How Much of Your Diet Is Ultra-Processed? The 57% Number, Explained

By Dr. Raj Dhadwal

You probably feel like you eat reasonably well. Most people do. Which is what makes the published number so uncomfortable when you first meet it.

Ultra-processed food now accounts for 57.0% of daily calories among United States adults, up from 53.5% two decades earlier, according to Juul and colleagues in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 2022.

What counts as ultra-processed?

The research uses the NOVA classification, which sorts foods by how far they sit from their original ingredients. Ultra-processed formulations are industrial products assembled from extracted substances, refined starches, oils, protein isolates, with additives for colour, flavour and shelf life. The practical tell is the label: a long list of ingredients that are not themselves foods.

Where the 57% comes from

Juul, Parekh, Martinez-Steele, Monteiro and Chang analysed national dietary data for US adults across two windows, 2001 to 2002 and 2017 to 2018, and reported the ultra-processed share of daily calories rising from 53.5% to 57.0% (PubMed 34647997). It is a paper about the food supply as a whole, not about any product, and not a prediction about any individual person's plate.

What sits at the other end of the scale?

NOVA's first category is unprocessed and minimally processed food: an ingredient that is still recognisably itself. A whole fruit, pressed, is about as close to that end as a packaged product can sit. That is the category our own product lives in, and the label test works on it the same way it works on anything: one ingredient. Human Renaissance sea buckthorn puree contains 190+ naturally occurring compounds, omega 3, 6, 7 and 9, 201 mg of vitamin C per pouch, 0 g sugar and 5,640 hand-picked berries per box.

What this number is not

It is not a claim that ultra-processed food poisons you, and it is not a claim that any single food fixes a decades-long shift in the food supply. It is a measured description of where the average plate has moved. What you do with that description is a choice about ingredients, made one label at a time.

Frequently asked

Is all processing bad?

No. Pressing, freezing and fermenting are processing too, and NOVA does not treat them as the problem. The category under scrutiny is industrial formulations of extracted substances, not a pressed fruit or a frozen vegetable.

How do I check any product in ten seconds?

Read the ingredient list. Foods have short ones. Formulations have long ones. That single habit reclassifies most of a supermarket.

This article is educational. It describes the composition of a food and published research about the food supply. It is not medical advice, and nothing here is a claim that sea buckthorn prevents, treats or cures any condition.