The modern food landscape bears little resemblance to what humans consumed for millennia, and understanding this transformation reveals why chronic disease has become epidemic.
Cardiologist and public health researcher Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian recently appeared on the FoundMyFitness podcast with Rhonda Patrick. During the conversation, he stated that approximately 60% of calories in the American food supply now come from ultraprocessed foods. This is a category that didn’t meaningfully exist until recent decades.
He said, “We’ve created now about 60% of calories in the food supply are these ultra-processed foods. I think we’ve created you know kind of a monster. And what’s exciting is I think now people are starting to get it and there’s a big push back. And so that’s I think where we need to go next.”
This shift didn’t happen by accident. It resulted from a convergence of scientific advances, policy decisions, and industry innovation that fundamentally altered how food is produced and consumed. The story begins not in the 1980s with low-fat guidelines, as many assume, but decades earlier with the discovery of vitamins and the Green Revolution’s focus on preventing starvation.
When scientists conquered vitamin deficiency diseases and global famine through technological intervention, they made a critical error.
“The mistake they made was when they decided to turn their eyes to new problems,” Mozaffarian explains. Facing the rise of heart disease as the top cause of death, researchers applied the same reductionist thinking that solved scurvy and pellagra. “They said, ‘Okay, we figured out the nutrient for pellagra. It’s niacin. We figured out the nutrient for scurvy. It’s vitamin C. What’s the nutrient for heart disease?’ And they said, ‘Oh, it must be saturated fat.'”
This narrow focus on single nutrients overlooked the complexity of chronic disease. While vitamin deficiencies can be cured by adding one compound, conditions like obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease involve intricate interactions between thousands of food components and human biology.
The 1980 low-fat guidelines accelerated ultraprocessing dramatically.
“When you take fat out, you change the texture, you change the taste, you change the mouth feel, you change structural properties of the food,” Mozaffarian notes. Companies compensated by adding “all kinds of flavorings and colorings and emulsifiers and stabilizers and thickeners.”
The result was products like fat-free salad dressing, essentially starch, sugar, salt, and additives with the healthy oil removed.
Then came an even more troubling development. In the late 1970s and 1980s, tobacco giants R.J. Reynolds and Philip Morris purchased nearly every major American food brand.
“They took their exact same brain engagement scientists. They took their exact same marketing teams that market to kids and create brand loyalty. They took their same flavor scientists, all of their scientists that had worked so hard to make tobacco as appealing and as engaging as possible and market it to kids and get it into people’s minds,” Mozaffarian says. “They took all of that same science and applied it to food.”
This transformation was enabled by a regulatory loophole unique to the United States. The “GRAS” (generally regarded as safe) pathway allows companies to add ingredients to food without FDA review.
“99% of food additives do not get reviewed by the FDA,” Mozaffarian states. “They not only don’t get reviewed, FDA doesn’t even know they exist.” Companies hire their own scientists, conduct their own safety reviews, and never disclose their findings publicly. “We are the only country in the world that has this exception,” he adds. “In every other country, everything has to be reviewed.”
The consequences extend beyond nutrition depletion and chemical additives. Ultraprocessed foods disrupt metabolism through multiple mechanisms. Their cellular structure has been molecularly disassembled and reassembled, causing rapid digestion that spikes blood sugar, starves the gut microbiome of calories it evolved to harvest, and increases the proportion of energy absorbed by human tissues rather than beneficial bacteria.
Perhaps most concerning is what Mozaffarian calls the untold story of the obesity epidemic. From 1980 to 2000, calorie intake rose and obesity increased predictably. But after 2000, something remarkable happened: “Calorie intake is pretty flat. Physical activity is going up. We’re all trying hard, but we’re gaining weight.”
The explanation lies in resting energy expenditure, the calories burned while doing nothing.
“By objective measurements using doubly labeled water, over the last 25 years the average person’s energy expenditure in the United States and in England where it was studied has gone down by 220 calories per day,” Mozaffarian explains. The primary culprit appears to be reduced thermogenesis. it is the body’s ability to generate heat through specialized brown fat and metabolic uncoupling in cells.
What activates thermogenesis? The very compounds stripped from ultraprocessed food: polyphenols in berries and nuts, omega-3 fatty acids from seafood, curcumin from turmeric, and metabolites produced when gut bacteria digest intact food matrices.
“All of the same things,” Mozaffarian emphasizes, are missing from the modern diet.
Industry has seized on the new dietary guidelines’ protein recommendations to market what Mozaffarian calls the “protein halo.” They add protein to Pop-Tarts, sugary coffee drinks, cheese puffs, and candy to create a health perception.
Mozaffarian says, “But what industry is doing is taking that message and putting protein in Pop-Tarts, putting protein in Starbucks and Duncan sugary drinks, putting protein in cheese puffs, putting protein in candy. So I think that’s a big big mistake for the American public because it gives a health halo to these highly ultraprocessed foods.”
“The guidelines say eat real food. Get your protein from a range of sources,” he clarifies, not from ultraprocessed products with cosmetic protein additions.
The path forward requires following the money already being spent. Healthcare consumes five trillion dollars annually. Redirecting even 5% toward healthy food through prescriptions and food-as-medicine programs would transform incentives across the entire food system. The SNAP program spends about 100 billion dollars yearly, far more than agricultural subsidies, with no nutrition standards. Multiple states are now testing healthier approaches.
Most critically, the FDA’s nutrition budget represents just 15 million of its 7 billion dollar total, with most funds devoted to [ ] regulation rather than preventing the top cause of poor health through better food policy.
“This is the single biggest issue and opportunity humans have to kind of grab and make the world a better place,” Mozaffarian concludes. The solution isn’t demonizing individual nutrients or counting calories, but recognizing that food quality determines whether bodies burn energy efficiently, whether beneficial bacteria thrive, and whether thousands of bioactive compounds can activate the genetic pathways humans evolved to respond to over hundreds of thousands of years.
