Ultra-processed foods (UPFs) are under increased scrutiny for their perceived negative health impacts, but advocates at the Non-GMO Project argue that the embattled food products also are taking a toll on the environment.
While an official definition for UPFs has yet to surface from US regulators, the Non-GMO Project is gradually building its own Non-UPF certification program and increasingly criticizing the environmental sustainability impacts from highly-processed foods.
GMOs and UPFs are part of the same industrial agriculture system and concurrently sickening consumers and the environment, argues Hans Eisenbeis, Non-GMO Project director of Mission and Messaging.
“GMOs and UPFs are both expressions of industrialized food production – just at different stages of the food chain,” he said. “GMO crops (especially corn, soy and sugar beets) tend to go to three places – biofuels, animal feed and ultra-processed foods. Seventy percent of arable land in the US is planted in these GMO monocrops.”
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He argues that taking a commodity crop and breaking it down into its derivatives, recombining it in new ways and adding sugar and artificial ingredients erases the food’s natural value.
“It’s a degradation of biodiversity, because we’re focusing on just a few commodity crops that we’re going to grow on thousands and thousands of acres,” he said.
Despite increasing consumer skepticism of food processing, they are largely unaware of the prevalence of UPFs in their own diets, according to Eisenbeis. Although the USDA estimates that 50-70% of US diets contain UPFs, consumers estimate that their own diets contain 20-30% UPFs.
Counting impact at the loading dock
The current food system fails to serve consumers and the natural world, Eisenbeis said, calling industrial food production a “lose-lose scenario.”
Lifecycle assessment analysis, which accounts for environmental impacts, often begins at the loading dock when ingredients and products are shipped, he said, explaining that much of the environmental impact takes place during processing of those ingredients.
He argues that precision fermentation, for example, relies largely on feedstock from GMO corn and beets.
“They don’t want to talk about the biohazards they create that have to be burned by law. Oftentimes they don’t talk about all the infrastructure and the energy that goes into those precision fermentation tanks,” he said.
The commodities used to create those ingredients are part of a larger industrial food supply chain where roughly “one out of every four acres of food that’s grown in the US ends up going into the waste stream,” Eisenbeis said.
“We successfully externalized all the costs so that we’re not even aware of it,” he said. “We’re not even aware of the damage that we were doing both to the environment and to our own health with the food habits that we’ve developed over time with ultra-processing and GMOs.”
Health impacts unsustainable
Many ultra-processed foods, particularly those containing high levels of sugar, preservatives and artificial ingredients, create a “vicious cycle” of consumption for consumers as well as the environment, according to Eisenbeis.
“We see those things as being a throughline, nested within one another,” he said.
The negative health impacts can lead to mental illness, anxiety and depression as well as obesity and diabetes, he said.
“We’re just not getting the nutrients that we need because of the highly processed foods that we’re eating,” he said.
Non-UPF Verification
The lack of consumer awareness about the presence of UPFs in their diets and potential health impacts prompted Non-GMO Project to expand its labeling certification program in 2025.
The NOVA framework, which is currently the standard for what constitutes UPFs, fails to adequately define ingredients making their way into the food system, according to Eisenbeis.
Non-GMO Project’s system analyzed food products category by category to more accurately reflect where ultra-processing is problematic, he explained.
“What we found is that the NOVA framework, as soon as you try to apply it to an individual product, becomes very problematic, because it’s like, what do you do with bread? What do you do with ice cream?” he said. “NOVA doesn’t really make a lot of sense, because almost any loaf of bread in the NOVA System will be considered ultra-processed food because of the various ingredients and supplements that go into bread.”
The Non-GMO Project focuses on ingredient integrity, Eisenbeis explained, noting that the UPF certification process also closely scrutinizes ingredient sourcing. “How is food grown on the farm? Is it an industrial farm with livestock agriculture?” he explained.
He said that when considering ultra-processing, consumers are mainly left to look at package labeling, which contains ingredients but no information about UPFs.
“Ingredients could be proxies. So you might see that a product contains soybean oil, but you don’t know how that soybean oil was made,” he said. “We get deep into that ingredient space, where ingredients can be proxies for levels of processing.”
