They're everywhere in our cupboards, fridges and supermarket shelves. Convenient, cheap and often very attractive, ultra-processed foods are now part of the daily diet of millions of people. But ...

Americans now get 55% of their daily calories from ultra-processed foods, according to data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey conducted between August 2021 and August 2023.

A decade ago, most people had never heard of ultra-processed foods. But that changed in 2019, when Kevin Hall, then a scientist at the National Institutes of Health, published a study that shocked the ...