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I haven’t been on a dating app since 2012, but if Kristen Bell’s All In energy bar were a dating profile, it’d read like: gluten-free, soy-free, dairy-free, and GMO-free. Clean. Virtuous. Filtered for your wellness needs.<\/p>\n
But here’s the thing: a label that tells you what a food isn’t doesn’t tell you what it is. Bell’s bars, formerly known as This Saves Lives (kinda dramatic, IMO) still pack 20 ingredients, and as a dietitian, I\u2019d still consider the whole thing ultraprocessed.<\/p>\n
We live in this weird era of “Not” food. No this, no that, nothing scary. But that doesn\u2019t automatically make the food nourishing. If anything, these terms make it easier to stop asking questions about what we’re actually eating.<\/p>\n
“Not” Doesn’t Mean Healthy<\/p>\n
You’d think we’d be getting smarter about food labels by now. However, according to the 2025 Global State of Wellness Report by Nielsen IQ<\/a>,<\/a> 78 percent of people still define health by what a food doesn’t have, such as sugar, gluten, and soy, rather than what it actually contains.<\/p>\n That’s not just clever branding. It’s confusion by design.<\/p>\n Nearly 60 percent of global consumers say they feel lost when reading wellness labels. The report refers to it as \u201chealth washing,\u201d where the front of the package claims “clean,” but the back reveals it is ultra-processed. Almost half of Millennials and Gen Z admit they trust buzzwords more than the actual ingredient list.<\/p>\n That’s not on them. That’s on the system.<\/p>\n