| Today’s letter |
| Trade one shelf, and the rest of your kitchen can stay |
| My old friend Dot called me last week and said she had spent an hour on her kitchen floor in Akron, emptying the shelves. She had pulled down the cereal, the bread, the crackers, the cans of soup. Someone at her church had told her she needed to cut ultra-processed food from her diet, all of it, and Dot being Dot, she sat down on the linoleum and tried to sort the whole kitchen into two piles.
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| She is not alone. A poll from the American Heart Association, out this month, found that 72% of Americans say they can identify ultra-processed food, but only 35% say they are very or extremely familiar with the term… Every article and every influencer repeats the advice. Nobody agrees on the definition. And if you have ever stood in your own kitchen feeling like you failed before you even started, that is not a character flaw. The size of the job did that to you. |
| “What am I supposed to eat?” |
| Dot kept the books for a tire company in Akron for 31 years. She can reconcile a ledger in her sleep. But more than half the American diet qualifies as ultra-processed, and there is no agreed definition of what that even means. Give a woman like Dot an impossible standard and she will try to meet it. Take away any way to measure it, and she will blame herself when she cannot. |
| She did everything the articles said: read the backs of boxes, put things in her cart, then put them back. Seventy-one percent of Americans say they are trying to avoid ultra-processed food, and most of them are doing what Dot did: guessing, second-guessing, and then standing in the checkout line wondering if the yogurt was a mistake. |
| Here’s what gets me. |
| Dot’s kitchen was never the problem. The size of the job was. |
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| Let me show you how I know. Not with my opinion, but with a study. |
| Researchers at the National Cancer Institute followed 461,682 American adults, ages 50 to 71, for more than twenty years. They recorded every new case of colorectal cancer that appeared in that group: 10,075 cases in all. |
| Then they did something no one had done at this scale. They broke the category apart, food type by food type, and then modeled what happens when a person trades a tenth of what she eats in that category for food that is barely processed at all. The total amount of ultra-processed food a person ate showed no association with colorectal cancer. |
| What they found |
| National Cancer Institute, 2026. Abar et al., PLOS Medicine. |
| The meat (8% higher per serving) |
| Each extra daily serving of meat from ultra-processed sources was linked to an 8% higher incidence of colorectal cancer across the follow-up. |
| The tenth they traded (2% lower) |
| When the researchers modeled swapping a tenth of that category for minimally processed food, colorectal cancer incidence came out 2% lower. |
| A tenth. Not the whole kitchen. |
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| In other words… she was asked to redo a whole kitchen to get a result the researchers measured from a tenth of it. |
| Her discipline had nothing to do with it, and neither does yours. |
| So why was she handed the whole kitchen? |
| The classification system groups foods by how they are manufactured, not by what is in them. Processed meats carry nitrates, sodium and preservatives long associated with cancer risk, and the manufacturing adds those compounds. Other foods sitting in that same group, including whole grain breads and fortified cereals, were associated with lower incidence in this cohort, and in these participants more than 80% of the whole grain they ate came from those sources. Here is the part that stopped me: what they measured was one food swapped out, not a kitchen emptied. One sandwich a day.
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| Dot never stood a chance with a job that size. Neither did you, I’d bet. |
| That’s the part no one says out loud… |
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| Try this today |
| Tomorrow, find the processed meat in your fridge: the deli slices, the hot dogs, the prepackaged bacon. Swap that one thing for something you cooked, canned or cut yourself: leftover chicken, canned tuna, a hard-boiled egg, hummus, avocado. One shelf, not the whole kitchen. Everything else stays where it is, including the bread, the yogurt and the cereal. If you are managing a medical condition or following a doctor’s plan, keep it and mention the swap at your next visit.
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| The only thing leaving your kitchen is the one food the data actually flagged. |
| Promise me you’ll try it today? Saying it out loud is half of what makes it stick. |
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| This is not magic, and it is not a promise. The study is observational, which means “linked to,” not “caused by.” But 461,682 people and twenty years of follow-up pointed at one food, not at the whole kitchen. |
| Dot swapped the deli slices in her fridge for a can of tuna the next day. She said it took less time than emptying one cupboard. |
| There’s still time for you. |
| And the rest of the kitchen can stay right where it is… |
| It was never your fault. |
| — Cole |
| P.S. How many times this month has someone told you to cut ultra-processed food? Just the number, hit reply. I’ll tell you tomorrow how you compare. |
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