy this century.

I head to DC in a couple of weeks to promote our report and other new science about UPFs. Here’s hoping the folks in charge listen.

🍩🍩 If you like, drop us a comment below and tell us how you identify ultraprocessed foods!

Have you ever been frustrated when your kid had a tantrum in the middle of the grocery store, begging for the latest Frozen-themed fruit snacks?

Are you confused about food dyes, seed oils, protein, or a million other ever-changing nutrition recommendations?

If so, you’re in the right place!

Unjunked is written by two scientists who study ultraprocessed foods for a living.

Our mission is simple: translate the science of healthy eating, call out how the ultraprocessed food industry stacks the deck against families, and answer the eternal question: what the F is for dinner?

As researchers who run large university labs, we use cutting-edge science to understand how engineering and the relentless availability and marketing of these foods make us sick.

We are also moms who live in the real world. You know, the one where dinner sneaks up on you at 5:42 pm and someone is crying because the pasta “touched the sauce.” As busy parents, we often barely have time to use the bathroom, let alone cook elaborate meals from scratch.

That’s why this is not a lifestyle blog— or a purity contest. Our goal is to pull back the curtain on how the food industry is rigged against us, and what the average consumer can actually do about it, without churning your own butter like an 1800’s farmer.

Our Pillars

Science-based

We bring rigorous research from our own labs and from scientists around the world. If we say it, it’s backed by data. We love a good randomized trial the way some people love a good sourdough starter.

Systems-focused

We don’t have an epidemic of chronic diseases because our collective willpower just collapsed. Our poor health is the predictable outcome of an ultraprocessed food system that engineers products for overconsumption, markets them to young kids, prices them to undercut real food, and sells them on every corner.

In other words, the system is rigged. But we are optimists! Our goal here is to provide people with the evidence they need to advocate for change and, in the meantime, figure out practical strategies on how to eat healthier.

Compassionate

We are not purists or fear mongers. We are not here to shame you, your kids, or your pantry. We are here to offer realistic, research-based guidance for busy people who are doing their best in a tricky food environment.

For everyone

One of us cheers for the Michigan Wolverines. The other cheers for the Ohio State Buckeyes. If we can get along, anyone can!

We welcome curious, thoughtful readers from all backgrounds who care about learning and improving the food environment.

Subscribe now

Subscribers receive:

• The inside scoop on all the headlines that are terrifying you

• Occasional interviews with big names in food

• Stories about how we feed ourselves and our own families while balancing it all

• Starter packs on how to de-UPF your diet without breaking your bank or losing your mind

Our Story

We met while testifying before the U.S. Senate at a hearing on ultraprocessed foods. The night before, over a glass of wine, we discovered we had both grown up among the same cornfields in rural northwest Ohio. We immediately discovered many commonalities: former stints as sorority girls, graduate training at Yale, a professional obsession with ultraprocessed foods, and a much more questionable obsession with college sports.

Ashley (left) and Lindsey (right) after testifying for the Senate Health committee. We don’t look it, but we were both TERRIFIED.

We also bonded over our frustration about how confusing food is these days. Between social media, constant headlines, and ever-changing recommendations, it feels impossible to sort truth from fiction. As scientists, we wanted to cut through the noise and talk with people directly. A Substack felt inevitable.

Our Bona fides:

Lindsey Smith Taillie, PhD, MPH

Lindsey is a nutrition epidemiologist who designs and evaluates policies to promote healthy eating. An award-winning professor, she also directs the Global Food Research Program at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where she oversees a large research portfolio on food systems and food policy spanning more than a dozen countries across the US, Latin America, Asia, and Africa. Her work on UPFs is regularly featured in the media, and her writing on nutrition has been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Vogue, and many others. When she is not analyzing data or talking about ultraprocessed foods, she is wrangling her two daughters, writing satire, or cheering for the Tar Heels or Buckeyes.

Ashley Gearhardt, PhD

Ashley is a clinical psychologist whose research examines how ultraprocessed foods can trigger addictive responses similar to tobacco, alcohol, and other drugs. She is a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan and directs the Food Addiction Science & Treatment Lab, and is a top 2% cited psych scholar globally. When she’s not running randomized clinical trials or national surveys, she is chasing her two sons or getting reprimanded for the volume of her enthusiasm at Michigan games.

Subscribe now