A couple of years ago, when my daughter Sandy was in fifth grade, she fell in love with Gatorade. A couple of times a week, she’d beg me for a few dollars so she could walk to the bodega a block from our apartment in Brooklyn and buy a 20-ounce bottle of the Cool Blue “flavor.” (I said no. Usually.) Her craving seemed to have erupted from nowhere, but she told me it had come from seeing other kids drink it. Which kids? “The sporty kids,” she said.

Frankly, I understood the appeal. I’m a runner, and after a sweaty Sunday trot of 10 to 14 miles, there’s little more satisfying than popping into a bodega, pulling a Gatorade from the cooler, and chugging it on the spot. After all, Gatorade, now owned by PepsiCo, has been engineered for precisely this purpose: It was invented in 1965 as a way to replace the fluids and nutrients — sodium, potassium, magnesium, sugar, and carbohydrates — that the University of Florida’s football team (the Gators, of course) sweated out during practice and games. Once the scientists and marketers added tasty flavors, the innovation took off as “the beverage of champions,” launching a whole new category of performance beverages that Fortune Business Insights predicts will grow to $36.35 billion in 2028.

And as sports and fitness evolved over the past several decades from niche endeavors to popular pastimes, that category itself spawned a host of others, from protein powders to energy gels and beyond, all designed to enhance high-level athletic performance. These are perhaps the purest form of ultraprocessed foods, delivery devices for the highly calibrated nutrients required by serious athletes, from high-performing amateurs to professional elites. Beginning with those Florida Gators and continuing through the past decade of shrinking marathon times, these nutritional innovations have helped generations of athletes win games, break records, and stay healthy. But somewhere along the way, they began to appeal to — and were marketed to — kids like Sandy.

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Since nutrition-facts labeling was first introduced by the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) in 1973, the back of the box has been a controversial space. Countless FDA rule changes, congressional hearings, and laws have pitted the scientific community and public health advocates against the food companies over how best to convey to the public what actually goes into our foods. Take a look at some packaging today and you can see it’s not going too well — vague health claims mix with unrecognizable, often unpronounceable ingredients to confuse well-intentioned consumers.

The recent frenzy over the ultraprocessed foods that dominate the American diet has sharpened the label debate and raised questions about what is, and what is not, ultraprocessed, and whether all ultraprocessed foods are unhealthy, or if only some of them are, and why. It’s not an insignificant question: Today in the United States, adults consume around 58 percent of their daily calories from ultraprocessed foods, and these foods make up 67 percent of children’s diets.

In an effort to bring some clarity, I set out to decipher the ingredient list of the Nutri-Grain Soft Baked Mixed Berry Bar, the latest iteration of a breakfast bar that has been around in various forms, flavors, and recipes for over 30 years. The package boasts that the bar is made with “8 grams of whole grains,” is a “good source of calcium and iron,” and contains no high-fructose corn syrup. It also lists 38 distinct ingredients — the gums, emulsifiers, anticaking agents, dyes, and starches that are the building blocks of the bar’s novel texture, intense flavor, and unnatural shelf life. Oh, and five different kinds of sugar.

What do all those ingredients do? Should we be worried about them?