What We Eat When No One’s Scoring Us

Morning rush still carries the scent of butter and warm cardboard. I slide trays of croissants into the case, wipe a milk ring from the counter with the heel of my hand, and steal a minute with my phone by the dish sink. A headline pops up: a scientist who studies ultra-processed foods, and what he eats in a day. It’s the kind of story that makes you stand a little taller over a pastry. We sell convenience in layers here; coffee is a ritual, the wrapped biscotti by the register a small shortcut, and both are stories we tell to feed our hunger. The morning light pools on the counter as we move from one order to the next, and sometimes a stray radio crackle slips into the chatter, reminding us that not everything is under control. Still, we keep going, with hot cups, warm bread, and the steady rhythm of a day that begins with scent and ends with a receipt.

The Washington Post piece profiles Kevin Hall, the NIH researcher whose 2019 metabolic-ward study rattled the pantry doors. In that experiment, adults spent weeks living in a clinic where everything they ate was counted and measured. Same calories offered, same macros on paper: two different menus, one built from what we’d call whole foods and the other assembled from ultra-processed products. People on the ultra-processed diet ate roughly 500 more calories a day without being told to, and they gained weight; on the other menu they lost a little, again without trying. That isn’t just a correlation chart; it’s bodies reacting in real time to formulations designed to be easy to eat fast. Cell Metabolism, 2019.

The Post frames Hall as pragmatic. If you’re alive in 2025 and not a monk or ridiculously rich, you’ll be eating things that come from factories. He seems less interested in purity than in sensible defaults. You can find decent choices even on the ultra-processed shelves, he says, which sounds like heresy to some corners of wellness culture and relief to anyone who works two jobs (Washington Post).

There’s more evidence behind that uneasy feeling in the snack aisle. Last year, an umbrella review in The BMJ sifted through dozens of meta-analyses and found consistent links between higher ultra-processed intake and a troubling lineup of harms: cardiometabolic disease, depression, various cancers, and earlier death. The associations aren't destiny, but the signal is loud enough to cut through the fridge hum [BMJ 2024 umbrella review].

I don’t love how “ultra-processed” has become an identity badge online. It’s a technical label from the NOVA system that lumps together everything from packaged breads to frozen dinners and protein bars. That’s a very wide tent, useful for surveillance and policy, but sometimes clumsy for an actual Tuesday. I’ve watched friends go from curious to scrupulous to brittle in a month, then fall into a shame spiral over a gas-station sandwich. That isn’t health; that’s a diet of rules.

On my busiest days I eat like a person in transit. A boiled egg I cooked three mornings ago. A banana browning in my camera bag. The granola bar that makes Hall’s point: yes, it’s a lab’s idea of food, but it also keeps my hands steady through a double shift and a train ride to a photo gig. When the schedule slows a bit, I cook on Sundays. A pot of beans, rice in a jar, onions sweating down until they’re sweet. I don’t do this to score clean points. I do it so Tuesday’s me can open the fridge and choose a bowl over a crinkly wrapper without thinking too hard.

That's the physics of it: friction. Lab results suggest ultra-processed foods slide down easier, so we end up eating more before we notice. The culture around them shaves time and labor, and that's the whole pitch. You feel it when you're tired at nine p.m., the microwave calls, and your knives feel heavy. People talk about willpower. What I see in my life, and in my friends' lives, is infrastructure: time, tools, a ride to a store that carries fresh produce, a kitchen you share with two roommates or five, a paycheck that doesn't vanish by the 20th. If we only preach discipline, we're scolding people for not having a back porch.

Hall’s take lands like a small mercy. It’s okay to live in the world we actually live in. Aim for less of the stuff that nudges us toward mindless eating. Be selective about protein, fiber, and salt. Read labels not to shame yourself but to notice what your body notices. Pick the yogurt without the candy. Choose the bread whose ingredient list reads like a sentence. If the choice is between skipping breakfast and a fortified cereal that comes in a box with a cartoon, eat the cereal and go for a walk.

There's a bigger machine at work here, too. The same review that links ultra-processed food to all those harms is telling a story about systems, not just individual appetite. Corporate engineering that chases bliss points; supply chains that make corn and soy derivatives cheaper than carrots. Work schedules that turn dinner into a slot to be filled. A lot of people need structural help: school lunches that don’t look beige, SNAP benefits that stretch to fresh foods, city blocks where a head of lettuce sits closer than a three-for-$5 chip display. This isn't a morality lecture; it's logistics.

There's only so much you can do in a one-day-scientist setup. You can't live inside someone else's stomach. I don't know what Hall's body feels like after a long week, what groceries line his shelves, or how his stress spikes when the dishwasher breaks. Still, I trust the part of his message that returns to design. Make the better thing the easy thing. That’s what the clinic study showed on the other side: make the easy thing the hyper-palatable thing, and most of us will overdo it without meaning to.

I took a break on a milk crate by the back door. The alley carried the sharp tang of orange from the juicer and the damp smell of paper. I peeled open a bar anyway and ate it slowly, sip by sip, with a shot of espresso I pulled a touch too long. Then I opened my notes app and jotted a shopping list for later: beans, eggs, greens, bread you can actually pronounce. Not as a vow of purity, just a small favor for Friday’s version of me, who will be tired but still want to feel awake inside her own life.

We closed at noon. I stacked the plates, counted the till, and turned the Open sign to face the other way. A kid pressed his face to the glass, watching the laminated cookies we hadn’t sold. I waved and shrugged, sorry, tomorrow. I thought about the scientist and those trays of food in the study, and how quickly people drifted toward the ones that ate like a river. I don’t need a new identity. I need better defaults. A counter with beans cooling. A pocket of time to chop. The habit of asking whether this will feed me or just move me along.

When I left, the sun painted a bright stripe across the doorframe. I could smell butter again, faint and ghostly. I tucked the wrapper in my pocket so I’d remember it later, a little crinkle of truth. On the walk home I passed the corner store and didn’t go in. Not as a rule. Just because I had onions waiting, and a pan, and twenty minutes to make the easier thing feel like mine.