The Food Additives Nobody Asked For
This article, HFCS, Ultra-Processed Foods, and Our Health, is intended for general educational and informational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice. If you have concerns about diabetes, blood pressure, your liver, or your diet, please consult a qualified healthcare professional before making changes.
Let me tell you why this one isn’t academic for me.
I have watched diabetes and high blood pressure move through my family like a quiet storm. Two of my sisters have been diagnosed. A nephew we lost far too young. A granddaughter facing dialysis before her 35th birthday. These aren’t statistics to me. They are names. They are birthdays. In some cases, they are empty chairs at the table.
So if you hear passion in my voice, understand where it comes from. Not anger. Not conspiracy. Love, and a desire to ask hard questions about the food environment we all inherited. This conversation isn’t about blame. It’s about awareness, because awareness gives us back a choice.
And here’s the thing that should bother all of us: two of the biggest changes to what we eat, high fructose corn syrup and ultra-processed foods, were never something the public asked for. Nobody stood up and demanded an alternative to real food. It was handed to us. Let’s talk about who did the handing, and what it’s doing to our bodies.
First, what even counts as “ultra-processed”?
Ultra-processed foods are industrial formulations made mostly or entirely from substances extracted from foods, then loaded with additives and ingredients you would never find in a home kitchen. They go through heavy chemical and physical transformation, extrusion, molding, pre-frying, until almost nothing about them resembles the whole food they started as. That definition comes from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Now sit with the scale of it. Johns Hopkins estimates that nearly 75% of the U.S. food supply is ultra-processed. More than half the calories the average American adult eats come from these foods. In children, it climbs past 60%. And the research ties them to a long list of outcomes: obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiometabolic disease, several cancers, gastrointestinal disorders, asthma, anxiety, depression, cardiovascular events, and all-cause mortality. Look at that list closely. It reads almost exactly like the CDC’s roster of leading chronic diseases. That is not a coincidence I’m willing to ignore.
Not sure if you’re eating them? Try this test
I started questioning my own plate, so I came up with a simple gut check. Could you make it in your own kitchen?
Cheese curls. Could you make those at home? Bologna. What exactly is in it, and could you make it yourself? Chicken nuggets, Doritos, Pringles, turkey ham. If you can’t reasonably recreate a food in your kitchen with ingredients you recognize, that’s your answer. That’s ultra-processed.
I’m not being cute about it. That question cuts through the marketing faster than any label claim. If a food required a chemical plant to exist, it probably belongs in a different category than the beans and rice your grandmother cooked.
You don’t need a boutique budget to eat better
Here’s where I want to be careful, because “just eat healthy” advice too often ignores real budgets, real neighborhoods, and the food deserts a lot of us are actually navigating. Getting off ultra-processed foods does not require an expensive organic market. It requires a strategy.
Prioritize frozen over canned. Frozen vegetables and fruit are picked at peak ripeness, usually carry no added sugar or corn syrup, and cost less than out-of-season fresh produce.
Buy whole grains in bulk. Dried beans, lentils, oats, and brown rice run pennies per serving and skip the industrial processing entirely. Walk into an African or Asian market and you’ll see rice sold in 20 and 50-pound bags for a reason. You portion it yourself, store it in your pantry, and you’re set for a long time.
Batch-cook your proteins. Prepare a large quantity of plain chicken, eggs, or ground beef, portion it, and freeze it. That one habit replaces a whole shelf of microwave dinners and deli meats.
Small moves. Real money saved. Better food on the table.
The syrup you can’t even buy
Now let’s talk about high fructose corn syrup. The average person takes in about 12 teaspoons of it every single day, and it isn’t just soda. It’s in ketchup, salad dressing, crackers. Teenagers consume roughly 80% more than the national average, which pushes them past 21 teaspoons a day. Compare that to the American Heart Association and American Diabetes Association guidance of about 6 teaspoons of added sugar for women and 9 for men. We are not in the same ballpark. We’re not even in the same city.
So I asked an obvious question. If this stuff is fine, why can’t I buy a bag of it at the store and set it next to the sugar? The answer tells you everything. High fructose corn syrup is a sticky industrial liquid shipped in tanker trucks. It’s produced through complex enzymatic processing of cornstarch in chemical plants. It was custom-engineered for corporate manufacturers because it blends into liquids, preserves color, and stabilizes shelf life. There was never any retail demand for it. It was built for factories, not for families.
Then I asked why the exact amount never shows up on the label. Turns out the FDA lets companies group chemically similar sugars together and report “total sugars” and “added sugars” in grams, rather than breaking out how much comes from corn syrup versus cane sugar. Part of the reason is that disclosing the precise recipe would expose a brand’s formula to competitors. So their proprietary secrets stay protected, often to our detriment.
But you do have one tool. Federal rules require ingredients to be listed in descending order by weight. If high fructose corn syrup sits near the top of the list, that product is heavily saturated with it. Check your breads and buns, your condiments and sauces, your yogurts and cereals. That’s where it hides.
What it actually does inside you
This is not harmless sweetness. High fructose corn syrup delivers a large, unnatural dose of free fructose straight into your system, and fructose is a problem because only your liver can process it. Glucose, every cell can burn. Fructose, the liver handles alone. Overload it day after day and the liver starts converting the excess directly into fat. That’s non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, NAFLD.
It doesn’t stop there. The rapid breakdown of fructose in the liver spikes uric acid. High uric acid crystallizes in your joints like grains of rock salt and causes the inflammation known as gout. Ask anyone who’s had it, usually in the big toe, sometimes a knee or an elbow. According to the Mayo Clinic, the same condition is aggravated by high-purine organ meats, excess red meat, certain shellfish and fish, and alcohol, with beer as the worst offender. High fructose corn syrup keeps that company.
And maybe the sneakiest effect of all: research summarized by Britannica suggests high fructose corn syrup disrupts leptin, the hormone that signals your brain that you’re full. When that signal breaks, your appetite stays switched on. There’s no internal voice telling you that you’ve had enough. So you keep eating, and the system that sold you the food keeps selling.
Follow the money
None of this happened by accident, so let’s ask why. In the 1970s, two government moves reshaped the sweetener market. First, heavy corn subsidies created a massive, cheap surplus of domestic corn. Second, tariffs and import quotas on foreign cane sugar made real sugar artificially expensive here at home.
Cheap corn on one side, expensive sugar on the other. Food scientists saw the opening and perfected a way to turn that corn surplus into a liquid sweetener that mimicked sugar at a fraction of the cost. Soft drink makers switched over and saved billions. They did it quietly, without changing the marketing, and without giving consumers any real say. The American public got handed a dietary shift dictated by agricultural politics and corporate profit margins. That’s it. That’s the whole story.
The system rewards shelf life and repeat sales. Highly engineered foods are designed to be hard to stop eating. We deserve more transparency than that.
Awareness gives us back the choice
You don’t have to overhaul your whole life this week. You have to start asking why. Why is corn syrup in the crackers? Why is a food impossible to make at home? Why isn’t the amount on the label? Those questions put a little power back in your hands, and in a food environment like ours, that matters.
If you want a head start, I put together a free Food Truth Starter Guide. Plain English, no filler, no fluff. It walks you through reading labels, spotting hidden sugars and corn syrup, and making real-food swaps that fit a real budget.
Download the free Food Truth Starter Guide →
This is also the heart of the work I’ve been building toward for years. My book, Food: The Final Frontier — The Plain Truth About Food, Chronic Disease & Health in Black & Brown Communities, comes out September 2026. Same voice you trust here, now something you can hold in your hand and pass to your mother, your sister, your church group, your book club.
Ask the why questions. Share this with someone you love. Stand for something, or you’ll fall for anything.
Make it a powerful day. Peace.
Sources & Further Reading
- Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health — What Are Ultra-Processed Foods? (2025): publichealth.jhu.edu
- Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health — Ultraprocessed Foods Account for More than Half of Calories Consumed at Home (2024): publichealth.jhu.edu
- Mayo Clinic — Gout Diet: What’s Allowed, What’s Not: mayoclinic.org
- U.S. Food & Drug Administration — Added Sugars on the Nutrition Facts Label: fda.gov
- Encyclopaedia Britannica — High-Fructose Corn Syrup: britannica.com
- CDC — National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES): cdc.gov/nchs/nhanes
About Lynn
Lynn Peterson (“Lynn Pete”) is an instructor, writer, researcher, and health and nutrition blogger who describes herself as “just the messenger.” She hosts the Health News & Views: Food the Final Frontier podcast, dedicated to bringing clarity to the health disparities in Black and brown communities. She holds a B.A. in English/Communications and M.S. and D.Sc. degrees in Education, and is a Certified Post-Secondary Instructor and Certified Health Coach. Her book, Food: The Final Frontier — The Plain Truth About Food, Chronic Disease & Health in Black & Brown Communities, arrives September 2026.
Food: The Final Frontier.