Health reporter Kelly Grant prepares carrot muffins. Her family of five spent seven days experimenting with avoiding ultraprocessed foods.Melissa Tait/The Globe and Mail
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Nearly every product in the inner aisles and freezer cases of your local grocery store are ultraprocessed foods (UPFs). Pop, chips, breakfast cereals, margarine, hot dogs, sausages, lunch meat, crackers, cookies, mass-produced packaged bread, flavoured yogurt, frozen pizzas, chicken fingers, fish nuggets, meat pies.
If it’s produced in a factory with ingredients you don’t recognize by a company bent on selling as much of it as possible, it’s a UPF.
In the last couple of years, however, there has been a big spike in studies linking UPFs with chronic disease. The bulk of the research blames our modern food environment, with its cornucopia of cheap, convenient and irresistible products, for increases in obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and other diet-related ailments.
The only way out is home cooking. But is it truly possible to eliminate all UPFs? Kelly Grant, one of The Globe’s health reporters, decided to find out. She and her family underwent a week without any of the frozen staples or takeout dinners that make their busy life possible – and she documented the whole experiment.
On Thursday, June 4 at 1 p.m. ET, Kelly Grant answered reader questions about her week without ultraprocessed foods, what she learned in the process and what makes it so easy for consumers to turn to UPFs.
How did it affect grocery costs and cooking time? How did her family feel day to day? Did she change any habits after the week-long experiment? Read our responses here.