Processing the ultraprocessed food phobia
For much of the world, simply getting enough calories to sustain life is a daily challenge. Among the relatively affluent citizens in the west, wave after wave of dietary fashions encourage us to medicalize food. A recent example is the demonization of “processed” and “ultraprocessed” foods. This has been validated by the Trump nominee for HHS secretary*. While we can stipulate that a diet of exclusively unprocessed foods won’t be harmful**, what’s the evidence that eating processed foods is necessarily harmful?
Dietician Jessica Wilson decided to do an unblinded, non-placebo-controlled experiment. Designing the experiment was challenged by the lack of a rigorous definition of “processed” and “ultraprocessed” foods.
“For the month, 80 percent of my diet came from ultraprocessed foods, as best I could define them. But while van Tulleken purposefully swapped snacks like nuts for chips, I didn’t make any nutritional compromises with my diet. I ate that cashew yogurt, as well as Aidells Chicken and Apple sausage, soyrizo (a vegetarian dupe of chorizo), protein shakes, gluten-free bread, and countless Trader Joe’s and Costco snacks and premade meals.”
And the result?
“At the end of my experiment, I actually felt better than I had before. I went from skipping lunch during the week, because Sunday Jessica had had no interest in meal prep, to having meals and snacks full of veggies and protein at the ready. I didn’t have decision fatigue over what to cook, because everything took five minutes or less to get onto my plate. What’s more, it all tasted good. It was easy to grab an ultraprocessed main course and add some fruit and vegetables on the side. I didn’t need afternoon naps anymore, and overall, my anxiety was lower. Most important to me, my spouse noticed that I was more pleasant in the evenings.”
OK, before you reach for your keyboard:
• yes, I know the plural of anecdote isn’t data;
• yes, I know how you feel falls a bit short of quantitative data.
My (and her) point isn’t to validate a Trumpian diet of hamberders and pizza. My (and her) point is that we need to stop medicalizing food and fetishizing the number of ingredients. Be glad you can afford choices in your calories and use good judgement in balancing diet with lifestyle.
*RFK Jr, who is also an anti-vaxxer.
**unless you grill your meat (which creates carcinogens), eat rice (which often contains significant levels of arsenic) and consume baked goods (which contain the neurotoxin and carcinogen acrylamide).
Who’s afraid of the big bad food?
I would rather expect that removing ultra-processed foods from a varied diet but maintaining the same calories would have little measurable result. I suspect it would be hard to perform a study that answers the question of whether eating a diet of ultra-processed foods leads to increased calorie consumption or leads to reductions in variation that leaves out valuable nutrients. How do you blind a participant from changing behavior simply because they know they are in a study?
People are great at creating fads by jumping into something without becoming fully informed, but I am not sure it warrants being called a phobia.
The one basic difference between humans and other animals is that we do process our food routinely. The actions of preserving food for the winter are processing. We pickle vegetables and dry jerky and make cheese. Whatever made someone think about nixtamalizing corn? Or cod?
Long before we had processed and ultraprocessed, some of our traditional or basic foods went through several steps before they became food that was eaten. Not all processing is bad, and not all raw foods are good.