The Decibel - A week without ultraprocessed foods

Episode Date: May 20, 2026

Finding the time to cook can be a challenge. The solution for many Canadians looks like using convenient pre-prepared foods. Ultraprocessed foods (UPFs) are branded, commercial foods made from cheap ingredients and contain little to no whole foods. But despite their convenience, foods like these are usually known for being bad for your health. So is it possible to go without UPFs? Kelly Grant, one of the Globe’s health reporters, decided to find out. She and her family underwent a week-long experiment of eating no ultraprocessed foods. She’s on the show to discuss how the week went, what she learned and what makes it so easy for consumers to turn to UPFs. Questions? Comments? Ideas? E-mail us at [e-mail] Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Okay, I'm just doing a little check-in here. That's Globe reporter Kelly Grant. To mark my first full day of prep for my family's week of trying to eat no ultra-processed foods. Kelly is a health reporter, as well as a mom, to three busy boys. William, who is 15, Campbell, who is 13, and Ethan, who is 10. All three play hockey. This means they are a family. on the go, and the boys are always hungry.

So when Kelly cooks, she cooks a lot. It is 2.35 on Monday, April the 13th, and I have been cooking since 9.30 a.m. today. So I don't know if you can hear that in the background, but I am stirring away one of two pots that I have with a homemade boulinets sauce. The dishwasher is chugging away behind me. I also We also have two trays of homemade granola that are finished and one ball of focci dough that is covered currently rising. I'm about to clean up my very messy kitchen before I head out to the grocery store and pick up a few things for tomorrow. The reality is families like Kellys have become accustomed to food that is convenient. And convenience can often look like ultra-processed foods.

But then again, we hear so much about ultra-processed foods being, quote-unquote, bad for us. So Kelly wondered, could we, with a little more organization and effort, go one week without eating any ultra-processed foods and what might we learn if we did? And we're going to find out today on the show. Kelly shares what it was like for her family, what she learned about the research into ultra-processed foods, and what's causing so many people to be so reliant on them. I'm Cheryl Sutherland, and this is the decibel from the Globe and Mail.

Hi, Kelly, great to have you on the show. Thanks for having me, Cheryl. Let's start by getting a sense of what a typical week of meals would look like for your family before you did your no ultra-processed foods for a week experiment. So when it comes to dinners, I generally cook from scratch two or three days a week. The rest of the time, either we're relying on sort of food on the go, or for things like breakfast, lunch, and snacks, we really do rely on a lot of what I now recognize as ultra-processed foods. You know, breakfast cereal, grocery store bread with peanut butter, sandwiches at lunch, packaged granola bars.

You know, there's some fruits and vegetables in there too, but we really do rely a fair bit on convenience foods. Our schedule is ridiculous. All three of my sons play competitive hockey and they're on the ice 15 times a week. between the three of them. And then they play other sports and do other activities too. And I feel very much like I could make a choice to say no to that and say, no, you can't participate in, you know, competitive sports or theater or some of the other things that they're really enthusiastic to do so that we could all eat dinner together every night over something that is home cooked. And I could choose to prioritize that. And lots of people do. And I say like more power to you if that is

like what your choice is. But to me, the price of being able to support my kids and doing very healthy physical activity is that sometimes it's going to be frozen lasagna and not homemade lasagna. And that's like a choice that I've tried to make some peace with. So, Geli, I mean, I get it. I mean, I see why you'd reach for a frozen lasagna when you're that busy. Now, I assume that a frozen lasagna is considered an ultra-processed food. But what is the actual definition. So for the purposes of the experiment that we did this week, my family relied on something called the Nova Food Classification System. It divides foods into four categories. So you're ready for, ready for your four categories here? I'm ready, Kelly. Let's go. Okay. So we've got group one,

which is unprocessed or minimally processed food. So think like fresh fruit and vegetables, you know, chicken, anything that just sort of like is in its most closest to the natural state that you could possibly imagine. Number two is processed culinary ingredients. So those are things like butter, oils, spices, things that you would add to group one foods to make a meal but that you probably wouldn't eat on their own. Okay, that makes sense. Yeah.

Then we've got group three, which is processed food. And generally these are foods that are still fairly close to what you would see in nature, but they've usually been processed in some fashion so that they last longer. So like think about canning, for example, like tinned fish, can. canned beans, canned fruit and vegetables, that sort of thing. And then we get into ultra-process foods. And this is group number four. And this is anything that is industrially produced using ingredients that you would probably

not recognize, contains very little whole or natural food, is generally packaged, and is designed for the purpose of getting you to find it really delicious, get like a great, nice hit of dopamine off of it and eat as much as possible so that the companies who make it can earn as much money as possible. I think it's fair to say there's been a lot of attention on ultra-processed foods as being quote-unquote bad for us, right? But let's get a reality check and talk about what that means exactly. What does the science say about the effects of consuming a lot of this kind of food? So the evidence showing that these foods are quite bad for us has been building slowly over time. and it feels to me as a health reporter like I am seeing many more studies looking at this question

and finding some associations between eating a lot of ultra-processed foods and developing a whole host of diet-related chronic diseases. So everything from obesity to diabetes to cardiovascular disease to some mental health issues like depression, to some links to Alzheimer's and certain types of cancer. So most of the studies in this space are finding associations or correlations, but we don't necessarily have causation. To get that, you have to have gold standard randomized control trials. But there have been a few down in this space and one in particular that was quite famous. It was a 2019 study from the United States where they took 20 people and created two diets, one that was made up entirely of ultra-processed foods and one that was made

up of minimally processed whole foods. But in each case, they kept the calories and the share of sugar, fat, and salt equivalent. Then at the halfway point, they switched them. And what they found was that while these research subjects were eating the ultra-processed diets, they ate about 500 calories more a day, and they gained in the neighborhood of about two pounds during the course of the two-week experiment. And what was so interesting about this was that when we think about why people eat so many ultra-processed foods, we think about a lot of things that are external to the food itself. We think about the advertising, the convenience, the price. This experiment stripped all that away so that all you were talking about was the quality of the food

itself. And there was something about the ultra-process meals that made everybody involved, eat more. But the kind of big picture thinking of why does it seem like eating a lot of these foods tends to make us sick. There's a couple things that are possibly going on here. I mean, one is the idea that these foods displace traditional dietary patterns where you will eat a lot more fiber, a lot more like phytochemicals, just a lot more fresh food that contains things that are good for you. Then there is also some thinking that it might be some of the actual elements of these foods, like a lot of endocrine disruptors, additives, chemicals, things. like that. Even there's some hypotheses around, like, so many of these foods are served in plastic

packaging that can contain some chemicals that have been shown to be not great for our health. Now, of course, there's people on the other side who think that the problem with evaluating foods this way is that the category of ultra processed is so broad that you are getting in there things that we know are really clearly bad for us like soda with things like whole grain breads. Like, does it really make sense to include all brand and fruit loops in the same category, for example? Yeah. Yeah. Do we have a sense of how much of the Canadian diet is made up of ultra-processed foods?

Yeah. So the most recent data we have from Statistics Canada goes back to the 2015 Canadian Community Health Survey. And at that point, Canadians were consuming just under half of their total calories, 46% from ultra-processed foods. Now, an interesting thing about that is that our consumption of ultra-process foods as a share of our total calorie intake has actually gone down a little bit since 2004. It was higher, closer to 50% that year. And the change seems to be from Canadians getting the message around pop and juice and people drinking less of those products. So that's actually brought the share down a little bit. Okay.

Would you say that those numbers are accurate for your family before the experiment too? Yeah, I would say that that's pretty close, pretty fair. Okay. So you're very much on trend with other Canadians then. Let's now get back. This is a good segue to get back to your family's experiment. We have a bit of tape of your audio diaries from the week. This part we're going to play is from your family's first dinner for the week.

Can you set this up for us? So if my memory serves this night, we were eating salmon with. a honey lime glaze, a Caesar salad with homemade croutons and rice. And this was the only dinner that all five of us sat down together for during the week, which is very typical for our family. Okay, so here's the snippet from that night. I'm glad you guys. It's our first full day of trying to eat only unprocessed foods, no alter processed foods. So I want to hear from everybody how the day went. Ethan, can you go first? Well, two girls in my class decided to hold

An Easter, like, project, I needed Easter accounts, but then I asked people when I came to away. What about you, Will? How did it go for you? It was completely normal. Nothing was different. Well, wait, did you eat the Bolognese in the thermos? Yeah. Do it stay hot? Yeah. And you actually ate it? Yes. Okay? Did you eat anything other than the packed lunch today?

I went to the Japanese bakery after school because I needed a little bit of extra food before I worked out and I got a custard blend from there. But you think it was okay? It was alright. Like okay in terms of taste, but okay is in terms of like... I asked them, they said that they were, none of the things are pulled to process and they baked to themselves. Then so. Oh, that seems like a fits the rules to me.

Okay, Campbell. How did your experience go with this today? I had pizza for lunch So you had what for lunch Pizza Why did you have pizza for lunch I had two to your guys for us Why?

So what happened to the Bolognaz And a thermos that we made this morning I stole my bag Did you eat any of the anything else That was in your pack lunch today? Yeah I ate my banana, right My grapes It's pizza ultra-processed

Pizza is so No Pizza is so ultra-processed You suck Campbell You suck Campbell. Oh my gosh. Pizza. Is it ultra-processed? Yes, indeed. Bad news, everybody. It is indeed ultra-processed. And, you know, I will say, Ethan, who's the little one who said no to the Easter candy on the first day, did not necessarily follow the rules perfectly for the rest of the week.

Spoiler here. Okay. Exactly. But yeah, you know, they all had their, they all had their different challenges as the week went on. How did you feel about that? How did you feel about the fact that you your boys were having, you know, challenges with the experiment? I was zero percent surprised. You know, they live in the real world, right? And the real world is one where they are very frequently offered candy and pizza and where they need to pick up something quickly on the way to the gym, as happened with my oldest kid.

And convenience foods are everywhere for them. So I appreciated the fact that they did try as the week went on to eat better than they normally do. but like it's not easy out there for them or for anybody else really. After the break, we look at the factors that lead people to eat a lot of ultra-processed foods and what Kelly's takeaways were after her experiment. So Kelly, it sounds like the experiment got off to somewhat of a rough start, but did it get any easier? I mean, in some ways, yes, because I started getting into a little bit of a rhythm,

but I really didn't do it long enough to become faster at cooking new things. I think if I had stuck with it a little bit longer, maybe I would become better at that sort of thing. But a week is probably not enough time for me to develop into the kind of super fast, super talented chef that might be better at this than I am. There's one story that you had in your reporting about you and your son making chips. I know that some people in the comments were kind of criticizing you about why would you be making chips. But can you talk about it a little bit? Because I feel like what I got from that story was that was kind of a bonding moment as well. Tell me about that. Tell me about that. Yeah, Ethan and I had a lot of fun making those chips. He was totally into it. We made them in the air fryer. You know, he used the mandolin to slice. And then we bathed the potato slices in an ice bath. And then we put them in like single layers in the air friar. And he thought it was very cool and very fun. He does like to be in the kitchen. All three of them actually are fairly interested and helpful when the time comes. But, you know, it just wasn't like a practical way to prepare snacks for the week.

It took us such a long time. And we wound up with such a small amount of chips for the time that we put in. So it was a great like mom and son experience. It was less useful as like a bulk preparation technique. But a learning experience, I think, right? Like I think that if you were to continue on with this, you'd be like, okay, I've learned my lesson on that. And now I know what takes much time and what takes maybe a little bit less time. Yeah.

I learned that we will not. be making potato chips again. So I want to zoom back out for a moment here and look at who is most likely to buy these foods and why. So the research is, it's a touch all over the place. There have been some studies that pointed to these foods being fairly popular with people who are of lower socioeconomic status because they can be very cheap, right? And they're cheap, not just in terms of like what it costs to buy them at the grocery store, but they are cheap in terms of the amount of time it takes. And if you're a person who's, say, working multiple jobs or shifts or has, you know,

caregiving responsibilities that take up a lot of your time, that tends to be the people who reach for these foods. But I would say that probably the biggest element seems to be people who just don't have the time or the wherewithal to cook. Did the research find anything about gender and ultra-processed foods? Yes. Women are still the primary providers of. of day-to-day food.

We are the ones who do the meal prep. We make the plans. We do the unsexy day-to-day work of putting meals on the table. Now, at least in Canada anyway, time-use surveys are showing that over the last couple of decades, men are contributing more. So that gap between the amount of time women spend and men spend is narrowing, but women do still spend more time every day cooking and cleaning up than do men. Okay. So you kept track of your time, right, when you were making food. How much time did you end up spending during the week preparing, thinking about food for that week? So between the prep and then the eight days where we kind of followed this diet, I estimated that I spent about 25 hours on everything from planning to grocery shopping to picking up extra food to the cooking and baking itself and then the cleaning up. So many dishes. Yeah, I can imagine. So based on your experiment,

would you say it's realistic for you to do this on a regular basis outside of this week? It is not. It was only possible for me this week because it was, in essence, my job. All I did during this week was work on this story. So that meant doing the experiment and then doing interviews with experts in everything from food policy to digital marketing to health experts of all kinds. if I had had to do my regular job and, you know, file a story every day or if I was, you know, a person who had a different type of job where I worked shift or was in a store or whatever all day, I would never have had time to do with this. It's a good reality check for sure. So we've been talking about your experiment and also about what you can change on the individual level, right? But this is, of course, a systemic or a structural issue as well.

we are used to cooking and shopping based on how our food systems are set up. And there are so many items available on grocery store shelves that are ultra-processed because they don't spoil as fast. And as you mentioned, they can be cheaper. So on that bigger picture, is there something that governments can do in terms of regulation that could help people eat fewer ultra-process foods? You know, there wasn't an expert I spoke to who said anything other than the fact that the food environment is the real problem here.

If we put all of this on the shoulders of individuals, like there won't be any change. That as a society and as a government, you asked about policy. If we don't make some changes there, it will be very hard to shift people's diets. But then, of course, we've just talked about how difficult that can be with time. So it's just like we're stuck in this cycle right now. Yeah, I feel like that's why I got so much interesting reaction to this story because I think there are so many people out there who want to feed themselves and their families better and then feel very constrained by the idea of the time. So I think one of the big takeaways for me is to not let the perfect be the enemy of the good and where you can make some small changes and do a little bit more prep and a little bit more cooking with real food. Even those small changes, I think, can be helpful.

Kelly, how did you feel? Did you end up feeling any better during the experiment? You know, it's so funny. So many people have asked me that. I think because they have this idea from social media that, you know, one week of clean eating and your skin is glowing and your hair is thicker and you're sleeping better and you're sleeping better and you're. feeling great. And I did not feel that way. Now, a week is a short period of time. So I think we have to acknowledge that major changes in your health don't happen overnight. But the reason I didn't feel that way was because it was overwhelmed by the fact that I felt really tired being on my feet for a good portion of the day in the kitchen. I am used to a job where I'm lucky enough to get to sit in a chair for part of the day. The other thing is that my own eating was not drastically different. Like, I generally eat fairly well.

It's just that, you know, I'll be in the office and I will grab a salad instead of making it myself. I actually don't think, and I'm probably going to like cause a stir with this, but I actually don't think it's all that hard to eat more minimally processed when you are just feeding yourself. The purpose of this story was talking about trying to feed a family and what that costs in labor and effort, particularly for moms. So now we have some tape from your family from the end of the week. Okay, so this is our last full day of trying not to eat ultra-process foods. As is like normal and typical for our family, there's only three of us here. Me, Will, the oldest, and my husband, Tom, we will check in with the middle and littlest boys after to see what they thought.

But I want to ask you, Will, like, how do you feel like the week one? I didn't notice a lot different. I found that we're up to so many meals that weren't ultra-processed that we just cut out of the ones that we didn't. And I don't really eat that much junk food, so I noticed not eating that. So it was pretty normal. Did you end up trying the natural peanut butter? I did try, like, a finger of it. It wasn't that good, unfortunately.

Did you use a spoon or did you use your finger? My finger. Yeah. Sure, everybody appreciates that. Okay, come back here, Campbell. So are you happy to have your protein powder smoothie back? Yep. Yeah?

And how did you feel about no-alter-processed foods week? I failed twice. Yeah, how did you fail? I don't want to talk about it. Oh, come on, tell me. No, it's okay. Come on. I know you failed on pizza day.

Where else did you fail? My friend gave me some goldfish. Okay, Ethan. What's you eating there? processed food. What kind of processed food? Ultra-processed peanut butter on unprocessed, not ultra-processed bread. Yeah, and how are you enjoying that?

I missed it. What did you think of the natural peanut butter? It tasted weird. What did you think of us trying not to eat ultra-processed foods for the week? It felt like it was fun, and I felt like I made all the time. dinners taste better because that means mom's like, because this was part of mom's job, which meant mom had to, like, which means mom could stay home and make, like, really good food. And so you actually liked that?

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So it's so funny to listen back to those clips from the kids. I think it's very funny to hear from William that, like, it didn't feel all that different for him. And I think from the kids' perspective, I can understand why. It's like if in your lunch that day you took homemade banana bread versus like a granola bar, to him he's like just eating a snack.

To me, that was like an hour of work to make the banana bread as opposed to just opening up the package, right? The other thing is that it was nice to hear from Ethan that he thought some of my cooking was good because I don't think I'm super well known as a great cook. It's not a thing I'm known for. My husband, Tom, is actually generally a better cook than I am, but he works in the office five days a week and often works long hours. And the result of that is just I do have some flexibility to work from home. And so most of the burden of day-to-day food prep falls to me. So given all the research you did and the reaction to it and this experiment, what was your takeaway from all of this?

And will you keep doing it? My overall takeaway was that I definitely do not have time to do this permanently. And nor do I want to, actually. I think there are some people who dream of the idea of being in the kitchen all day and really take a lot of joy from it. There were some moments of joy for us during the week. But this is not the life that I want. I was very happy to be able to go back to the office. I'm very happy to know that there were a couple of moments in the weeks that followed where when I was super busy and overwhelmed, I could turn to a convenience product and there would still be something on the table for my family to eat.

However, there were a few small things that I picked up during the week that I would like to keep doing and have kept doing. One was making my mother-in-law's really terrific granola as an alternative to cereal. So I have been making that weekly since the experiment ended. another is more frequently buying, like, good quality bakery bread. I mean, that is a swap that doesn't take any time. It's a bit more expensive, but it tastes better and is better for us. So I am trying to think about, as I said earlier, not making the perfect the enemy of the good, but also knowing that, like, I didn't come away from this wanting to be a full-time chef.

Let's put it that way. I think what I'm getting out of this is like moderation is important here, but not perfection. Yeah, I think that's a great way to put it. Kelly, thank you so much to you and to your family for this experiment and for coming on the show to talk about it. Thanks for having me. This was fun. That was Kelly Grant, a health reporter for the globe. That's it for today. I'm Cheryl Sutherland. Our associate producer and intern is Cynthia Jimenez.

Our producers are Madeline White, Rachel Levy McLaughlin and Mihal Stein. Our editor is David Crosby. Adrian Chung is our senior producer. and Angela Pichenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening.