The scene opens in the most boring place possible: the snack aisle.
Bright packaging, health halos, words like “protein,” “plant‑based,” “whole grain.”
On the outside it looks like wellness.
Inside someone’s body, it looks like chaos.
Because this is 2026, the witnesses aren’t just people, they’re sensors.
Continuous glucose monitors pinging after “healthy” granola bars.
Gut‑sensitive twenty‑ and thirty‑somethings noticing that one brand of frozen bowl leaves them fine, another leaves them bloated, wired and then weirdly sad.
Official guidelines have finally started mumbling “eat less highly processed food,” but they still can’t agree what that actually means on a label.
Meanwhile, bodies out in the wild are doing their own experiments every time they scan a barcode.
Here is what people wearing CGMs keep finding, over and over:
Two breakfasts with the same calories and similar carbs can behave like different species. One gives a small, smooth glucose bump. The other gives a skyscraper spike followed by a crash that feels like brain fog, irritability and a 3 p.m. sugar hunt.
The “fitness” cereal with 14 ingredients you can’t pronounce sends glucose climbing faster and higher than the plain oats with nuts and fruit, even if the sugar grams on the label look similar.
Liquid sugar is its own villain. Sweet coffees, energy drinks, “vitamin” beverages and juices bypass chewing, satiety and common sense. The CGM graph looks like a roller coaster and the liver quietly takes the hit.
A recent longitudinal study in young adults with a history of overweight found that just a 10‑point increase in ultra‑processed food intake over a few years was linked to 51% higher risk of prediabetes and more than doubled risk of impaired glucose tolerance.
No one felt that change in real time.
Their meters did.
The pattern is the same in clinic notes: more ultra‑processed food, more early insulin resistance, more weirdly high fasting insulin in people who “only” snack on bars and “healthy” packaged stuff.
The crime scene isn’t “sugar is evil.”
It’s that these foods are engineered to hit the brain’s reward circuits fast and hard while dumping glucose into the bloodstream in a way your pancreas was never hired to handle.
Zoom in from blood to gut.
This week’s debates have been circling the same idea in different outfits: ultra‑processed foods aren’t just about weight, they are messing with the gut‑brain line.
Diets heavy in ultra‑processed, low‑fiber, additive‑dense foods are linked to less diverse gut microbiomes and more inflammatory signaling, which in turn ties into higher rates of low mood and brain fog.
Clinicians describe patients whose IBS, reflux, joint aches and “random fatigue” flare hardest not with one evil ingredient, but with meals that combine refined carbs, industrial oils, emulsifiers and artificial sweeteners in the same package.
People online are noticing patterns the literature is only starting to catch: “My anxiety is worse the day after I live on packaged snacks,” “My sleep tanks after certain frozen dinners even if the macros look fine.”
Scientists are now openly saying the quiet part out loud: a lot of these products are designed to hijack reward pathways, override satiety and keep you coming back in ways that look uncomfortably like old tobacco playbooks.
Your gut and your brain are not reading the marketing.
They are reading the ingredient list.
On paper, the new federal dietary guidance finally tells Americans to eat fewer “highly processed” foods and calls out salty, sweet, additive‑heavy products and sugar‑sweetened beverages.
But there is a catch:
There is still no unified, consumer‑friendly definition of “ultra‑processed” that you can actually apply in the aisle.
Regulators are only now working on a shared definition so they can even start measuring how much people eat and regulate marketing.
The official documents speak in broad, polite strokes while lived experience and wearables are telling a very specific story: that the way food is assembled, flavored and preserved changes how your body handles it, even when the label numbers look almost identical.
So you end up with a weird split:
the government says “less highly processed stuff,”
your CGM and gut say “this specific bar, that drink, this brand of nuggets are the ones that wreck me,”
and the box just says “low fat” or “good source of protein.”
There is no barcode for “this makes your brain feel like static tomorrow.”
The most interesting data doesn’t come from controlled feeding trials.
It comes from people in hoodies doing science on themselves between Zoom calls:
A software engineer finds that her glucose barely moves after a home‑cooked rice and beans bowl, but spikes and crashes after a “macro‑balanced” frozen entree with a longer ingredient list.
A teacher with reflux notices that “healthy” protein chips leave her throat burning and sleep wrecked, while actual nuts and fruit do not.
A dad wearing a CGM “for curiosity” discovers that a short walk after dinner flattens the post‑meal spike far more than swapping white rice for cauliflower bits.
None of them needed a position paper to tell them something was off.
Their graphs, guts and moods told them first.
This isn’t a purity sermon and I’m not here to confiscate your freezer.
But if your gut is loud, your mood is wobbly and your CGM graph looks like the Rocky Mountains, it might be time to stop asking “Is this food good or bad?” and start asking a different question:
“What story does this package tell my body after I eat it?”
Ultra‑processed foods are very good at telling your brain “you need more” and your bloodstream “here’s a sugar tsunami” while your labels keep saying “balanced,” “light” or “fit.”
You don’t need to memorize every additive.
You don’t need a perfect diet to earn a functioning pancreas.
You do need to notice which barcodes consistently leave your gut, glucose and mood looking like a crime scene the next day.
That pattern is your real guideline, long before any official document catches up.
Tess Marlowe 👩🏻⚕️🕵🏻♀️
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