Grocery shopping looks different these days. On Saturday mornings, instead of the local supermarket, I’m at the farmers’ market, loading up on fish, meat, apples, cheese and berries – enough for a family of four.
But it’s not a cheap excursion; our weekly grocery spend is now higher than it was when we decided to try to cut ultra-processed foods (UPFs) from our diet five years ago.
In 2021, I learned about how UPFs are formulated, engineered and marketed. I dived into books such as Salt Sugar Fat by Michael Moss, which revealed the processes and strategies behind these highly palatable products. I discovered how companies sculpt flavors that please our taste buds, and how such highly engineered foods can have potentially adverse consequences on long-term health.
The most profound thing I learned wasn’t technical. In Salt Sugar Fat, Moss writes that a former Frito-Lay food scientist “overhauled his own diet to avoid the very foods he once worked so hard to perfect”.
There is a growing body of research about the impacts of UPFs on health. The Lancet, a leading medical journal, published a series of papers in 2025 about their effects on health. These meta-analyses revealed that diets with a high proportion of caloric intake from UPFs were associated with chronic-disease risk and increased energy intake.
Additionally, their production and consumption is linked to the displacement of traditional food cultures and practices, environmental degradation, and the concentration of commercial and political power by large food corporations.
It all started to feel like a great big con.
The mission: reduce UPFs in my family’s diet
After learning about UPFs, I made it my mission to eat fewer of them. At the time, like many families, we relied on a lot of canned items and ate pre-prepared supermarket foods. We cooked many meals, but they were basic.
We decided to cook more from scratch. I began by making chicken stock. Then I learned to make yoghurt. We started making ice-cream with a hand-me-down machine.
We discovered that organic, pasture-raised animal products and produce from the local farmers’ markets tasted better than the ingredients we had been buying. This style of shopping meant we cooked and baked a lot more. Soon, I replaced the kids’ frozen chicken tenders and nuggets with from-scratch versions. I now make salad dressings and pasta sauces, cakes, cookies and slices.
This process is now in its sixth year. We haven’t bought frozen pizza or liquid chicken stock since then. Our last purchases of frozen chicken tenders, fish sticks and supermarket ice-cream were in 2023.
The costs of reducing UPFs – financial and otherwise
This wasn’t a cheap decision to make; our food costs went up overall.
I started tracking my family’s food expenditure in 2019. I didn’t intend to chart UPFs expenditure specifically, but the spreadsheet does show patterns in our consumption over time. For instance:
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In 2021, we spent $158.63 on cereal; in 2025, the total was $34.34.
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Our yoghurt costs went from $260.29 in 2021 to $24.27 in 2025.
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We no longer buy protein bars, which cost us $261.04 in 2021.
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Our peak expenditure on frozen chicken tenders was in 2020, when we spent $159.76. For the past two years we haven’t bought any.
On the other hand, costs went up in several other categories. We spent more on fruits, vegetables and ingredients like flour, sugar, milk, eggs and meat:
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Butter more than quadrupled between 2021 and 2025, to $234.22.
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The total in the sugar column went from $9.47 to $83.10 (I did a lot more baking last year).
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The biggest leap was for fruit and vegetables: $2,578.32 in 2021 became $5,706.36 last year.
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In 2021, we started buying meat that was humanely raised by farmers and ranchers using regenerative agriculture practices. We spent a lot in this category, almost $2,500 on raw beef and chicken (the previous year, we spent about $1,500). The following year, 2022, we dropped our meat expenditure down to about $1,000 by eating a lot less of it, and more dried beans.
It’s hard to say how much the switch from UPFs affected costs overall, although it certainly had an effect. In 2019, we spent $6,213.95 on food groceries. Last year, six years into this process, we spent $15,531.60, the highest amount in seven years of tracking.
Speaking generally, inflation has a part to play. Food inflation in the US in 2025 was 2-3%, and food prices are up about 30% since 2019. Separately, we increasingly opted for better-quality ingredients, which are more expensive.
In 2021, the year we began buying better and organic ingredients, our family also grew by one person; we spent $10,140.87. By 2025, we had changed our food consumption so much that a 1:1 comparison is impossible. We bought less UPFs, but we also ate out very rarely.
I also spent a lot more time, labor and energy on sourcing ingredients and cooking. The hardest part of trying not to consume UPFs is how much time it takes. Cooking a meal from scratch can take hours. As a stay-at-home parent, I have more time than a working parent might have. Not everyone has those resources or access to good quality whole foods.
“The research shows a general correlation between high UPF consumption and poor health,” says Bettina Elias Siegel, a former lawyer, food policy advocate and the author of Kid Food. “At the same time, we have to remember that UPFs are affordable, accessible and time-saving, which makes them a necessity for many families.”
The structure of food systems and modern life have contributed significantly to high UPF consumption. “There’s compelling research that UPFs are not great for Americans’ nutrition and health,” says Priya Fielding-Singh, a sociologist and the author of How the Other Half Eats. “At the same time, our entire food environment encourages – and in many ways defaults to – their consumption.”
Fielding-Singh, whose work focuses on food access and equity, highlights the impact of the pandemic on job stress, household incomes and grocery inflation. “Families – especially lower-income families – have always struggled to afford healthy food,” she says. “But now you’re layering rising prices for healthier, more nutritious products on top of that. At the same time, you’re seeing cuts and restrictions to Snap benefits and eligibility. And more broadly, life in America has simply become more expensive over the past five years.”
The day-to-day realities of eliminating UPFs
We haven’t completely eliminated UPFs, nor do I think we ever will.
Take children’s food: our daughter is eight and our son is six, and we’re deep in birthday parties, play dates, school events and children’s menus. We are not purists about this, and we deal with each situation differently. At birthday parties, they can have one of each thing – for instance, one juice box and one slice of cake. At Halloween, they choose their favorites from the entire haul and we give the rest away.
I also bake a lot, and the children will often choose to eat what I’ve made rather than, say, a chocolate bar from their Halloween stash.
Chris van Tulleken, a doctor, researcher and the author of Ultra-Processed People, tells me he now eats very little UPFs. “I will eat it to be normal and polite,” he says. “If it is put in front of me, I will sometimes have it, but I wouldn’t go and buy it.”
In our family, we take a similar approach. But the one meal I can’t seem to replace is boxed macaroni and cheese. I’ve made stove-top and baked versions, and the kids reluctantly picked at it. When it comes to mac and cheese, it seems there is only one acceptable kind.
Dalia Perelman, a research dietitian at Stanford University, says that the goal is “not to avoid all UPFs all the time, but to lower the dose – to reduce the number of meals or number of foods within a meal that are UPFs”, she says. So, instead of a hotdog, chips and soda, try a hotdog with corn on the cob and sparkling water, or subbing in a grilled chicken sandwich.
The process isn’t easy; it takes time, effort and consistency. We certainly didn’t hold ourselves to any standard of perfection. But if you want to try, here are some suggestions based on my experience.
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Changing your palate so that UPFs are no longer appealing is half the battle. It then stops being something you need to resist. I now find most store-bought desserts too sweet, and many prepared foods don’t have the same depth of flavor or satisfying textures of the foods I cook and bake. This happened gradually and subconsciously, as my taste buds adjusted to dishes that weren’t as sweet or salty.
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To this point, children’s – and adults’ – palates can be malleable and more sophisticated than you think. My children now prefer our homemade chicken nuggets to frozen ones.
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Be consistent in building your family’s food culture. Cook regularly and eat together.
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Talk to your children about food. Discuss ingredients, nutrition and where food comes from. For example, to help my kids understand the bacteria in their gut microbiomes, we talk about their “good tummy bugs” and how they like different plant foods.
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Read ingredient labels. If you want to reduce UPFs in your diet, you need to know where they are (hint: everywhere).
The bigger picture
I started reducing UPFs partly for health reasons. But the more I learned about them, the more this seemed to be an issue about justice. It’s not fair that many people cannot afford to eat well, or have the time to cook a good meal, or eat fresh fruits and vegetables on a regular basis.
Whole foods should be accessible and affordable. Accurate information about food should be available. Food producers should be compensated fairly. “If you care about human health or antimicrobial resistance, risk of pandemic disease, plastic pollution, deforestation, loss of biodiversity, climate change, gas emissions, land use change – all of it is linked through UPF, and it is all an issue of justice and rights,” says van Tulleken.
Yet individual actions are still important, van Tulleken says: “The grassroots movement comes out of so many things … people taking books, podcasts and documentaries and science papers and running with it. Parents at school start agitating for change and voting. And this is what happened with cigarettes – the scientists did the work … then gradually everyone got what they wanted, which is cigarettes not being sold to their five-year-olds.”
In the US, recently released dietary guidelines emphasize protein (plenty of the protein-heavy products that have proliferated recently are, notably, UPFs), eating “real food” and reducing the consumption of processed foods. Experts have expressed concern about many of the guidelines, and some I spoke with questioned whether the necessary structural changes and support would also be implemented.
“The updated dietary guidelines’ recommendation to keep kids away from sugar until age 11 is, in many ways, an admirable and ambitious public-health goal. But it’s also almost impossible in practice, because sugar is secretly hiding in so many foods,” says Fielding-Singh.
“We also need the structural and policy changes that would actually make them feasible. Otherwise, we’re just layering additional guilt on to people who are trying to navigate a food system that makes those guidelines incredibly hard to follow.”
One benefit I’ve found from my new way of eating is eating without guilt. I used to know that I should eat more leafy greens and reduce UPF consumption. But so much of what we’re told we ought to do seemed too hard or impossible. This change happened one food item at a time, and as I’ve learned more about food and gained more skills in the kitchen, our new way of eating has become more natural.
As the kids get older, I hope their palates continue to expand and they continue to experience food with pleasure and joy.
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Jen Sherman is a stay-at-home parent and writer, and a former urban and cultural geographer
