Trust me, I know how exhausting it can be to figure out how to feed your kids a healthy diet while also living in the real world as a busy working parent with limited time and means.
Sometimes, popping a frozen pizza into the oven or microwaving some frozen fish sticks is the quickest, easiest and least expensive way to get a meal on the table that your kids will actually eat. Even health experts do it from time to time.
“My littlest one will eat mac and cheese” – from a box –”every day if he could,” says Kevin Hall, a senior investigator at the National Institutes of Health who studies obesity and diabetes.
These kinds of quick, convenient, ready-to-heat meals and packaged snacks now dominate the diets of American kids and teens. They’re all what’s known as all ultra-processed foods, that is, industrially formulated products made mostly from ingredients extracted or refined from foods. They’re usually high in fat, added sugars and salt. And they often contain additives like colorings, flavorings, emulsifiers or hydrogenated oils — used to transform the texture, looks and flavor of food.
Ultra-processed foods made up a whopping 67% of the calories in kids’ and teens’ diets in 2018, a trend that’s been growing, according to a study published in 2021 in the journal JAMA. The trend cuts across socioeconomic lines, notes study author Dr. Fang Fang Zhang, a nutritional epidemiologist at Tufts University. The same study found that kids are eating less of the foods we know are good for them – like fruits and vegetables.
A large body of research has linked high consumption of ultra-processed foods to a host of bad health outcomes in…
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