Why Cheap Ultra-Processed Calories Fuel the Global Obesity Crisis
Why unhealthy foods are cheaper worldwide—and how trade, subsidies, retail power, and marketing fuel the global obesity crisis
The cheapest calorie on Earth is not “found”. It is engineered.
Across rich and poor countries alike, the food system got very good at one thing: delivering stable, shelf-safe energy at an industrial scale. It got far less good at delivering affordable nutrition, especially in cities where time, cash, and cooking space are tight.
The global obesity crisis sits inside that trade-off. Governments want food prices low enough to keep social order. Companies want products with margins, durability, and repeat purchases. Public health needs diets that are harder to mass-produce and harder to keep cheap.
What follows is a map of power and constraint: how farm support, trade, modern retail, marketing, and energy shocks made ultra-processed calories abundant, while making healthier diets feel like a luxury in much of the world.
The story turns on how governments and markets made calories cheap and nutrition expensive.
Key Points
The geopolitical contest is not “food vs. health.” It is stability and profit vs. nutrition security in a system built to minimize price shocks.
The decisive starting point was the urbanizing world of the early 1990s, when modern retail and cross-border supply chains expanded fast and standardized what people could buy.
A major turning point came when global trade and investment flows widened access to ultra-processed foods, especially in import-dependent states.
The hinge shock was the era of repeated price volatility (food, fuel, fertilizer), which pushed many governments to prioritize cheap, durable calories over diet quality.
The most significant constraint is affordability: billions cannot afford a healthy diet, even as cheap energy is widely available.
What changed most was the food environment—availability, marketing, portioning, and convenience. What endured was the political fear of food inflation and unrest.
The clearest legacy signal is the slow shift from voluntary pledges to harder rules: taxes, warning labels, and tighter controls on marketing to children.
Background
The burden of overweight and obesity is now global. It is no longer concentrated in high-income states, and it has risen sharply since 1990.
At the same time, the world runs on a simple political reality: when staple prices spike, governments wobble. Food inflation occurs quickly, disproportionately affects the poor, and can lead to protests, instability, and hastily implemented policies. That makes “cheap food” a core legitimacy project, not a lifestyle preference.
The major actors are not just consumers. They include states managing social stability, producers seeking predictable income, processors chasing margins through scale, retailers controlling shelf access, and advertisers shaping demand—now with digital precision.
The system already in motion was a global push toward standardized, tradable food: commodity inputs, branded processing, modern retail expansion, and tighter integration with fossil-fuel-dependent logistics and farm inputs.
That starting position set up a world where calories could get cheaper faster than nutrition could.
The Trigger
The decisive trigger was the global scaling of “modern food environments” beginning in the 1990s: supermarket and minimart growth, consolidated supply chains, and multinational processing reaching deeper into everyday diets, especially in cities.
This shift changed the payoff matrix. For households, it reduced time and uncertainty—buying became faster, storage got easier, and meals became more portable. For firms, it made demand legible and controllable: standardized products, predictable repeat purchase, and long shelf life. For governments, it offered a quiet social bargain—steady calories at low prices.
The enabling conditions were practical and structural: trade and investment openness, cold-chain growth in some corridors, global advertising reach, cheap commodity ingredients, and policies that often supported volume and price stability over nutrition outcomes.
Once that bargain locked in, reversing it became politically expensive.
The Timeline
The calorie bargain: policy makes ingredients cheap (late 1980s–1990s)
Many countries supported agriculture at scale to stabilize supply, protect farm incomes, and keep food affordable. The effect, often unintended, was to make key inputs—grains, sugars, and oils—reliable building blocks for industrial food.
Producer support is large in aggregate, and the most distortionary forms are hard to unwind because they are politically “sticky”: they create constituencies and expectations. This is not a conspiracy. It is path dependence with electoral consequences.
That gave processors and brands a structural advantage: they could promise steady pricing and consistent taste in a way fresh supply chains struggle to match. The next step was to turn those ingredients into a global portfolio of durable products.
This is how a farm policy becomes a global diet signal.
The global shelf: trade and retail scale the same foods everywhere (1990s–2000s)
As modern retail expanded, the “power on the ground” shifted from farms and wet markets to shelf space, contracts, and distribution. Retailers could gatekeep which products were visible, discounted, and placed at checkout.
Trade amplified the effect, particularly for import-dependent states. Greater import flows can broaden access to energy-dense, highly processed products, and in some contexts accelerate shifts toward obesogenic diets—though outcomes vary by local patterns and policy.
The constraint was not ideology. It was logistics and risk. A shelf-stable snack travels well. A fragile supply of fresh produce demands cold storage, rapid turnover, and higher waste tolerance. That asymmetry pushed modern retail toward packaged calories.
This is how a local food choice becomes a global supply chain outcome.
The hinge shock: volatility makes “cheap now” the dominant politics (2007–2012)
When food prices surge, governments tend to reach for tools that calm markets quickly: subsidies, price controls, export limits, and emergency imports. Alternatives that improve diets slowly—education, urban planning, preventive care—do not stop a protest next week.
The hinge is not any single law. It is the repeated lesson that volatility is destabilizing, and that energy and farm input prices can drag food prices with them. Fossil-fuel dependence ties oil and gas swings to fertilizer and food costs, widening the political premium on cheap calories.
Once a state builds legitimacy around “keeping food affordable,” it becomes cautious about policies that raise consumer prices, even if those policies improve health over time. That caution shows up in the slow, uneven adoption of stronger regulation.
The result is a system that treats chronic disease as a future problem and food prices as a present threat.
The attention economy: marketing scales faster than regulation (2010s)
As screens became the primary storefront, food demand stopped being shaped mainly by geography and started being shaped by feeds. Children and adolescents became a strategic market: early brand imprinting, high repetition, and low marginal cost per impression.
Global health authorities have pushed for stronger protections. But implementation is uneven, and enforcement is difficult in digital environments.
The capacity shift favored firms with data, creative, and distribution power. Those same firms often have the resources to shape policy debates and delay rules that threaten profitable product categories.
In a market where attention is scarce, the cheapest calorie is the one that wins the algorithm.
The affordability split: healthy diets price out billions (2020–Present)
In the 2020s, the affordability constraint became impossible to ignore: a healthy diet costs more than many households can consistently pay.
In that context, obesity and food insecurity can coexist inside the same household logic. People do not “choose” ultra-processed foods in the abstract. They choose what is affordable, durable, and fast under stress, and the system supplies that at scale.
Meanwhile, projections suggest the burden keeps rising without major policy change, especially in many low- and middle-income regions where health systems have less fiscal room for expensive chronic care.
This is how a price problem becomes a global health and capacity problem.
Consequences
The immediate outcome is a world where cheap energy is widely available while nutritious diets remain economically out of reach for a large share of humanity. That mismatch is a structural driver of diet-related disease.
Second-order effects are where it turns geopolitical. Rising obesity increases the burden of noncommunicable disease, expands long-term health spending, and can weaken workforce participation and productivity—especially where health coverage is thin and preventive systems are underbuilt.
It also hardens political constraints. The more households rely on cheap packaged calories as a coping strategy, the more any price-raising reform risks backlash unless paired with credible affordability protection. That slows reform and preserves incumbents’ advantages.
The downstream fight is not only about medicine. It is about who pays, who regulates, and what governments can afford to enforce.
What Most People Miss
The overlooked factor is volatility insurance.
Ultra-processed foods are not only “junk.” They are a private resilience tool in a world of unstable prices and unstable time: shelf-stable calories that survive payday gaps, transport disruption, and sudden cost spikes. That function makes them politically harder to confront than their nutrition profile alone suggests.
This is why the same government can acknowledge health harms and still hesitate. Food inflation is immediate, visible, and punishable at the ballot box. Preventing diabetes is slow, diffuse, and often credited to nobody.
A serious strategy treats affordability as infrastructure, not a moral lecture.
What Endured
Geography and climate still dictate what can be grown cheaply, where, and with what risk, even as global trade smooths some shortages and amplifies others.
Energy dependence remains a quiet choke point: food prices track fuel and fertilizer shocks more than most consumers realize, and that keeps states sensitive to volatility.
Political legitimacy still leans on affordability. Governments that lose control of food inflation often lose control of the narrative, and sometimes much more than that.
Corporate scale still buys optionality—distribution reach, marketing budgets, legal capacity, and the ability to reformulate faster than smaller competitors when rules tighten.
These enduring constraints shape what reform can look like without triggering instability.
Disputed and Uncertain Points
How much subsidies drive obesity: Some analysts stress farm support and commodity pricing as upstream drivers; others argue retail power, marketing, and convenience dominate the causal chain in most countries.
Ultra-processed foods and causality: Evidence links higher UPF intake with worse health outcomes, but debates continue over mechanisms and how much is driven by confounding lifestyle factors versus processing itself.
Taxes and regressivity: Excise taxes can reduce consumption and spur reformulation, yet critics argue they can be regressive unless paired with targeted support for healthier alternatives.
Marketing rules and enforceability: There is broad agreement that marketing affects children’s diets, but enforcement—especially online and cross-border—remains a weak link.
The best sequencing: Some prioritize affordability first (support healthier food access, strengthen school meals, expand availability) before restrictions; others argue restrictions must lead because the market otherwise overwhelms households.
Legacy
The long-run legacy is a reframing: obesity is increasingly treated as a whole-of-system outcome rather than a failure of individual willpower. That framing shifts attention toward food environments, corporate incentives, and the fiscal math of prevention.
Policy is moving, unevenly, toward three concrete levers. First, reshape incentives through taxes and standards that change product formulation and pricing. Second, constrain marketing—especially to children—so demand is not manufactured faster than households can resist. Third, repurpose farm and food support so “cheap” includes nutrition, not only calories.
The states that succeed will be the ones that make healthier diets feel like the default bargain, not a premium upgrade. Subscribe on Spotify, or explore more articles for more compelling insight.
