My mother never learned how to drive a car. Once I did, I served as her chauffeur sometimes.

And what I learned during one of those times was how tactless and arrogant an MD can be.

My mother’s mother suffered a severe stroke while I was taking final exams during the fall semester of my junior year of college. On the day I got home, I drove mom to the hospital so we both could visit nana.

She looked terribly aged and acted helplessly infantile, but my mother had warned me about that, so seeing it really didn’t bother me. Seeing how desperately nana was trying to communicate with us, though — and hearing her indecipherable pig squeak — really did.

What really bothered my mother occurred as we were leaving.

A doctor she didn’t know (a vascular neurologist called upon to assess my grandmother’s condition, a nurse later told her) entered the room. He pointed to the chart in his hand, looked at my mom, and said, “After reading this, you’d think your mother was 96. There’s nothing even I can do for her.”

At the time, my grandmother was 69. My mother was 48 and didn’t handle the information well.

But it was accurate. My grandmother died a few days later.

Sometimes when I’m driving to a doctor’s appointment, I think about that whole scenario and how hurtful it was for my mother. But on my last drive, I had a different thought, one created in part by listening to a podcast featuring Michael A. Singer, author of two New York Times bestsellers, The Untethered Soul and The Surrender Experiment.

One that’s true, I believe, for every development and situation in your life, including those health-related. You either handle it well — and you are well as a result — or you don’t and you’re not.

When the “it” is the proliferation of ultraprocessed foods, however, it may not be a matter of well or not, according to a study published in the June issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. In that case — and considering that about 73 percent of the United States’ food supply is currently ultraprocessed — it could very well be a matter of life or death.

The study considered data from eight countries. Some where inhabitants get less than 20 percent of their daily calories from UPF (Colombia and Brazil), and some where the percentage is more than 2.5 times that (the United Kingdom and the United States).

The study was observational, following the participants over a course of time (for one or two years, depending on the country), and therefore does not establish cause and effect. But it does establish a relationship.

That for each 10 percent increase in UPF consumption and regardless of the country, what’s considered to be an early death (one that occurs between the ages of 30 and 69 from any cause) increases by 3 percent. While a 3 percent increase may not seem significant, it’s the nature of the relationship — that it’s linear in nature and based upon the dose — that makes it so.

Because typical American adults receive more than 50 percent of their daily calories from UPF. It’s a fact that lead the researchers to estimate that 14 percent of early deaths in the U.S. can be attributed to UPF consumption.

So even if you’re an atypical American and eat mostly unprocessed or minimally processed foods and virtually no ultraprocessed ones, it’s likely that some American adults who matter to you aren’t, so a trip to the hospital to visit one of them could be in your future. If so, you’ll need to handle “it.”

Which is why I’ll share a bit more of Michael A. Singer’s podcast, “Mastering Life: The Art of Handling Everything,” a bit that begins with the seemingly obvious statement. The world’s “a happening place” and things are going to happen.

Like your child throwing a tantrum in a department store.

If this happens, there’s only two things you can do. You can either handle it or not.

If you do handle it, you’re fine. If you don’t, well ... “you’re not doing well.”

But Singer doesn’t offer advice on how to handle that child “because it’s your child, it’s your department store.” He does make clear, however, that handling any “it” you encounter isn’t the same as surrendering to it.

And that an acknowledgement of the it you need to handle is crucial for your well-being.

So you need to acknowledge the proliferation of ultraprocessed foods — while also remembering that the previously mentioned study found the relationship between the consumption of them and early death to be “a linear, dose-response relationship.”

Which means — as Lisa O’Mary points out in an article for Nourish by WebMD, “Will Ultra-Processed Foods Kill You?” — “it works the opposite way, too. Your risk drops in an equal manner each time you choose a healthier option instead of an ultra-processed product.”