Ultraprocessed Food Still Makes Up More Than Half of Americans’ Diets

Data released Thursday from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggested that people in the United States were eating slightly fewer calories from ultraprocessed foods compared with previous years, but nutrition experts caution that this decrease is far from a public health win.

It’s still true that more than half of the daily calories Americans consume come from ultraprocessed foods, defined as those made via industrial methods or with ingredients, like high-fructose corn syrup or hydrogenated oils, that you wouldn’t typically find in home kitchens.

The new data showed that, on average, 53 percent of the calories adults consumed each day between 2021 and 2023 were from ultraprocessed foods. That share was down from an average of 56 percent between 2017 and 2018. For children up to age 18, that figure was about 62 percent — down from about 66 percent.

The numbers come from the most recent data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, or NHANES. The survey, which the C.D.C. has been conducting since the 1960s, collects information about Americans’ health and diets. This is the first C.D.C. report of its kind on ultraprocessed food consumption, said Anne M. Williams, a nutrition researcher at the agency and the report’s lead author.

The report comes as Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary, has warned of the dangers of ultraprocessed foods, a major talking point in his “Make America Healthy Again” movement.

Because the new data accounts only for Americans’ eating habits through 2023, they do not reflect the MAHA movement’s most recent messaging about ultraprocessed foods.

Ultraprocessed foods were already in the national spotlight before the current administration, said Filippa Juul, a nutritional epidemiologist at SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University in Brooklyn. In 2019, a landmark study from the National Institutes of Health showed that ultraprocessed foods caused people to overeat. And studies have linked ultraprocessed foods and health conditions like obesity, Type 2 diabetes and heart disease.

The slight decline in ultraprocessed food consumption could mean that people are more aware of how these foods may be harmful, Dr. Juul said. But we don’t have enough information to say whether this is really the case, she added.

The data is a “promising sign,” said Julia Wolfson, an associate professor of international health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, who was not involved with the new report. But it does not mean Americans can “declare victory” over ultraprocessed foods.

Among all the age groups in the report, sandwiches, including burgers, contributed the most calories to the daily total versus other ultraprocessed food categories. Sweet bakery products, savory snacks and sugar-sweetened beverages like sodas and juices — often cited as the main drivers of obesity and chronic disease — also played a role.

Adults with higher family incomes consumed slightly fewer calories from ultraprocessed foods than those with lower incomes, and people 60 and older consumed fewer than younger adults and children. This wasn’t surprising, said Josiemer Mattei, an associate professor of nutrition at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, who was not involved with the report. Food companies tend to market ultraprocessed foods more aggressively to children and lower-income families, she said.

The report had its flaws, said Barry M. Popkin, a professor of nutrition at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who was not involved with it. The data set was small, including only 4,881 adults and 1,752 children. And it relied on the participants (or their parents) to report what they ate — an often unreliable measure of people’s diets.

Still, many nutrition researchers view data from this long-running national survey as the most representative and robust source of information on what Americans eat, Dr. Wolfson said.

The consumption declines in the report were also small enough that they could have been mere measurement errors, Dr. Popkin said. For example, for an adult consuming 2,000 calories per day, the dip was roughly the equivalent of eating 60 fewer calories from ultraprocessed foods — no more than a small handful of potato chips.

Experts said it was not yet clear if the data pointed to a larger trend. It will be several years before the next NHANES report helps answer that question.

Ultimately, Dr. Wolfson said, the C.D.C. report is “notable,” but the biggest takeaway isn’t the small decline. The real message, as she sees it, is that Americans are still eating too many ultraprocessed foods.

“There’s still a lot of work to be done,” she said. “For all of us, but particularly youth.”