In February, the Institute of Food Technologists hosted a seminar titled “Navigating the Science of Ultra-Processed Foods,” led by Dr. Matt Teegarden and Dr. Susanne Gjedsted Bügel. The seminar dove deep into the growing trend of labeling “ultra-processed” as the ultimate stand-in for “junk food.” But the NOVA classification system, which currently defines “ultra-processed” foods, is a bit broader. It includes everything from whole grain breads and yogurts to ultra-filtered high-protein milk — and yes, cookies and cakes.
These foods make up nearly 70% of the U.S. food supply, which makes recommending a reduction in ultra-processed foods (UPFs) a bit of a messy proposition. Researchers like Bügel are working to untangle the confusion. She’s currently leading a two-year international initiative to refine the NOVA system, especially when it comes to Category 4: the ultra-processed foods.
In the meantime, though, Bügel is regularly asked the big, eternal question: How should we eat?
“What should we tell people?” she mused. “Well, in Denmark, I’d say follow the Danish food-based dietary guidelines. Those guidelines say eat less meat, avoid soft drinks, and drink water instead.” Bügel then flashed a slide featuring the Danish food guide: six colorful boxes, each representing a different food group, with their sizes indicating their proportion in a healthy, climate-conscious diet. Each box also comes with its own suggestions, with one overarching recommendation: “Eat plant-rich, varied and not too much.
As Bügel moved on with the presentation, I couldn’t help but notice how the Danish guidelines felt familiar. They echoed Michael Pollan’s “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants” mantra from his 2008 book “In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto.” Pollan declared it even then the new, yet very ancient, answer to our food dilemma.
Seventeen years later, I couldn’t help but think: “Eating like a Dane” is one viral campaign away from being hailed as the latest breakthrough in American wellness — the long-awaited solution to our nutritional crisis.
This, of course, was not Bügel’s point. But it did make me reflect on how, in a culture so obsessed with thinness, we’re endlessly bombarded with contradictory messages about which foods to embrace and which to demonize (Is it carbs? Fats? All ultra-processed junk?). These food fights have raged for decades. And in the middle of all this confusion, it's tempting to look abroad for answers.
Because despite America’s relentless search for the perfect diet, the country’s approach to healthy eating often feels less like a well-balanced meal and more like a buffet of borrowed ideas — each one neatly repackaged as a “hack” for whatever ails us. Worried about heart disease? The Mediterranean diet will save you. Struggling with portion control? Take a page from the French. Hoping to live to a hundred? Start eating like the Japanese.
But by the time these diets make their way into American wellness culture, they are inevitably flattened, their nuances lost in translation. What remains is a handful of cherry-picked principles, stripped of their cultural context and repurposed for maximum marketability.
For instance, French women eat small portions and drink red wine — never mind the leisurely, three-hour meals and a cultural disinterest in snacking. The Mediterranean diet is distilled to olive oil, fish and nuts, with little mention of the long, social dinners that define it. Japanese cuisine is reduced to green tea and miso, often divorced from its deeper philosophy of balance and respect for food. Meanwhile, Scandinavians are known for rye bread and foraging, though the communal dining and variety in their diets are largely overlooked.
There are also entire cuisines that are overlooked in the world of American dieting; the advice we see around healthy eating is steeped in Eurocentric ideals with the foods of these regions being elevated as the gold standard, while other global cuisines — particularly those outside of Europe and parts of Asia — are often sidelined or dismissed as too “ethnic” or not aligned with mainstream notions of health.
What emerges is a kind of patchwork quilt of food rules, stitched together from distant traditions, yet somehow never quite fitting. And, thanks to our cultural obsession with thinness, what often takes shape from these scraps is just another guise for diet talk, this time draped in the effortless élégance of imported prestige.
In my lifetime, the most seminal example of this phenomenon is undoubtedly “French Women Don’t Get Fat” by Mireille Guiliano. First published in 2005 — just a year after the debut of “The Biggest Loser” — the book presents an alluring proposition: you can indulge in flaky, butter-laden pastries, decadent chocolates and glasses of champagne (Guiliano, it’s worth noting, would later go on to become CEO of Veuve Clicquot) and still remain thin. Impossibly thin. Effortlessly thin.
The book begins with a personal anecdote: as an 18-year-old from a small town in eastern France, Mireille spent a year as an exchange student in Weston, Massachusetts, where she discovered American food — and gained 20 pounds in the process. When her parents met her at the port in Le Havre, they were shocked by the transformation. Her father, visibly recoiling, told her she looked like a sack of potatoes.
“I could not have imagined anything more hurtful,” she writes. “And to this day, the sting has not been topped.”
After embarking on a leek soup detox and discovering her “willpower,” Guiliano loses the weight, keeping it off even after her return to the States. She then sets out to share the “French way” of eating—mindful, moderate, and centered on food’s rightful place—with tired, overworked, and often overweight Americans.
“French Women Don’t Get Fat” went on to become a runaway bestseller, moving over 3 million copies. Yet, as Julia Reed astutely pointed out in her 2005 New York Times review, Guiliano’s advice is not dissimilar to what most American nutritionists would prescribe.
“It’s exactly the advice I got last year at Dallas’s Cooper Clinic during my annual physical: if you want a glass of wine with dinner, don’t eat the bread or skip the baked potato,” Reed wrote. “Do some aerobic exercise; if you’re over 40, lift weights. Keep a food diary and cut out the processed junk. Slowly changing your eating habits is far more effective than any crash diet. You don’t have to deprive yourself if you learn to make trade-offs. And on and on.”
While the book does acknowledge some of the cultural factors that make French eating habits so enviable — like the long, leisurely meals that are practically a national pastime, versus Americans hunched over sad salads at desks — it conveniently avoided addressing the more significant structural realities. Like, say, France’s strollable cities or the minor detail of universal healthcare, which might make it a little easier to live your best, thin and graceful life.
These crucial details were also often absent from the repackaged international wellness advice that circulates in American circles.
Yet 20 years later, in response to all the scary headlines about ultra-processed foods, I’m starting to see the cycle repeat itself. The solution being touted to combat ultra-processed foods is a familiar refrain: Eat like the Europeans.
And while it’s true that European food traditions often feel a world apart from the processed chaos of the American diet, there’s a bit of a catch. European food products aren’t always just “healthier” versions of American foods; they’re often formulated differently altogether.
Take, for example, how European processed foods use fewer artificial preservatives, or how some nations have stricter regulations on food production — something else Büchel mentioned in her presentation. The problem with Americans holding up these cultures as the gold standard is that it ignores the fact that their food systems aren’t directly transferable to an American context, where processed foods are so entrenched in everyday life that simply importing foreign habits won’t fix the underlying systemic issues.
Instead of borrowing bits and pieces of foreign food cultures to serve as the next wellness trend, we need to address the core of the problem: our country’s food environment. Demonizing ultra-processed foods without considering the broader context — including how and why these foods became ubiquitous in the first place — is a one-size-fits-all solution that misses the mark. What’s needed is a deeper, more nuanced conversation that doesn’t just point fingers at ultra-processed foods, but works to create sustainable, culturally inclusive and accessible food systems that support health for all.
