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If you inspect a packet of M&Ms, one of the best-selling candies in the United States, you'll notice familiar components like sweetener, skimmed milk powder, and chocolate fat. But, numerous items are unfamiliar: gum arabic, dextrin, carnauba wax, soya lecithin, and curcumin.

You'll find thirty-four components in the candy, and no fewer than thirty nations involved in supplying them. Every one has its own production network that converts base substances into ingredients – beans into chocolate paste, cane into sugar, petroleum into blue food dye.

These components then travel across the world to a main manufacturing plant where they are combined and transformed into tiny blue, red, yellow and green chocolate gems.

It's becoming more widely recognized that agricultural networks are a major driver of the environmental emergency. Scientists can study land clearing for farming or methane emissions from livestock. But the ecological footprint of highly manufactured products – such as these candies – is less clear and is just beginning to come into focus. One reason they have been so difficult to evaluate is the inherent complexity of UPFs: these factory-produced items include a huge number of ingredients and procedures to assemble them, making it extremely difficult to monitor.

However, this doesn't imply it's unimportant. As UPFs dominate US grocery store shelves and eating habits – they now account for seventy percent of products purchased in supermarkets, and more than half of calories consumed – specialists say that understanding their ecological cost is critical to build a more climate-friendly food system.

What We Already Understand

Although researchers are only starting to examine the environmental impact of UPFs, existing knowledge about them is concerning.

"The more processed products become, the more harmful they are to public wellness and the planet," stated Anthony Fardet. The primary cause, he clarifies, is that the components are so resource demanding. Once assembled, the toll balloons.

Take the popular candy. The first step in creating the sweets is farming for cocoa, sweetener, dairy and palm.

There is extensive evidence that farming for ingredients like cocoa drives ever increasing rates of forest clearance across the globe. For over a century, agricultural expansion has driven nearly ninety percent of global deforestation, which has been responsible for 30% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Large corporations have been called out in the past for agricultural methods in their supply chain, and have since created environmental initiatives, but these fail to address that industrial farming are, fundamentally, ecologically damaging.

Then there's, sugar, milk solids and palm oil – also significant greenhouse gas emitters.

Furthermore are the industrially made components like food dyes – perhaps the signature of intensive manufacturing – which M&Ms contain 13 different types of. The blue candies are colored with artificial blue dyes; these dyes are primarily produced in industrial color production centers India and China, through synthetic processes of petroleum derivatives with chemical compounds, accelerated by the metals copper or chromium.

Producing soya lecithin, an ingredient made from plant oil that's used to change the consistency of candy, requires procedures like oil refining in a heated vessel, chemically isolating phospholipids, bleaching using chemical agents and dehydrating under reduced air pressure. And, dextrose, begins as maize that gets steeped in acid before being ground, separated and dried. Afterward, it's decomposed into simpler compounds using enzymes and chemicals, and then recrystallized.

While ultra-processed chocolate products are among the most damaging, other kinds of UPFs are burdensome on the environment as well. Consider another popular snack, which has 39 ingredients. Maize is the primary component, and for every hectare grown, one thousand kilograms of CO2 is emitted to the atmosphere. Like other corporations, manufacturers have created their own environmental pledges, but many of these commitments are underpinned by practices that are considered greenwashing.

As a result, researchers have begun estimating the environmental toll of ultra-processed foods.

One analysis calculated that popular candies generate at least thirteen point two kilograms of greenhouse gases per kilogram produced. Considering yearly output of over 664 million kg in the US, this would mean that the products emit at least three point eight million tonnes of CO2 – accounting for 0.1% of yearly carbon output in the US. However, this is just a calculation based on publicly available data; the actual impact is probably much higher, experts say.

There's a "black box" when it comes to carbon accounting in the processed food industry, notes a professor who studies how corporations engage with the climate crisis. "There exists so much ambiguity as supply chains get complicated."

What We Have Yet to Discover

Getting an exact measure of the ecological impact of UPFs is nearly impossible, since, definitionally, UPFs consist of many ingredients and a high volume of non-transparent procedures. Ingredients aren't just mixed together like one would do to make a stew at home. Rather, these ingredients are altered synthetically, certain portions removed, and flavors, dyes or consistencies added in – and it's unclear what the cost of these processes are because numerous providers and parts are involved.

Another reason is that all UPFs are the creations of manufacturing corporations that have minimal motivation to reveal their ecological impact and might not comprehend it to begin with.

As an example, major brands do not cultivate key ingredients themselves, but instead depend on hundreds of farms that don't always have accurate carbon accounting measures in place. This means that emissions from big food corporations may be underreported. Analysts said that corporations "lack real measurements, so they use emissions factors, which are approximations."

Specialists say that corporations provide reports on simple things like shipping, which are easier to calculate, and frequently exclude or complicate the farming-related carbon of their items. After all, disclosing significant carbon output contradicts the interests of major manufacturers, so the intricate assessments needed to establish the carbon footprint of industrial farming and multi-step industrial chemical processes used to make processed food components remain un-researched.

"The main point of ultra-processed foods is profit," said Fardet, noting that they're created to be appealing, easy and enjoyable to eat.

"The majority of individuals in the manufacturing sector's production network don't care about global warming from an ideological point of view, but they do care about money," explained another expert. He explains that to change these motivations, the value of products and components would need to incorporate their impact on our global environment. But that would require government regulations and financial penalties based on the true environmental cost of ultra-processed foods.

The Reasons It Is Important

At just under $2, the price of popular candies at the supermarket hardly reflects their true cost on the planet. But to tackle these issues with ultra-processed foods, more than just a minor adjustments to the ingredient list are needed.

"Lowering the sodium, or sweetener of just a single item is just greenwashing," stated Fardet. "We need to change the entire system." To do that, he suggested eating more locally sourced, whole foods, which often take much less energy and transit to create, and therefore have a significantly reduced carbon footprint.

Specialty goods that can't be obtained nearby, like cocoa items, should {make up|constitute