How many times have you heard someone (or even yourself) say, “I’ll just get a Yoplait for breakfast because, you know, it’s yogurt and it’s good for me”? The bad news is that you might as well be eating a scoop of ice cream for all the sugar you’ll find in your cute glass cup of Yoplait Oui.
The yogurt racket is just one small arm of the ultra-processed food complex, a system that has almost completely taken over our kitchens, school cafeterias, restaurants, supermarkets, and more. A recent report in Nature Food revealed that a whopping 73% of U.S. food is ultra-processed. Increasingly, we are seeing the dire effects of this shift on our bodies, our minds, and our society.
Last week in “Ultra-Processed Foods Are Ultra-Bad for You: Here’s What to Know” in the Guardian, Cynthia Nowell observed that “a growing number of grocery-store foods – even ones that appear healthy – are what scientists today call ‘ultra-processed’: fruit-flavored yogurts packed full of sugars, flavorings and thickeners like guar and carob bean gum; or packaged bread, with ingredients like soy lecithin and monoglycerides slipped in alongside the flour and water.”
She goes on to point out that “research is increasingly tying ultra-processed foods to a myriad of health concerns, like diabetes, obesity, cancer and depression. Despite those risks, the average American gets more than 60% of their daily calories from ultra-processed foods – more than in any other country in the world.”
In fact, earlier this year there were several alarmed reports about the growing numbers of young people developing colorectal cancer. As a Medical News Today article from last June reports, the culprit for the spike in cancer among younger adults appears to be the “Western Diet,” specifically large amounts of sugar and red meat.
The Western Diet, as Michael Pollan defines it in his book In Defense of Food, “is lots of processed foods and meat, lots of added fat and sugar, lots of everything—except vegetables, fruits, and whole grains.” It is a product of a food system run amok—one that is most interested in profit rather than the people it feeds.
And while a lot of our food is processed in some way shape or form (pasteurized milk or canned tomatoes, for example), an increasing amount of the food available for us to buy, as Nowell notes, is ultra-processed (those yogurts, chips, breakfast cereals, granola bars, sugary sodas, etc.). She cites the work of Brazilian nutritionist Carlos Augusto Monteiro, who, in 2009, noted this ultra-processing, which he identified as foods being created to be more “edible, palatable, and habit-forming.” He was motivated to research these foods because he and his colleagues had noticed an uptick in diet-related diseases in Brazil and tied that phenomenon to the growth of ultra-processed foods.
Nowell’s article is a useful overview of the current research into ultra-processed foods—the constellations of chemicals they’re made up of, the sugars, salts, the unnatural ingredients and their impact on our bodies. She also shows how difficult it has been to do this work because of the myriad kinds of foods there are which makes it hard to pin down what precisely is causing so much harm.
And while one researcher “doesn’t think any food should be 100% off-limits,” it does look more and more as if the major food corporations, unless checked, will continue to plague our health with ever more poisonous yet convenient and addicting ultra-processed foods.
My take is that like Big Tobacco and other promulgators of things that kill us, the “Nutritional Industrial Complex,” as Pollan calls it, won’t regulate itself. Saying that people should eat more whole foods and veggies individualizes a collective harm.
All of this is of especial concern in low-income and communities of color where the term “food desert” really applies. There are large swathes of areas in South and East San Diego that don’t have enough markets, where healthy whole foods are in short supply. What’s easily accessible is ultra-processed food in convenience and liquor stores and fast-food restaurants.
Another issue is that ultra-processed foods are designed to be addictive, which is why they have so much sugar, salt, and fat in them. Once you head down the junk food road, it’s really difficult to get your taste buds to prefer healthier food. They need to be re-educated. Given a time-out to recalibrate.
The trouble is that what with advertising and the sheer volume of ultra-processed foods surrounding us, including in schools (WHY is it necessary, for example, for a school to ever have Gatorade on its premises?), it’s very difficult for people to detox.
A simple solution is more home and communal cooking. That’s something we practice in my household. We need to go back to the ways of our ancestors and feed ourselves and others good, healthy food—which, in its constituent ingredients, is actually pretty affordable.
Nowell notes in a follow-up article the very real difficulties and time constraints of going homemade: ”I’m reminded of an offhand comment one nutritionist made while we were talking about ultra-processed foods: not enough gets said about the domestic labor it would require, most likely from women, to transition away from them.” Which is a good point, especially the often gendered nature of cooking. However, it also speaks to the ways we’ve come to view eating as just another chore rather than a central way humans have had of nurturing each other and communing over food.
If more people learned or re-learned how to cook and then taught that to the young folks in their lives, we might rediscover community in the context of nourishing ourselves. That sounds like it might solve a world of ills.