Scientists Expose Startling Levels of Food Processing at Walmart, Target, and Whole Foods

Developed by researchers at Mass General Brigham and publicly accessible, the database reveals the prevalence of processed meals throughout numerous grocery shops, emphasizing the necessity for larger consciousness and regulation of food choices.

A brand new research from researchers at Mass General Brigham affords invaluable insights for customers and policymakers concerning the stage of food processing in merchandise bought at three main grocery retailers.

Using an algorithm, the workforce evaluated retailer merchandise and assigned scores based mostly on their diploma of processing. They additionally examined numerous food classes to match product choices throughout totally different shops. The research’s findings are revealed in Nature Food.

“There are a lot of mixed messages about what a person should eat. Our work aims to create a sort of translator to help people look at food information in a more digestible way,” mentioned corresponding writer Giulia Menichetti, PhD, an investigator within the Channing Division of Network Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. “By creating a system of scoring processed food, consumers don’t have to be overwhelmed with excessive and challenging information to be able to eat healthier.”

Health Concerns Around Ultra-Processed Foods

In the previous couple of a long time, extremely and “ultra” processed meals have flooded grocery store cabinets. These meals typically include components, preservatives, and high quantities of sugar, salt, and unhealthy fat. Research has steered that diets high in ultra-processed meals can contribute to health points like weight problems, diabetes, and coronary heart illness. Over-processing may also strip meals of useful vitamins. But there is no such thing as a straightforward method to inform what meals are processed, extremely processed, or ultra-processed. Researchers additionally know little or no about what meals can be found in real-life situations.

“When people hear about the dangers of ultra-processed foods, they ask, ‘OK, what are the rules? How can we apply this knowledge?’” Menichetti mentioned. “We are building tools to help people implement changes to their diet based on information currently available about food processing. Given the challenging task of transforming eating behaviors, we want to nudge them to eat something that is within what they currently want but a less-processed option.”

The researchers gathered and analyzed the ingredient lists, nutrition details, and costs of meals accessible in three main U.S. grocery shops: Target, Whole Foods, and Walmart. They used this information to create GroceryDB, a database with over 50,000 food gadgets. They revealed the outcomes on the TrueFood web site, which customers can use to match meals. The web site encompasses a processing rating, nutrition details, and an ingredient tree that exhibits the make-up of numerous meals.

The researchers then used their FPro algorithm, revealed in a 2023 article in Nature Communications, which leverages machine studying to find out the diploma of processing for the accessible meals and captured in a “processing score.” The increased the rating, the extra ultra-processed a food is. While Whole Foods affords extra minimally processed choices, most of the food these shops promote is ultra-processed.

Limited Healthy Options Across Stores

In some shops, extremely processed meals have been the one possibility in some classes. For instance, cereals at Whole Foods lined a variety of FPro values — from minimally to ultra-processed. However, all cereals accessible at Walmart and Target had a high processing rating. This similar development was seen within the soups and stews, yogurt and yogurt drinks, milk and milk substitutes, and cookies and biscuits classes.

The authors word that whereas grocery shops might promote a big selection in phrases of amount of merchandise and manufacturers, the supplied processing selections will be an identical in a number of shops, limiting client dietary selections to a slender vary. While the info in GroceryDB and on the True Food web site is remarkably detailed, it stays restricted as a result of it originates from simply three shops at a single cut-off date. In the longer term, the researchers wish to add geolocation data and temporal monitoring to study food choices in numerous areas of the nation and how that variability might impression the social determinants of health.

“People can use this information, but our goal would be to push this to become a large-scale, data-driven tool to improve public health,” Menichetti mentioned. “Most analysis actions in nutrition nonetheless depend upon guide curation, however our research exhibits that synthetic intelligence and information science can be utilized to scale up. This initiative not solely lays the groundwork for related efforts globally, but additionally underscores the important position of open-access, internationally comparable information in advancing world nutrition safety with the objective of guaranteeing that everybody has entry to health food choices of their every day actions.”

Reference: “Prevalence of processed foods in major US grocery stores” by Babak Ravandi, Gordana Ispirova, Michael Sebek, Peter Mehler, Albert-László Barabási and Giulia Menichetti, 13 January 2025, Nature Food.
DOI: 10.1038/s43016-024-01095-7

Disclosures: Barabási is the founder of Scipher Medicine and Naring Health, firms that discover the use of network-based instruments in health and food, and Datapolis, that focuses on city information.

Funding: Menichetti is supported by the NIH/NHLBI (Okay25HL173665) and the American Heart Association (24MERIT1185447). Barabási is partially supported by the NIH (1P01HL132825), American Heart Association (151708), and ERC (810115-DYNASET).