Ultra-processed food

In a tightly controlled inpatient trial where meals were matched for calories, sugar, fat and fibre, people ate around 500 kcal a day more on the ultra-processed menu and gained weight — strong evidence that processing itself matters. Cohort studies link high intake to a long list of diseases. The unresolved problem is the NOVA classification, which groups wholemeal supermarket bread with soft drinks, so what exactly is being measured remains contested.

Reviewed 2026-09-20

Official sources

How this list was built

We searched Europe PMC for English-language papers published since 2015 whose title contains “ultra-processed” or “ultraprocessed”, kept meta-analyses, systematic reviews, trials and observational studies, because a diet or exposure like this cannot be randomised for long and its outcome evidence lives in cohorts, then ranked them by study design first, then recency and citations. Retracted papers are removed.

Open a paper to read its abstract and ask for an AI brief of what it found.