Gary Taubes's Atlantic essay 'A Fancy Name for Junk Food' (June 2026)
Resolved
On June 23, 2026, Gary Taubes published a long-form essay in The Atlantic titled “A Fancy Name for Junk Food,” asking whether the war on “ultra-processed foods” makes scientific sense. The article is paywalled; this page summarizes it via the LowCarbUSA interview in which Taubes describes its argument.
Taubes’s position, as he describes it, is that “ultra-processed food” is a rebranding of “junk food” or “processed food” — a category too vague to carry the weight being placed on it. He argues that a low-carb protein bar and a candy bar can both count as ultra-processed while having very different effects on blood sugar, insulin, hunger, and weight, and that the key question is what a food does in the body, not where it was made.
The essay extends his Substack and lecture critiques of the ultra-processed-food framing into a major national magazine venue, and the debate around it is ongoing.
Timeline
- June 23, 2026 — The Atlantic publishes “A Fancy Name for Junk Food.”
- 2026 (LowCarbUSA interview) — Taubes summarizes the essay’s argument: the UPF category is too vague to guide policy or personal eating because it shifts focus from a food’s effects in the body to where it was made.
