Let me tell you about a random Wednesday in March when I tried to feed my family of five a dinner free of ultraprocessed foods.
My plan was to make a big batch of beef meatballs from scratch. I had hoped to do this three days earlier, on Sunday, the day I bought a club pack of lean ground beef during my weekly trip to Loblaws.
Somehow, in the blur of my life as a full-time journalist and mom of three teen and tween boys, the first half of the week got away from me. But Wednesday looked promising. I was working from home. The only activity on our nightmare of a family calendar was piano lessons for the two younger boys, beginning at 6:45 p.m.
Then reality intervened, as it often does.
I was assigned a same-day story. I spent two hours chasing a news tip I couldn’t pin down. My 15-year-old came home from school at 3:30 p.m. and asked for help with an English assignment. My 10-year-old went to a friend’s house after school and needed to be picked up by 5:30 p.m.
As the clock sped toward 6 p.m., I gave up on the meatballs and reached into my freezer for an old standby: A frozen tourtière. The ready-to-heat meat pie was undoubtedly an ultraprocessed food (UFP), a category of convenient, irresistible, industrial concoctions that a mounting body of scientific research has linked to a frightening array of chronic diseases.
The night of the set-aside meatballs (which I wound up making at 10 p.m. for use later in the week) stands out in my memory because I was reporting a story that day that was, in a roundabout way, about ultraprocessed foods.
The meatballs were eventually made, but not until long after dinnertime.Kelly Grant/The Globe and Mail
The story was about a new recommendation from the Canadian Cancer Society, which had come out in favour of screening people for colorectal cancer starting at 45 instead of 50 because of an increase in the disease among younger adults. A cancer epidemiologist I interviewed told me our ultraprocessed diets were likely one of the culprits.
This wasn’t news to me, a health journalist. New studies cross my desk every week pinning the blame for our collective ill-health on ultraprocessed foods, or UPFs.
A recent series in medical journal The Lancet reviewed more than 100 studies and concluded that replacing traditional eating patterns with UPFs was associated with “adverse outcomes across nearly all organ systems” and “is a key driver of the escalating global burden of multiple diet-related chronic diseases.”
Proponents of classifying food by degree of processing say that how and why a meal or snack is made is more telling than the amount of sugar, salt or fat it contains. If it’s produced in a factory with ingredients you don’t recognize by a company bent on selling as much of it as possible, it’s a UPF.
Big Food can’t reformulate its way out of those three scarlet letters.
The only way out is home cooking.
Whenever I read an ultraprocessed foods study I mutter to myself, in a fit of anxiety that will be familiar to most working parents, “What am I supposed to do about this? Quit my job to cook all day?”
The grocery shopping, meal planning, prepping and cooking I already do is a slog that relies to an embarrassing degree on ultraprocessed foods. The Canadian food environment feels stacked against moms, who, despite some progress toward gender parity in the kitchen, remain likelier than dads to be in charge of the unsexy work of making meals, day in and day out.
And for families in which parents are juggling multiple jobs, supporting elderly relatives or kids with special needs, or navigating precarious living conditions, the challenges – including access to healthy foods, long and unpredictable work schedules, and cost – are amplified to an unmanageable degree.
In my house, my sons subsist on Kraft peanut butter and grocery store rye bread, on smoothies made with ultraprocessed protein powders, on Tim Horton’s breakfast sandwiches tossed into the backseat of our minivan on the way to hockey practice. And that’s just breakfast.
Ms. Grant empties her cupboards and fridge of ultra-processed foods for the week. (But she didn’t throw the products away. She saved them for the week after her family’s experiment in home cooking.)
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I’ve never been moved by the TV chefs, social media influencers and MAHA moms who make a fetish of cooking from scratch. But I am moved by science. The accumulating evidence forced me to ask: Should my husband, sons and I cut back on our UPF consumption?
What if we tried going cold turkey for just one week? What might we learn about the benefits and costs – in money, time and sanity – of a life without ultraprocessed foods?
After one week, I would see how truly difficult it would be to pull off full-time.
What counts as ultraprocessed?
Before we could start a one-week trial of whole foods, we needed ground rules.
Our lodestar would be the Nova classification system, a hierarchy commonly used in nutrition research that divides food into four categories: unprocessed or minimally processed foods (Group 1); processed culinary ingredients (Group 2); processed foods (Group 3); and ultraprocessed foods (Group 4).
Nova Group 4 foods, “are branded, commercial formulations made from cheap ingredients extracted or derived from whole foods and combined with additives. Most contain little to no whole food, and are designed to compete with the other three Nova groups – and therefore with freshly prepared dishes and meals – and maximize industry profits.”
Nearly every product in the inner aisles and freezer cases of your local grocery store are Group 4 foods. Pop, chips, breakfast cereals, margarine, hot dogs, sausages, lunch meat, crackers, cookies, mass-produced packaged bread, flavoured yogurt, frozen pizzas, chicken fingers, fish nuggets, meat pies – all would be verboten in our Toronto home for a week.
The Nova food classification system
Based on the extent and purpose of industrial food processing
Group 1: Unprocessed/minimally processed
Foods largely in their natural state without
adding salt, sugar, oils or fats
Examples: Grains (cereals), legumes (pulses), vegetables (including herbs and spices), fruits, nuts, fungi, milk, meat, poultry, fish and other whole foods
Group 2: Processed culinary ingredients
Foods obtained directly from group 1 foods or
from nature that are not consumed alone but are used to season and cook group 1 foods and turn them into freshly prepared dishes and meals
Examples: Oils, butter, lard, table sugar, honey, and salt
Foods in group 3 are those in group 1 that have
been modified by the industry by adding salt, sugar, oil,
or other group 2 ingredients, with preparation methods
similar to those used in home kitchens or restaurants
Examples: Vegetables in brine, fruits in syrup, tinned and cured fish, freshly baked breads, cheeses, and any commercial food or drink product made from foods in group 1 and ingredients from group 2
Group 4: Ultraprocessed foods
Branded, commercial formulations made from cheap
ingredients extracted or derived from whole foods and
combined with additives. Most contain little to no whole food
Examples: Mass-produced breads, sweetened breakfast cereals, salty snacks, sweetened products, soft drinks, spreads, sauces, prepared ready-to-heat meals
the globe and mail, Source: the lancet; canadian journal
of dietetic practice and research
The Nova food classification system
Based on the extent and purpose of industrial food processing
Group 1: Unprocessed/minimally processed
Foods largely in their natural state without
adding salt, sugar, oils or fats
Examples: Grains (cereals), legumes (pulses), vegetables (including herbs and spices), fruits, nuts, fungi, milk, meat, poultry, fish and other whole foods
Group 2: Processed culinary ingredients
Foods obtained directly from group 1 foods or
from nature that are not consumed alone but are used to season and cook group 1 foods and turn them into freshly prepared dishes and meals
Examples: Oils, butter, lard, table sugar, honey, and salt
Foods in group 3 are those in group 1 that have
been modified by the industry by adding salt, sugar, oil,
or other group 2 ingredients, with preparation methods
similar to those used in home kitchens or restaurants
Examples: Vegetables in brine, fruits in syrup, tinned and cured fish, freshly baked breads, cheeses, and any commercial food or drink product made from foods in group 1 and ingredients from group 2
Group 4: Ultraprocessed foods
Branded, commercial formulations made from cheap
ingredients extracted or derived from whole foods and
combined with additives. Most contain little to no whole food
Examples: Mass-produced breads, sweetened breakfast cereals, salty snacks, sweetened products, soft drinks, spreads, sauces, prepared ready-to-heat meals
the globe and mail, Source: the lancet; canadian journal
of dietetic practice and research
The Nova food classification system
Based on the extent and purpose of industrial food processing
Group 1: Unprocessed/minimally processed
Foods largely in their natural state without adding salt, sugar, oils or fats
Examples: Grains (cereals), legumes (pulses), vegetables (including herbs and spices), fruits, nuts, fungi, milk, meat, poultry, fish and other whole foods
Group 2: Processed culinary ingredients
Foods obtained directly from group 1 foods or from nature that are not
consumed alone but are used to season and cook group 1 foods and turn
them into freshly prepared dishes and meals
Examples: Oils, butter, lard, table sugar, honey, and salt
Foods in group 3 are those in group 1 that have been modified by the
industry by adding salt, sugar, oil, or other group 2 ingredients, with
preparation methods similar to those used in home kitchens or restaurants
Examples: Vegetables in brine, fruits in syrup, tinned and cured fish, freshly baked breads, cheeses, and any commercial food or drink product made from foods in group 1 and ingredients from group 2
Group 4: Ultraprocessed foods
Branded, commercial formulations made from cheap ingredients
extracted or derived from whole foods and combined with additives.
Most contain little to no whole food
Examples: Mass-produced breads, sweetened breakfast cereals, salty snacks, sweetened products, soft drinks, spreads, sauces, prepared ready-to-heat meals
the globe and mail, Source: the lancet; canadian journal of
dietetic practice and research
The Nova system originated with Carlos Monteiro, a Brazilian epidemiologist who was alarmed to see obesity and diet-related diseases rise in his country as global food companies and their products supplanted the traditional Brazilian way of eating. He argued in a 2009 paper that the problem was less an excess of blameworthy nutrients such as sugar, sodium and saturated fat, and more one of industrial processing itself.
A continent away in Canada, Dr. Monteiro’s thesis struck a chord with Jean-Claude Moubarac, who was studying added and naturally occurring sugars and their role in public health. An anthropologist by training, he thought it made sense that a decline in cooking with fresh, whole ingredients might hurt human health.
Dr. Moubarac connected with Dr. Monteiro over Skype, and before long he was working as a postdoctoral fellow in Sao Paolo, helping his mentor flesh out the classification system they would later christen Nova, after the Portuguese word for new.
Much of Dr. Moubarac’s work focused on applying Nova in high-income countries like Canada. One of his early studies used historic food budget surveys to show that, between 1938 and 2011, ready-to-consume products, many of them ultraprocessed, went from 28.7 per cent of the Canadian diet to 61.7 per cent.
Dr. Moubarac returned to Canada a little over a decade ago, hoping governments would embrace the Nova paradigm. Unsurprisingly, the food industry pushed back, while some nutritionists and food policy wonks criticized Nova for being overbroad and impractical.
A turning point came in 2019, when Kevin Hall, then a senior investigator with the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases at the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), published the results of a randomized controlled trial that the media gobbled up faster than a bag of Lay’s potato chips.
Dr. Hall and his team sequestered 20 adults in an NIH facility for nearly a month. Participants were divided into two groups and told to eat as much or as little as they liked of meals that were equivalent in calories, sugar, fat, sodium, fiber and macronutrients. The only difference was that one menu was comprised of ultraprocessed foods and the other was minimally processed. The groups switched at the half-way mark.
The results were stunning. Participants ate about 500 more calories a day on the ultraprocessed diet, despite Dr. Hall’s experiment stripping away the outside factors thought to influence UPF intake, including their low price, convenience, and appealing packaging.
“There’s this idea that appetite is under some sort of biological control, and we all have been talking about that in the field of obesity science for a great number of years,” Dr. Hall told me. “Yet you shift the same people to two different food environments in this very artificial way, and you get shockingly different eating behavior.”
Grocery shopping took longer than usual for Ms. Grant as she tried to eliminate UPFs.
All of this was on my mind as I headed to the grocery store on a Saturday in April to shop for our week without UPFs.
I spent nearly three hours – more than twice as long as usual – hunting for items I don’t normally buy and poring over ingredient lists like an amateur detective.
I put a bag labelled “pure chocolate chips” back on the shelf when I saw it contained soya lecithin. I hemmed and hawed over boxes of chicken stock, tubs of sour cream, jars of mayonnaise. I needed them for recipes that I considered from-scratch, but worried they crossed the line from processed (Nova Group 3) to ultraprocessed (Nova Group 4.)
Finding bread products that weren’t ultraprocessed was particularly tough.
Group 3 products are closer to foods in nature than their group 4 counterparts. Think canned beans, tinned fish, good-quality cheese and freshly baked bread.
I left the grocery store that day, Saturday, April 11, having spent $304.55, less than our usual weekly spend of $500 to $600. The bill was lower because I bought less food, knowing I would be schlepping to the butcher, baker and fishmonger in the coming week.
One common knock against minimally processed foods is their cost, especially in an era of grocery inflation, when nearly half of Canadians say the affordability of their food is more important than taste or nutrition, and more than 80 per cent say their grocery bills have grown faster than any other household expense.
Ultraprocessed foods tend to be cheap, and I had to spend more to avoid them. For instance, I traded our mass-produced rye bread ($3.99 a loaf at the grocery store) for fresh, preservative-free sourdough from a bakery ($6.75 a loaf.)
Despite the premiums, we spent less on food during no-UPF week. The real villain in our food bill is restaurant meals or takeout once or twice a week. The night before my visit to the grocery store we spent $91.98 picking up dinner from a local Italian restaurant.
After grocery shopping, I made potato chips in the air fryer with my youngest, Ethan. As a mom-and-son activity, it was a roaring success. Ethan loved slicing the potatoes with a mandolin, bathing them in ice water, drying them with paper towels and placing them gingerly in a single layer in the air fryer.
But as an exercise in bulk food prep, it failed. Two hours in, we had enough chips to fill four sad Ziploc bags, barely a day’s worth of school snacks for the boys. The next day, I rose early to bake a couple of loaves of banana bread to slice up as snacks for the coming week. The boys polished one off before the day was out.
Time crunch
Kozeta Miliku first became interested in ultraprocessed foods when she arrived early at daycare one day and found her daughter holding a cup of ready-to-eat tangerine slices floating in syrup. She had been monitoring the daily food log on her daycare’s mobile app, and had assumed her daughter was being fed fresh tangerines.
She wondered how much ultraprocessed food her daughter and other Canadian preschoolers were eating. More importantly, why did their parents and caregivers feed them this way?
In March, Dr. Miliku, a professor of nutritional science at the University of Toronto, and her team published a study showing that parental commuting time was strongly correlated with high UPF intake among a cohort of 2,411 Canadian three-year-olds. Other factors contributed, including mothers’ eating habits, children’s screen time, the presence of older siblings and the density of nearby fresh fruit and vegetable markets.
But to Dr. Miliku’s surprise, parental income and education made little difference in UPF consumption. “A busy parent is still a busy parent,” said Dr. Miliku. “What matters is not just income or education, but the time and environment families are navigating – like how far they need to travel for work or how easy it is to access fresh food. Those constraints shape what ends up on the table.”
My sons are involved in an absurd number of activities. Our biggest time-suck is competitive hockey, which has all three boys on the ice four or five times a week from September to March.
That was why I didn’t begin our experiment in March, after the night of the meatballs. I decided to wait until mid-April, when I presumed hockey season would be over. We set the dates in stone, and then Ethan’s team proceeded to make a run deeper into the playoffs than he dared to dream. He had four games during no-UPFs week.
On my first full day as a reluctant full-time home cook, I worked in the kitchen from 9:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. I baked two huge trays of homemade granola to replace our usual ultraprocessed breakfast fare, made two heaping pots of Bolognese – one to freeze – and took my first crack at focaccia, kneading the dough and letting it rise twice over the course of the day.
I ducked out mid-afternoon to pick up fresh fruit, bread, a rotisserie chicken and four steel Thermoses, the keys to my school lunch plans. My hope was that the boys would take leftover dinner in a Thermos instead of their usual sandwiches of cheese, Wowbutter and jam, or salami.
I would encourage them to pack fresh fruit and veggies, as my husband, Tom, and I always do. Breakfasts would be plain Greek yogurt, fresh fruit and granola, or sourdough toast with natural peanut butter (which I predicted, correctly, the boys would not eat.)
Dinners would mostly be meals that were already in our regular rotation, including chili, beef stew, chicken and penne with homemade pesto, and chicken skewers with Greek salad. The difference was I would cook these types of meals every night, rather than two or three times in a week.
On the second day of my experiment, and the boys’ first eschewing UPFs for a full day, we gathered for what would turn out to be our only dinner of the week with all five of us present.
As we ate our salmon, rice and Caesar salad with homemade croutons and dressing, I asked how they felt about the experiment so far. Ethan boasted of refusing Easter candy at school. Will, my oldest, said the maiden voyage of his Thermos Bolognese was fine, but he was so hungry after school that he went to a Japanese bakery and bought a custard bun, which the proprietor assured him was not ultraprocessed.
Middle child Campbell, 13, on the other hand, had takeout pizza for lunch.
“The teacher got it for us,” he explained.
“So what happened to the Bolognese in a thermos that we made this morning?” I said.
“It’s still in my bag,” he replied.
Ms. Grant’s husband, Tom, is a good cook, but he works long hours out of the house, so the responsibility of weekday meal planning and prep falls to her.
Versions of this scenario played out all week. The real world, with its birthday parties and hockey snacks and enticing variety stores on the walk home from school, kept disrupting our plans, although I gave the boys and Tom high marks for refusing more UPFs than normal.
Tom, to his credit, is a better cook than I am. But he is in the office five days a week and his days are long. I have the flexibility to work from home two or three days a week, and as a result, the mental and physical load of feeding our family mostly falls to me.
That scenario remains common, despite the gap in time spent making meals between the genders narrowing in recent years. Canadian women spent an average of 62 minutes a day on food preparation and clean up in 2022, the most recent year for which StatsCan has data from time use surveys. Men averaged 40 minutes a day. Canadian women’s contribution has held steady since 1992, while the time men devote to cooking and dishes has doubled, from just 21 minutes a day 30 years ago.
Still, Sarah Bowen, a sociologist at North Carolina State University and one of the authors of a 2019 book Pressure Cooker: Why Home Cooking Won’t Solve Our Problems and What We Can Do About It, told me that, in her research, she and her co-authors found that women remained more likely to oversee the planning and execution of day-to-day meals with children.
“We have this tendency, which has only gotten worse since we wrote the book, to romanticize this kind of lifestyle that involves beautiful scenes cooking natural food in your kitchen,” she told me. “But that is hard work.”
Even Dr. Moubarac, who spoke to me with genuine enthusiasm about the joy and meaning of cooking with his three young children, admitted he struggled against a world awash in ultraprocessed food.
His children sometimes feel left out when they aren’t allowed to take part in school pizza day, he explained. “I’m sometimes preoccupied by the way they feel different than the rest,” he said. “But are we going to eat hot dogs every week just to be like the others?”
Ms. Grant estimates that she spent about 25 hours planning, shopping, cooking and doing dishes during her family’s week without ultraprocessed foods.
Processing our week without ultraprocessed food
As our week without UPFs wore on, a few friends asked if I was feeling healthier and more energetic. I was not. Whatever boost I might have gained from eating cleaner was outweighed by how tired I was from being on my feet in the kitchen most of the day.
All told, I spent about 25 hours planning, shopping, cooking and cleaning up during our week without UPFs. Cutting out UPFs was only possible because cooking and interviewing for this story was my job for the week, much like the whole-food influencers whose performative meals are their chief source of income.
Kelly Grant/The Globe and Mail
On the second last night our experiment, I wandered beneath the fluorescent lights of a No Frills, picking up groceries for a return to our regular menu.
Even though I was more convinced than ever that eating too many heavily processed foods is bad for our collective health, I felt an absurd amount of affection for the Old El Paso taco kits and frozen pizzas I added to my cart that night. Hello, old friends!
I also thought about the studies suggesting that minor dietary tweaks can make a difference to our health. Our no-UPF experiment was extreme, and it was never realistic to imagine I could keep it up. Instead, I would try to maintain a few of my new practices, like making granola and chip dip from scratch, and baking when it isn’t Christmas.
But I draw the line at natural peanut butter. The Kraft crunchy is back in our cupboard, and we’re all happier for it.
