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The earliest processed foods promised ease and convenience.

They filled the bellies of soldiers at war.

But now, the evolution and explosion of ultraprocessed foods has become one of the greatest health threats of our time.

How did we get here? Let’s take a tour through history.

How America Got Hooked on Ultraprocessed Foods

They promised convenience and cheap nutrition. But they became one of the greatest health threats of our time.

By Alice Callahan

Humans have been processing food for millenniums. Neanderthals sizzled meat over open flames; hunter-gatherers ground wild wheat to make bread; and factory workers canned fruit for soldiers during the Civil War.

But in the late 1800s, food companies began concocting products that were wildly different from anything people could make themselves.

Coca-Cola was introduced in 1886

Jell-O in 1897

Crisco in 1911

Spam, Velveeta, Kraft Mac & Cheese and Oreos arrived in the following decades.

These were among the first ultraprocessed foods, though experts wouldn’t formally call them that until many years later.

Over decades, they came to dominate the American food supply.

Wartime Innovation and Cultural Change

1940s-1960s

During World War II, shelf-stable foods like powdered cheeses, dehydrated potatoes, canned meats and melt-resistant chocolate bars were developed to feed soldiers.

New additives like preservatives, flavorings and vitamins were infused into them, and they were packaged in novel ways to withstand hard helicopter drops, wet beach landings and days at the bottom of rucksacks.

After the war, food companies realized that they could adapt this foxhole cuisine into profitable convenience foods for the masses.

Targeted marketing campaigns gradually convinced homemakers that these products offered superior nutrition and could save them time in the kitchen.

Wonder Bread commercials from the 1950s claimed the product’s added vitamins and minerals would help children “grow bigger and stronger.”

Ads for Tang, the powdered citrus drink, boasted its high levels of vitamin A and vitamin C.

In the 1950s and ’60s, more women began working outside of the home, but were still expected to feed their families.

Home refrigerators offered modern freezer compartments, ready to fill with fish sticks, frozen waffles and TV dinners.

People moved from farms and cities to the suburbs, where large supermarkets stocked new varieties of packaged foods.

By the mid-1970s, women spent much less time cooking, and men picked up little of the slack.

In a Time magazine cover story from 1959, a writer described a “working wife” preparing dinner for 14 guests from frozen lobster and asparagus, instant rice and canned mushrooms: “Such jiffy cooking would have made Grandma shudder, but today it brings smiles of delight to millions of U.S. housewives.”

These products weren’t all ultraprocessed — some were just whole foods that had been frozen or canned with a simple ingredient, like salt. But during this time, people got used to the idea that packaged goods could replace cooking from scratch.

An Ultraprocessed Food Explosion

1970s-1990s

By the 1970s, innovations in fertilizer, pesticide and crop development, along with farm subsidies, led to a glut of grain.

Corn and wheat supplies roughly doubled between 1970 and 1990, and those grains were transformed into cheap ingredients we see in ultraprocessed foods today — like high fructose corn syrup, vegetable oil and modified starch.

Between 1970 and 1993, high fructose corn syrup consumption among U.S. children and adults increased a hundredfold.

“An alternate universe of food products” was created, said Dr. David A. Kessler, a former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration.

By the late 1970s, televisions were ubiquitous in American homes.

Elementary school students spent more time in front of the TV than in school, viewing thousands of commercials for sugary cereals, candies and fast foods every year.

Animated characters like Tony the Tiger, Count Chocula and Fred Flintstone blurred the line between ads and morning cartoons.

In 1977, consumer groups petitioned federal regulators to ban the marketing of sugary foods to children, but industry lobbying halted those efforts.

Food companies knew they could “own you from the very early years,” said Laura Schmidt, a public health researcher in San Francisco.

By the 1980s, food manufacturers were under intense investor pressure to grow profits. They developed thousands of new drinks and foods — especially snacks — and marketed them aggressively.

In a 1986 report, PepsiCo called the United States “a nation of snackers,” with Americans spending more on salty snacks than the rest of the world.

The tobacco companies Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds diversified into the food industry, dominating it through the early 2000s.

They applied the same savvy marketing techniques to snacks that they had used to sell cigarettes, including targeting children and certain racial and ethnic groups.

Kraft, owned by Philip Morris, created Kool-Aid flavors for the Hispanic market and handed out coupons and samples at cultural events for Black Americans.

In the 1980s and ’90s, manufacturers owned by tobacco companies developed more products with increasingly irresistible combinations of sodium, fats and carbohydrates. Their competitors followed suit.

Federal health officials urged Americans to eat less fat. Food companies responded by developing fat-free cookies like SnackWell’s, which flew off supermarket shelves. And they replaced the fat in chips with an ingredient (Olestra) that ended up causing digestive distress.

Obesity tripled in children and doubled in adults between the mid-1970s and the early 2000s.

A Health Crisis, and a Turning Point

2000s-Present

By the 21st century, you couldn’t walk through a school cafeteria, supermarket or airport without being inundated by ultraprocessed foods.

Obesity kept ticking up, affecting about 36 percent of adults and nearly 17 percent of children in the United States by 2010.

Food companies addressed the obesity crisis by making products they marketed as “healthier” like low-carb breakfast cereals, shakes and bagels; artificially sweetened ice creams and yogurts; and snacks like Oreos and Doritos in smaller, 100-calorie packs.

While popular, they didn’t curb obesity.

In 2012, Michael Bloomberg, then the mayor of New York City, proposed bans on large sodas in the city.

Around the same time, Michelle Obama urged children to “Move!”

For generations, obesity was seen as a problem of willpower — caused by eating too much, and exercising too little.

But in the last decade, research on ultraprocessed foods has challenged that notion, suggesting that these foods may drive us to eat more.

That research has also linked ultraprocessed foods to health concerns like obesity, Type 2 diabetes, cognitive decline and cardiovascular disease.

Today, scientists, influencers, advocates and politicians are publicly condemning ultraprocessed foods. In 2025, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. called them “poison” and a major cause of poor health among Americans.

Are we at a tipping point? Maybe. About 70 percent of the U.S. food supply is ultraprocessed. But there are signs that people are eating slightly fewer of these foods.

A national shift is possible, said Dr. Kessler, the former F.D.A. commissioner. But it could take time.

Our reliance on ultraprocessed foods was “decades in the making,” he added, and it “could take decades to reverse.”

Sources

We consulted Kelly Brownell, a professor emeritus at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University; Michael F. Jacobson, co-founder of the Center for Science in the Public Interest and the founder of the National Food Museum; Stuart Gillespie, a senior fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute; Tera Fazzino, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Kansas; Dr. David A. Kessler, a former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration; Carlos Monteiro, a nutritional epidemiologist and emeritus professor at the University of São Paulo in Brazil; Michael Moss, an investigative journalist in New York City who has written about the food industry; Marion Nestle, an emeritus professor of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University; Barry Popkin, a professor of nutrition at the University of North Carolina’s Gillings School of Global Public Health; John Ruff, a food scientist and former executive at Kraft and General Foods; Laura Schmidt, a professor of health policy at the University of California, San Francisco; Laura Shapiro, a culinary historian in New York City; Dr. Chris van Tulleken, a professor of infection and global health at University College London; Helen Zoe Veit, an associate professor of history at Michigan State University.

Credits

Getty Images (33); Alamy (6); Jessica Attie for The New York Times; AP Images