How a scientist is pushing to supersize research into ultra-processed foods
statnews.com
statnews.com
Even reading the Nova classification, the scientific verbiage describing the ultra processed category could easily describe making egg noodles at home. Extrusion is how we get noodle shapes. Molds are how we get cakes and muffins. Emulsifiers are everywhere and are a common reason for adding egg to a recipe. Specific protein isolates less so, but we isolate compounds all the time when brewing and stewing. The only significant difference I see between group 3 and 4 is that they are spoken about in completely different registers that make one sound familiar and the other foreign.
So please, put some sincere research behind this so we can finally get useful clarification on this subject.
My guess that the "processed food is poison" people are only by chance hitting on something. They have zero evidence and zero supporting data.
However, I've come to suspect that the gut is a very complex thing, with a computer in it, and highly connected to the brain. Once you start to go down that line of thinking, I think it's plausible that they've identified a real problem. One possibility among many is that "corporate food" is the result of a giant A/B test series over a hundred years that has machine-learned the model embodied in the gut-computer. It's essentially a DoS attack. And so on. Suggest folk consider what if the gut has a neural network with various sensors and subject to training data.
I normally dislike the typical podcasters/podcasts because of their self promoting and low information density nature but I thought this one was ok to recommend.
Consider that nutrition labels are largely focused on macronutrients. Carbs, fat, protein. Calories in and calories out.
What processed food tends to lack are micronutrients found in fresh, high-quality produce. This goes beyond vitamins (which are becoming scarcer due to agricultural practices). Anthocyanins, carotenoids, and other phytochemicals are produced by plants as protective agents. Those same chemicals help mitigate the entropic forces the body is subjected to over time.
Going back to macros, not all of them are created equal. Glucose syrup can have the same carbohydrate content as a sweet potato, but their glycemic index (how it impacts the functioning of the body) will vary. That doesn't get into the value of the fiber for the gut microbiome.
The differences are there when looking beyond the surface.
You’re missing the other good stuff in a sweet potato (vitamins, fiber, some protein even), but carbs for carbs it’s all gonna do the same thing.
The only difference, as far as I can tell, is that it’s much easier to eat a liter of glucose syrup than a few pounds of sweet potatos. If you could resist and turn off your body’s hunger response, you’d be equivalently overweight. That’s basically why GLP1 antagonists work. It turns that hunger response and makes it easier to say no to that extra slice of pizza.
Reasoning by analogy, most would accept that some people are better suited to extended release medication versus instant. A drug is defined as something that has an effect upon the body when it's ingested, especially in the context of the central nervous system.
Carbohydrates are the preferred fuel source of the body, the brain included. Glucose syrup is simple (C6H12O6). A simple carbohydrate like glucose needs minimal processing to become "active," and it tends to be provided without fiber which would ordinarily buffer the overall glycemic index (impact upon the body). As a result, a spike in blood sugar and insulin occurs.
The subsequent drop in blood sugar can lead to craving and excess consumption, and eventually insulin resistance over the long term. The reason why my initial comment seemed dismissive of "calories in calories out" is because it takes a myopic view of a complex system.
If we view insulin sensitivity (among other factors) as either a positive or negative multiplier of the "calories in calories out" metric, I believe we'd be closer to an accurate view of metabolism and its impact on human health. Sure, we can just take GLP-1 antagonists to curb that appetite, but we could curtail it at the source as well.
Just eat the damn sweet potato!
Working at a restaurant in college, I saw that a single plate of pasta they made during a busy night when it was hard to keep up could easily wind up an entire stick of butter. That’s on top of the cream.
Soda - tons of sugar packed into 12 oz.
When you don’t eat restaurant/processed foods at home, it does shock you a bit just what a giant volume of good 2,000 calories can be.
This is all it means to me. I’m not out here trying to prove science, just trying to stay healthy.
It can't because per Nova for something to be "ultra-processed" it has to be "industrially manufactured". Unless you're involved in cottage industry I guess.
"Ultra-processed" is a ridiculous categorization, a bit like some compounds artificially being labeled as "chemicals" and some not.
I only have slightly more than a passing interest in food science and nutrition, but from all I've learned my gut feeling is that I ought to avoid this stuff, and rely on cooking my own food as much as possible so I don't get into any imbalances (it's very hard to get a surplus of any macro or any other component via "natural" products)
I don't have any evidence on the nutrition side, but it's certainly not an experiment I'd like to do with my only body. And in the psychological side, it's definitely something to avoid if we value our physical and mental health
As to why people eat more, it's probably due to higher energy density food, advertising (especially to children) and lost norms about eating (e.g. sugary stuff is not "proper food"). As to why we move less is less manual labor, more sedentary entertainment and increased use of vehicles.
The obesity discussion seems to somehow deliberately try to avoid the obvious.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1724823/pdf/v03...
A brief sample, though their whole argument is more complex:
"People in the 1800s did have diets that were very different from ours. But by conventional wisdom, their diets were worse, not better. They ate more bread and almost four times more butter than we do today. They also consumed more cream, milk, and lard. Our great-grandparents (and the French) were able to maintain these weights effortlessly. They weren’t all on weird starvation diets or crazy fasting routines. And while they probably exercised more on average than we do, the minor difference in exercise isn’t enough to explain the enormous difference in weight. Many of them were farmers or laborers, of course, but plenty of people in 1900 had cushy desk jobs, and those people weren’t obese either."
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-per-capita-caloric-...
Animals, wild and lab, are probably affected by human food production.
Because they couldn't afford to eat more. In 1900, the average American household spent 43% of their income on food.
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/04/how-ame...
I don't know what's causing obesity, but it doesn't seem to be income, given everyone worldwide exploded into fatness around 1980.
And I'm not satisfied with flimsy hypotheses, such as a historically unprecedented worldwide diminution in human "willpower."
https://opendataforafrica.org/atlas/Guatemala/topics/Food-Se... https://data.worldobesity.org/country/guatemala-85/#data_tre...
But people differ in their incomes. While there always were fat rich people, if food prices were the limiting factor, your average noble from the House of Lords of 1930 would be as fat as average people are today. And yet if you look at those black and white photos of important politicians, businesspeople etc., they were way less fat than an average contemporary student.
This is the Pacific War Council in the early 1940s. Do you believe that those people, decision makers whose decisions affected lives of millions, couldn't afford to eat ad libitum?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Wood,_1st_Earl_of_Halif...
Today, they would weigh +15 kg each at least, and asking their doctors for tirzepatide.
I do know one thing people used to jump on that coincides with this timing, but I don't know how likely it is to be a/the culprit - high-fructose corn syrup. It's the green line on this graph: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_Sweetener_consumption,...
Honestly, have you looked at a 100 year old cookbook? Most of the recipes are… crude in their implementation, to put it mildly.
If I make a roast chicken dinner, not breast but full fat chicken, chuck some butter in the mashed potatoes, salt up the broccoli/carrots etc, it's still significantly lower in calories and higher in nutrients than lots of things people eat today.
It sounds to me that their "conventional wisdom" is more like, well, veganism or something. Milk, butter, cream, great.
Lard is a bit more marginal, sure. But I'd still rather eat lard than random seed oil deep fried whatever.
To the gist - its supremely easier to be or move into position of weakness and victim, look for external blame, while staying very deep in comfort zone, aka fix my shit as long as I don't have to change anything in my life, I'll even throw a lot of money on it. Massive resistance to change that's not convenient nor pleasant at first sight. People throwing tons of money on diet fads, experiencing jojo effects, depressed about their self-image and feeling helpless, binging in anxiety attacks. Yet nobody taking gym ownership, personal trainer, throwing out all that chocolate and other junky food, amking any self-improvement plan that 5 year old can put together and sticking with it. And of course almost everybody moves much less, but gist of the issue is food, quantity and quality.
It doesn't have to be about junk food per se, same is with parents basically giving up on raising kids and leaving screens and ad companies to do the work. Then complaining how young suck and are horrible and have no respect etc. While they themselves are glued to phones every day, addicted to the core, half laughing about it while scrolling further. Telling them to put it down for a day, spend time with them and kids (if they are still little, not much point pushing teenagers suddenly against their well-trodden addictive habits).
Comfort zone is death of one's 'fighting' spirit, I mean in fighting-as-hard-as-possible-for-best-life-possible. No good stuff comes without some form of a fight, at least it didn't in my life. It just doesn't happen in that damned zone, not with social media showing folks what they could have been if they tried. I don't mean some artificial celebrities faking / pretending how everything is glorious, I mean your schoolmates or childhood friends who were not spectacular in any way, yet rewind 10-20 years and there is abyss in how their vs yours life looks like.
I've 'lost' quite a few close people to such envy exactly because I was nobody special in any way yet somehow made it way further than most, from environment which expected very little from me. One way would be 100% quiet about everything good in my life or fake complain about everything, thats how many successful or rich folks live. I refuse to go over the board with that just to keep such, at the end subpar relationships. Rather accept people change, and one of benefits of non-family relationships is that you can finish them and create better ones as you change if it feels like the opposite is a mistake. I am currently in the process of losing my best childhood friend in same way too, not the greatest experience but unfortunately at this point unavoidable one.
/end a bit off topic rant
While it's rather obvious that obesity is caused by excess energy intake, it is not obvious how to change this. I'm getting weight (luckily not at an alarming speed) and I know exactly why I am and how I could stop it, but I don't. Knowledge that it's a "character flaw" doesn't change that.
I smoked for decades, knowing full well it's waste of health and money, and stopped only when smoking was made more difficult than not smoking (smoking bans, introduction of nicotine replacement products). I occasionally eat animal based products knowing they are destroying our environment, but eat them less now because of better plant based options.
Humans are not rational agents and our free will is at most limited.
You can maybe blame individual differences in outcomes on personal character weakness, if you really want to, but when millions on millions of people fall to the same character weaknesses that very similar people didn't fall for before, then "personal" is exactly what it isn't.
This leads to the obvious conclusion it's peoples inability to manage how much they eat that leads to their obesity. What else could it be?
Granted, this isn't necessarily their own moral failing... but the environment they're put in does not set them up for success.
Unless you think they literally just don't make people like they used to, if you swapped the babies in the cradle of the current generation with previous generations, we'd be thinner and they'd be fatter.
So saying the problem is people is kind of meaningless.
tl;dr seed oil is better than butter (saturated fat-wise), it is ok to heat it at home upto 200 Celsius, not ok “ultra processed” fastfood fries due to more heat, reheating (trans fat-wise)
"Highly palatable" foods do this. One way to create those is through "highly processed" techniques.
> but I've yet to see any credible evidence for it.
Obesity is more common in the world where highly processed foods are more common. There is evidence. There is no RCT. This has nothing to do with "credibility" it's just "non-standard analysis."
So it's not just an issue of chemical composition but how we respond to these foods behaviorally.
A 7.5oz bag of potato chips is made using around 6-8 medium sized potatoes. Eating a whole bag of potato chips in one sitting is frighteningly easy to do. But I challenge anyone to eat 6-8 medium potatoes at once, despite being around the same amount of calories.
Going on a whole foods diet often results in weight loss without any increased hunger sensation.
You need something more rigorous than "there is a correlation" to support something that important.
Are they? Maybe! Alcohol, Burgers, Croissants, for all I know there are more bad-diet things in the first half of the alphabet than the last. It could even be that if we convinced people to buy less high-alphabet food, they'd be healthier. But that doesn't mean it's a sensible category. We don't "need more research into high-alphabet foods", we need a causal theory of what makes food healthy or not. It's pretty clear it isn't alphabetic priority, and it's also pretty clear it's not simply "processing".
Most food needs to be processed in some way or another to be edible. I read a terrible catalog many years ago, from an alternative magazine, listing a ton of weird diets and questionable health practices. There were only a handful of things in that catalog of hundreds of things that even they warned against, and one of them was the "raw food diet".
If it's benzopyrene from frying that's the problem, talk about frying. If it's micronutrients being lost from soaking or boiling or long storage with preservatives, talk about that! But don't dumb us down by putting it all in a box and refusing to engage with what actually makes it bad.
The latter optimizes for using the cheapest possible ingredients, with the longest shelf life, and to be hyper palatable. Part of the problem is that, to achieve those goals, industrialized food tends to be high in sugar, fats, salt, and calories in general. But looking at only those nutritional numbers is shortsighted. In the last decades we have seen all sorts of junk food that used their nutrition labels to masquerade as healthy food: diet colas without added sugar, sugary breakfast cereals that are "rich in vitamins", and so on. And those did little to stop the obesity epidemic.
The conversation came about because she was encouraging me to reduce lunch meats from my diet. Lunch meat is a staple in many diets, but there are a lot of salts
For example, pictures of potato chips or bacon are often pictured and vilified as ultra-processed foods. The NOVA system describes these as "processed" (but not "ultra-processed") foods, and that's almost certainly the case. A home cook can make bacon by curing pork belly in salt and natural spices and then cooking it in a conventional fashion, or frying potato slices in oil and then salting them. Many bacons and potato chips list few ingredients beyond pork or potatoes, salt, and in the case of chips, oil. These can hardly be considered "ultra-processed", even if the American diet of cured and smoked meats may not be optimal for cardiovascular health. These are things people were eating for centuries, long before modern grocery stores and preparations.
But even then, the NOVA system is obtuse. Ice cream is listed as an ultra-processed food, even as you can pick up Haagen Dazs vanilla at Walgreens with only "cream, milk, eggs, sugar and vanilla." You can certainly make a simulacrum of it of similar quality at home using the same ingredients and an ice cream maker. Is it "healthy"? Almost certainly no! Is it ultra-processed? Also, almost certainly no!
Other "ultra-processed" foods according to NOVA are "sweetened and flavored yogurts including fruit yogurts" which again can be made at home using no artificial ingredients with... sugar and fruit, hardly ultra-processing. Chocolate milk is an ultra-processed food according to NOVA, consisting of... milk, cocoa and sugar, which again, you can certainly make at home and is not some sort of industrial concoction.
We are all well aware of the issues with excessive sugar and salt in the diet, and this was established long before any of us were born.
Everything you read about "ultra-processed foods" is junk science. There may well be certain preservatives or preparations that aren't good for us, but the classifications in place are total garbage, and don't point us to any actual risks beyond the natural ingredients we have all known to be problematic from time immemorial.
[1] The NOVA classifications: https://ecuphysicians.ecu.edu/wp-content/pv-uploads/sites/78...
"Ultra-processed foods are industrial formulations made entirely or mostly from substances extracted from foods (oils, fats, sugar, starch, and proteins), derived from food constituents (hydrogenated fats and modified starch)"
> Haagen Dazs vanilla at Walgreens with only "cream, milk, eggs, sugar and vanilla."
Yes, that's an "ice cream" according to the FDA. The problem is the definition is so loose that any product with 10% milkfat or milkfat solids can be called ice cream. Which means that "ice cream" may or may not be highly processed.
You'll need to examine the ingredients to know. Which is why Ben & Jerry's can't call themselves "all natural" anymore, because, they happily include many more industrial ingredients over your Hagen Dazz.
The only ingredients in Ben & Jerry's vanilla ice cream that aren't in Haagen Dazs are guar gum (which is a ground bean, and natural enough to be sold in a bag for your kitchen by Bob's Red Mill) and carageenan, which sure, can be considered a derived ingredient but is ultimately derived from seaweed and is almost certainly not the cause of any health issues. Those thickeners are a far cry from industrial concoctions like hydrogenated oils.
I mean, canned soups are on the list an ultra-processed food. Oh no!! I assure you we're not suffering a health crisis due to canned soups in the generic. It's all nonsense.
As I pointed out it does.
> Ben & Jerry's vanilla ice cream
They make more than vanilla ice cream I presume.
> canned soups are on the list an ultra-processed food
Campbell's Chicken Noodle Soup Ingredients:
"Chicken Stock, Enriched Egg Noodles (Wheat Flour, Eggs, Niacin, Ferrous Sulfate, Thiamine Mononitrate, Riboflavin, Folic Acid), Chicken Meat, Contains Less Than 2% Of: Salt, Chicken Fat, Water, Monosodium Glutamate, Cornstarch, Modified Cornstarch, Natural Flavoring, Dried Chicken Broth, Sugar, Beta Carotene For Color, Onion Powder, Soy Protein Isolate, Sodium Phosphate, Yeast Extract, Dried Chicken, Garlic Extract."
This does not seem 'ultra-processed' to you? It even has MSG in it.
> It's all nonsense.
It's a guideline. You need to do the work and read the labels yourself. I cannot hand you a list of anything other than "whole foods" an expect it to be useful or accurate. I can give you a guide which may highlight some previously unexpected categories of food which you should now know to inspect carefully before assuming they aren't ultra processed.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
People eating more calories because it's more calorie dense / easier to digest/eat
People eating more because of things like umami (has no protein but seems like it might be protein)
High GI foods causing blood sugar spikes
Weird E-numbery ingredients that aren't well studied (e.g. are sweeteners actually healthy for human consumption as opposed to simply not causing acute issues)
General lack of nutrition (e.g. if you live on bread and meat with no vegetables things gon get bad)
etc.
There seems to be a huge aversion in mainstream society to accepting the basic fact that calories in calories out works. It's used by millions and millions of athletes to hit weight classifications, to bulk and add muscle, to cut and reduce body fat, etc. It's about as proven as gravity. You cannot be fat as an average height person if you eat 2000 calories a day consistently.
I really doubt that there is any magic here - based on the experience of everyone I know, the thin and fit people eat a certain diet and do certain exercises, the thin and semi-fat (e.g. powerlifter type) people eat a different diet and do certain exercises, and the fat people eat, well, they eat shit, they do not consciously think about what they are eating, in the same way that a well earning person living paycheck to paycheck doesn't have a budget.
And then additional strides would have to be made to be convert restaurants (not to mention school cantinas) into actually healthy dining places. I don't think a single burger place would survive such an assessment.
I doubt this. The supermarket I go to would be about 1/2 empty if they removed processed foods. The rest is still largely taken up by the deli, meat, produce, dairy, and fresh foods. None of these are highly processed.
> And then additional strides would have to be made to be convert restaurants
Chain restaurants that supply themselves exclusively from Sysco. Almost all other restaurants actually cook with mostly whole ingredients.
> a single burger place
Everything there can be a whole food except the bun and the beverage. You're presenting this is as if it's a huge challenge when in reality it barely would be.
Also, there are some amazing pictures in this article.
Whey protein vs tofu? One is in your favorite Hunan dish, the other is sold in tubs next to dubious supplements. But, so?
So pies made with lard, sugar, and served with whole-milk ice cream?
Think of risk profiles rather than harm amounts.
It would be amazing if the tech to test samples of anything edible could become a target of the DIY & Maker community. This has to be a citizen science effort.
Production results vary. Just recently an acquaintance who owns a small coffee shop in a small town got a visit form the local public health administration telling him that they got a notice from a company that he purchased a product that is being called back due to xyz.
We were all surprised that this system works so incredibly well.
But in terms of health, there are just too many factors that impact individual bodies and brains while being barely relevant in samples of the general population. We need to build a database of human profiles whose health was impacted by something in their food. Of course, there's allergies, and nutritional coaches, and so on but those processes are incredibly long and people get lost and give up or often enough, nothing is found and the person is left to his or her own devices.
I have a friend who reacts bad to some dairy products, whipped cream for example, but the intensity varies with the producer! And he tried some of the most expensive products and some are 'ok' while others produce pain. There must be traces of something that is simply not looked at when tested by food safety labs. And labs like that of the dude from the article are rare and cost a lot.
A couple of weeks ago someone mentioned fertility rates and why some generations had worse ones than others. Not birth rates, fertility rates. Apparently there are periods in time where causes for worse fertility can't be deducted from research and economic data of the time. Microplastics and such didn't play that big of a role back then and the water, soil weren't even remotely as bad back then. Pre WW1 to post WW2. So I proposed it must be something that was in the food that nobody looked at. Might even be sabotage, who knows.
So yeah, I really hope the Maker community can up the game a little and pave the way for more citizen science in food safety and in the research of how different compounds &/or combinations impact energy metabolisms.
which maybe would be fine, if people made a modicum of effort and researched the definition. Instead everyone is playing word games "what about this, what about that", "does it mean cheese is ultraprocessed", and implying a vague coverage at the edges means the whole concept is worthless