Is this the end of ultraprocessed foods?

In a rare bit of bipartisan agreement in polarized times, ultraprocessed foods are under attack from both Democrats and “Make America Healthy Again” Republicans. This could change the way you eat.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom last week signed the country’s first law to “define and ultimately ban unhealthy ultraprocessed foods” from school lunches, said CNN. American kids get as much as two-thirds of their calories from foods “packed full of additives” and filled with “high-calorie sugars, salt and fat.” (The ban includes most “fast food, candy and premade meals” said CalMatters.) All but one member of the California State Assembly voted for the bill, said CNN. It is a sign that Americans “are waking up to the fact that we have chemicals in everything” and want to do something about it, said the Environmental Working Group’s Bernadette Del Chiaro.

The law arrives at the same moment Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is leading a revamp of federal dietary guidelines that put “ultraprocessed food in the spotlight,” said NPR. Kennedy has blamed such foods for the chronic-disease epidemic, but there is one challenge: There are “varied ways to define” ultraprocessed foods, making it difficult to “draw firm conclusions” about their actual health effects. The new dietary guidelines will focus on “whole foods, healthy foods and local foods,” Kennedy said.

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What did the commentators say?

Focusing on ultraprocessed foods “repeats America’s missteps on nutrition,” Harvard Medical School’s David S. Ludwig said at The Washington Post. The federal government once “launched a massive public health experiment” to promote low-fat diets it said would “prevent obesity, diabetes, heart disease” and some cancers. The result? “Processed carbs flooded the food supply,” obesity rates soared and now those processed foods are the “new dietary villain.” More “high-quality, long-term clinical trials” are needed to understand how such foods affect health. Otherwise, new measures “could cause more harm than good.”

“For decades liberals championed whole foods,” Nutrition Coalition founder Nina Teicholz said at The Wall Street Journal. Now they have “lost the Whole Foods vote” because they “championed ultraprocessed plant-based foods” as a replacement for meat, envisioning a world where “lab-grown meats replace real meat from real cows.” American voters increasingly favor foods that are “whole and ancestral, including meat.” It is a vision that can unite “Berkeley hippies and MAHA moms.”

What next?

The question of what foods will be banned from California schools is “complicated,” said the Los Angeles Times. “Minimally processed prepared foods” like canned vegetables will not count. The picture should become more clear over time: The law requires the state’s Department of Public Health to create a list of off-limits foods by 2028.

Kennedy’s MAHA movement crusade against ultraprocessed foods coincides with the Trump administration’s defunding of programs that helped “food banks, schools and child-care centers procure fresh food from local farmers,” said The New Yorker. The defunding will challenge cooks faced with making “hundreds or even thousands of servings per day” of school lunches required to be both cheap and healthy.