If you’re a patient or a regular reader of this blog or follow us on social, you already know that we’ve never been big fans of ultraprocessed food.
Scratch that last word. We prefer to call them “products” instead. After all, by the end of their manufacture, many of them have been so broken down, reformulated, flavored, colored, stabilized, sweetened, and packaged, they scarcely resemble real food. They don’t really nourish like real food either.
Yet these products make up most of the typical American diet. Adults get an average 53% of their daily calories from ultraprocessed products. For kids and teens, it’s nearly 62%.
Now, an enormous new study offers another reason to rethink just how much ultraprocessed products you want to include in your regular diet.
Just published in Family Medicine and Community Health, the study pooled data from 51 prospective studies involving more than 8.8 million adults. (We told you it was enormous!) Its authors looked at ultraprocessed product consumption in relation to a remarkably broad collection of health outcomes, including cardiovascular disease, cancer, overweight and obesity, metabolic syndrome and diabetes, depression and anxiety, digestive diseases, and death from any cause.
Ultimately, higher consumption was associated with higher risk across all those health outcomes. Only the size of the associations varied. Compared to those who ate the fewest ultraprocessed products, those who ate the most had a 12% higher risk of cancer on the low end and a 31% higher risk of digestive disease on the high end.
The researchers also found dose-response relationships for several health outcomes: As consumption increased, so did risk.
This study isn’t unique. A 2024 umbrella review in The BMJ examined pooled analyses from 14 meta-analyses involving 9.9 million people. It, too, found a relationship between eating ultraprocessed products and a higher risk of a wide range of health issues, “especially cardiometabolic, common mental disorder, and mortality outcomes.”
That said, there are important limits to what such research can tell us. For instance, many of the studies are observational, able to show relationships but not prove causality. And diet is notoriously difficult to study. Still, the pattern is increasingly hard to dismiss.
Also hard to miss — at least from the perspective of biological dentistry — is the fact that so many of the health problems highlighted by the research have also been scientifically linked with oral health: Cardiovascular disease. Diabetes and metabolic syndrome. Obesity. Digestive disorders. Depression and anxiety. Cancer.
The relationship between diabetes and periodontitis is especially well established. It also runs in both directions. Poorly controlled diabetes can make gum disease more difficult to manage, while periodontal inflammation can make it harder to control blood sugar.
Periodontal disease has also been linked with heart disease, while obesity, metabolic dysfunction, and gum disease share inflammatory pathways that are also involved in cardiovascular risk. Researchers continue to explore relationships between the oral and gut microbiomes, as well.
All this points to one of the core concepts of biological dentistry: The mouth doesn’t operate independently from everything below the neck.
When it comes to ultraprocessed products, the dental case is much simpler. Many are loaded with added sugars and other highly refined, readily fermentable carbohydrates. Cavity-causing bacteria love that stuff, generating acids in the process. Products like soft drinks, energy drinks, and sour candies bring plenty of acid on their own.
How you consume these products matters, too. Sipping a sweet drink over the course of an afternoon or grazing on snacks throughout the day means one acid challenge over another — and less opportunity for saliva to bring your oral pH up to its ideal neutral level.
At the same time, ultraprocessed products have a way of crowding out whole and minimally processed foods that give you the fiber, vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients that your body uses to nourish and maintain healthy tissues.
To be clear, an occasional ultraprocessed snack or fast food meal isn’t going to doom you. It’s the overall dietary pattern that counts.
For some people, a healthier pattern comes from gradually crowding out the products with real food cooking more often; choosing foods made with recognizable ingredients; or simply making ultraprocessed products occasional rather than everyday fare.
For others, though, moderation is harder than abstinence. If drawing a bright line makes it easier to change the way you eat — no fast food, no added sugars, no ultraprocessed products at all for a while — we say go for it.
There’s no requirement that everybody use the same strategy.
What matters is where your habits eventually take you. A diet built mostly from real, minimally processed foods gives your body — and your mouth — something very different to work with than one dominated by ultraprocessed products.
And increasingly, the research suggests that difference matters.
