Maintenance Phase - Ultra-Processed Foods
Episode Date: June 3, 2025Everyone agrees that processed foods are bad for you. When it comes to defining what they actually are, however, there is considerably less agreement. Support us:Hear bonus episodes on PatreonWatch A...ubrey's documentaryBuy Aubrey's bookListen to Mike's other podcastGet Maintenance Phase T-shirts, stickers and moreLinks!Nutrition and health. The issue is not food, nor nutrients, so much as processingUltra-Processed Foods: Definitions and Policy IssuesExamining the Nova Food Classification System and the Healthfulness of Ultra-Processed FoodsA new classification of foods based on the extent and purpose of their processingUltra-processed diets cause excess calorie intake and weight gainWhy Is the American Diet So Deadly?Ultra-processed foods and mortalityAssociation of ultra-processed food intake with risk of inflammatory bowel disease: prospective cohort studyAcademic and doctor Chris van Tulleken: ‘Ultra-processed products are food that lies to us’Food addiction: a valid concept?The study of food addiction using animal models of binge eatingObesity and the brain: how convincing is the addiction model?Ultra-processed foods and cardiovascular disease: analysis of three large US prospective cohortsSugar addiction: the state of the scienceThe Plastic Chemicals Hiding in Your FoodPremature Mortality Attributable to Ultraprocessed Food Consumption in 8 CountriesUltra-processed food intake and animal-based food intake Thanks to Doctor Dreamchip for our lovely theme song!Support the show
Transcript
Discussion (0)
What do you have? I have one too, even though it's not my turn. But what is yours?
Wait, I want to know what yours is.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no. I want to see what you do with it first.
Hi everybody and welcome to Maintenance Phase, the podcast that's finding
new and exciting ways to stigmatize
the foods you love.
Oh, that's good. That's very direct.
On brand, the other thing that I thought about as an opening is asking you what your favorite
ultra processed food is. Mine is smoked salmon.
Oh, Nutella. No, mine was going to be Welcome to Maintenance Phase, the podcast that is
finally going to tell the story of yellows one through four
I'm Michael Hops. I'm Aubrey Gordon
If you would like to support the show you can do that at patreon.com
Maintenance phase or you can subscribe to premium episodes on Apple podcasts. It's the same content same content Michael
We're talking about ultra processed foods. And this is a thing that people are like sort
of constantly asking us to cover, asking us to talk about, all of that sort of stuff.
And I am fascinated to hear where we land.
Well, okay, so the bad news is we have to start with the same tedious caveat that we
start every episode with.
This is like my test of like, can I do research
without going down a bunch of like unnecessary rabbit holes and then cutting like hours of
footage out of the show? The one thing we're going to talk about is like the definition
of processed food.
Oh my God, I can't wait.
I think the core challenge of talking about this in a nuanced way is that there are two
definitions. There is the colloquial definition of processed food.
Like when you are going about your business,
you constantly hear people say like,
I'm trying to avoid processed foods.
It's one of those concepts that is sort of like,
I know it when I see it.
That's what I was gonna say is revised tagline
is a welcome to maintenance phase,
the podcast where like pornography,
we can't define ultra processed food,
but we know them when we see them.
Right, like you kind of know that a Twinkie is like an ultra processed food. We can't define ultra-processed food, but we know them when we see them.
Right. Like, you kind of know that a Twinkie is like an ultra-processed food.
You know that Wonder Bread is an ultra-processed food.
And I want to say that, like, as a colloquial matter, I don't really police this stuff.
Like, if I'm with somebody and they say, like, oh, I'm trying to cut back on processed foods,
I'm not like, how are you defining that?
The research disagrees with you!
Yeah. If you are a person who's trying to avoid processed foods, like you know what that means,
there's all kinds of kind of arbitrary concepts in our lives that we still manage to live by,
and I think this is totally fine. The question that we're trying to confront on the show is like,
is this useful as a scientific concept and as a concept that is now driving policy?
So there are numerous countries that are passing taxes on processed foods.
We talked in our last episode about how RFK Jr. potentially might want to remove, quote,
processed foods from food stamps.
And so it's kind of fine to have a colloquial understanding of a term that is like a little
murky or a little, you know, sort of changes depending on the circumstances.
But if we're going to be passing laws and if we're going to be putting out studies
that say, okay, ultra processed foods is associated with a 5% higher risk of cardiovascular disease,
we need to have a clear understanding of what this term means.
I also think there is a way that sort of processed food has come to act as a stand in for what
folks maybe previously would have referred to as quote-unquote junk food.
God damn it Aubrey, this is in my conclusion.
Oh shit, I'm so sorry!
There's sort of an understanding that it might be uncouth or sort of judgmental to refer to some foods as quote-unquote junk foods,
and processed sounds like more technical or more descriptive or something to people.
Fine, Aubrey
I'll scroll down to the part of my notes where I have information about this, you know
I was thinking about the fine last night and I was looking at my beloved bean shelf
Do my beans count as ultra processed? What about I have a jar of barley is that ultra process?
The closer you get to trying to find a line the murkier. Yeah, it's right. It's very sort of impressionist
It makes sense from a distance and then you get up close and you're like no to trying to find a line the murkier it gets, right? It's very sort of impressionist. It
makes sense from a distance. And then you get up close and you're like, no.
The thing is, the more I read about this, the more I actually, I think I prefer the
term junk food, because when people say junk food, you know that it doesn't actually have
a lot of informational content. It basically just means like, food I don't like. You're
like, okay, everybody's going to define it differently. Whereas processed food feels objective.
Yeah. But like it turns out to be like just as arbitrary.
It just sounds less arbitrary.
There is something that is genuinely helpful about people just sort of owning up
to their judgments and biases, because then you actually can have a conversation
about it. Exactly. Versus someone who goes, oh, it's not junk food.
It's ultra processed foods.
Where they just sort of keep sort of seeking a new refuge
from any kind of conversation about how they actually feel.
So the first thing to know about the term processed food
is that it's been around like much longer than I knew.
So I went on that like Google gram thing that is like,
how much is this term being used?
The first reference that it has for processed food
is from 1912.
You can find old articles in like the New York Times,
like decrying processed food and how it's harming people.
One of the first articles I found was from 1970
called Bread is Fatal to Rats, but that's not the point.
Wait, wait, wait, Mike, wait.
Are you doing a rat soundboard right now?
No, I'm not. I'm not doing a sound. God, I'm trying to find my fucking zoom window to turn on the camera.
Oh, wow. When is this from? This appears to be from the 50s. I found this in an antique shop.
It's a print that says bread helps to keep up your energy in this sensible reducing diet bread helps burn up safely the fat you lose.
Dude, bring back this graphic design.
It looks dope.
It's so wordy.
It's like all these words and then like people at a prom or something because they ate bread.
Also, now I want a rat soundboard.
Sorry.
This is OK.
I know I said I wasn't going go down rabbit holes and shit, but the first paragraph of this article is,
for what may be the 1000th time,
the question of whether or not rats can live on nothing but ordinary white bread
has been raised once again.
I'm like, is that something we were raising a lot in the 1970s?
Sorry, are we coming back to this one a bunch?
Just like a first date question.
Fascinating. Where are you from? Do you have any siblings? Can rats live on bread? If a tree falls
in the woods, the woods around to hear it doesn't make a sound. Can rats live on bread? So this is a
study where they fed rats like ordinary white bread, of course like refined flour, you know,
they remove a lot of the fiber, a lot of the nutrients, etc. If you feed rats just white bread, they do die, like they starve to death basically because
there's not enough nutrients.
However, if you feed them an enriched white bread that has these vitamins and minerals
put back in, they live.
But what's interesting to me is like, in this article from the very beginning of this term,
nobody could really define what processing is because one way to think about it is like, OK, you're processing the wheat,
you're taking out all the nutrients, but also boiling down foods to get the
nutrients out and turning them into powders and putting them into bread is
also processing. It's arguably 100% more processing.
This is just a different kind of processing.
So it's like everyone uses the term process just to mean like, food I don't like,
food that I think is bad.
Right, absolutely.
Like, there are very few definitions of processed foods
in terms of the like, colloquial usage
that would include like, olive oil.
This does actually get to like,
the biggest problem with the term
and the biggest problem with like, efforts to define it.
So, the term becomes much more popular
in the early 2000s, especially with like,
the rise of Michael Pollan. I went back to the omnivores dilemma for this and like he refers
to processed foods many times, but he doesn't refer to ultra processed foods. The term ultra
processed is coined in 2009 by a Brazilian researcher named Carlos Monteiro, who had been
doing kind of field work in Brazil in the 1970s and 1980s, originally on malnutrition,
but he was noticing with these poor populations, eventually the problem of malnutrition had started
to shift to what he calls overnutrition. You basically have, as the Brazilian economy is
developing, there's more of these like commercial foods being produced and traditional diets are
starting to give way to like, you know, sodas and Twinkies and all the kind of stuff we associate with ultra-processed foods.
So in 2009, he puts out the first use of this term
in academia, ultra-processed,
and also an attempt to define it.
So this is a paper called
The Issue is Not Food Nor Nutrients So Much as Processing.
So I'm gonna send you the first couple paragraphs.
It is now generally acknowledged that the current pandemic of obesity and related chronic
diseases has, as one of its important causes, increased consumption of convenience and pre-prepared
foods.
However, the issue of food processing is largely ignored or minimized in education and information
about food, nutrition, and health, and also in public health policies.
So this is happening in the context of this shifting understanding of food, right?
That the original understanding of like, quote unquote, unhealthy food was food that was high in saturated fats, right?
We talked about this coming out of the 1950s. It was like, we need to cut down on fat.
Then in the early 2000s, we get this stigmatization of sugar and carbs. And so what Monteiro is saying is like, we need a more holistic understanding of this,
that it's not just like you measure the grams of sugar and then you're like, this food is
level eight bad.
Like, that's really one dimensional.
We need a three dimensional understanding.
And that comes from understanding the way that the food is made, basically.
God, the whole time you're talking about this, I'm just thinking about other foods that are
ultra processed. Protein, protein protein powder protein powder that's ultra processed. We're getting there we're getting there we're getting there.
Athletic greens. You read two more paragraphs Aubrey and then we'll get to the fun part which is us
trying to define what ultra processed food is. Fucking dunking on huel. Yeah exactly.
Yeah fuck you moon dust.
So I'm sending you these paragraphs about where he lays out, like, what is the problem
with ultra processed foods?
Modern diets usually do contain some unprocessed plant foods and meat and milk, but also keep
several of the unhealthy features of the processed ingredients they are mostly based on.
Low nutrient density, little dietary fiber, and excess simple carbohydrates,
saturated fats, sodium, and trans fatty acids. What makes snacks, drinks, dishes, and meals mainly
made up from the ultra-processed foods different from traditional dishes and meals is that they
are inalterable. They come ready to eat or heat. Diets that include a lot of ultra processed foods are intrinsically nutritionally unbalanced
and intrinsically harmful to health.
Well, now hang on.
Are you going to mention exactly what I was about to say?
You can say this, but we just talked about enriched flour and enriched cereals, right?
Growing up, yes, absolutely, breakfast cereal That like growing up, yes absolutely,
breakfast cereal was kind of everywhere,
but all of that breakfast cereal was like
very prominently labeled as being enriched
with vitamin A, vitamin C, vitamin B.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I don't know that you can argue necessarily
that it's intrinsically nutritionally unbalanced.
Again, athletic greens is an ultra processed food that
advertises itself as being nutritionally balanced, right?
There's also this core problem that you find in like every single paper about this where it says, okay
It's not about the nutrients. It's not about what's inside of the food
It's about the processes by which the foods are made and then it's like, okay, why are ultra processed foods bad?
It's about what's in the food.
So he's saying they're high in fat,
they're high in sugar, and they're calorie dense.
Oh my God, Mike, are we gonna end up
doing the reporting version of that Breyers commercial
from the 90s where they made a little kid
try to read the ingredients on a bucket of ice cream?
Oh, that was a Breyers commercial?
I actually looked up the ingredients of Breyers
for this episode. Yeah, cause they were like, but look at Breyers commercial? I actually looked up the ingredients of Breyers for this episode.
Yeah, because they were like, but look at Breyers!
And the kid is like, milk, cream, sugar.
Guar gum? That kid could pronounce guar gum?
Ha ha ha ha ha ha!
It just really feels like that's sort of where we're headed.
We finally get to, like, the meat of this paper
and, like, just such fucking Mike Bate,
the attempt to actually operationally define what ultra-processed so he proposes in 2009 this classification that has three groups
Every single person who writes about ultra processed food has like the same paragraph where they're like well all food is processed
Yeah, slicing up an apple is processing it, but it has no nutritional content whatsoever
is processing it, but it has no nutritional content whatsoever. But also like Pringles, like making like a slurry of potato
and then shaping it into like chip shape is also processing.
It's like this term encompasses such a wide range of activities
that it's probably better to just find a different term.
So he does acknowledge this.
So the first group in his classification is minimally processed foods or unprocessed foods.
Obvious stuff, right?
Of like, you pick an apple from the tree and it's like a group one food, right?
But then he also acknowledges that even these foods include processing.
So he says, such processes include cleaning, removal of inedible fractions, portioning, refrigeration, freezing, pasteurization, fermenting, pre-cooking,
drying, skimming, bottling, and packaging.
Skim milk, process.
This is the problem.
Process this fuck.
He's saying these are forms of processing,
but they don't count.
It's not about whether foods are processed,
it's about the intensity of the process.
Yeah, it just feels real goofy to be like,
the dried beans are not processed,
but you put them in a can and then they are.
So that is group one.
These are foods that are like, they're processed, yeah,
but they're not ultra processed.
So they're good.
We're gonna look the other way.
Yeah, they're fine, right?
Group two is substances extracted from whole foods.
So this is anything like, you know, refining flour.
Oh, is that my olive oil?
Yes, this is olive oil.
So when you press olives, you get oil out of them.
This is again, also a form of processing,
but it's not like the bad kind of processing.
You're basically making ingredients out of whole foods.
So he says, traditionally, they are ingredients
used in the domestic preparation and cooking of dishes mainly made up of fresh and minimally processed foods.
Because all of this is based on his work with traditional families and rural poor populations
in Brazil, what he's really trying to do with this classification is separate kind of traditional
food practices from modern food practices. This is a critique of the modern food system.
And so what he's doing with group one and two is like, well, yeah, you know, if you
look at like a poor family in rural Brazil, like they might be using some flour, they're
probably using some oil when they like saute vegetables, they're using spices.
Technically that's processing, but that's not the kind of processing that is going to
be harmful to health.
These are like traditional practices, right?
But then he contrasts this with group three, which is ultra processed food So we're finally getting to the definition of ultra processed foods. Hmm. So here is this
These are made up of group two substances to which either no or relatively small amounts of minimally processed foods are added
or relatively small amounts of minimally processed foods are added, plus salt and other preservatives, and often also cosmetic additives such as flavors and colors. This group of foods includes breads,
cookies, ice creams, chocolates, candies, breakfast cereals, cereal bars, potato chips,
and savory and also sweet snack products in general, and sugared and other soft drinks.
That's the kind of you know it when you see it thing.
Meat products such as nuggets, hot dogs, burgers and sausages made from processed
or extruded remnants of meat can also be classified as ultra processed foods.
Boy, if anyone ever describes anything I'm eating as extruded remnants of meat.
I mean, that's what they are.
It's true. And I don't want to hear it.
I know. Don't think about it. Ultra processed foods are basically confections of group two
ingredients, typically combined with sophisticated use of additives to make them edible, palatable,
and habit forming. They have no real resemblance to group 1 foods, although they may be shaped, labeled, and
marketed so as to seem wholesome and quote-unquote fresh.
Unlike the ingredients included in group 2, ultra-processed foods are typically not consumed
with or as part of minimally processed foods, dishes, and meals.
They are designed to be ready to eat, sometimes with addition of liquids such as milk, or
ready to heat, and are often
consumed alone or in combinations, such as savory snacks with soft drinks, bread with
burgers."
It really feels like a very vibey definition.
The core definition is that ultra-processed foods are made up of group 2 substances to
which either no or relatively small amounts of minimally processed foods are added
so the idea is that these products are
Majority like oil and fat like something like Nutella which is like 13% hazelnuts and
Effectively everything else is just like oil and sugar
But Michael that's not typically consumed with or as part of minimally processed foods, dishes and meals, which means, I'm sorry, you never have
dipped a banana into Nutella.
You know, earlier he said, like, the problem with ultra-processed
foods, right, is that they're very high in sugar, they're high
in fat, they're very calorie dense, but then he includes
things in ultra-processed here that are not particularly high
in sugar or fat or energy dense.
Like, all breads, you're including tortillas.
This also excludes a lot of foods.
This definition does not include potato chips,
because like I looked at Lay's potato chips,
like Lay's original potato chips have three ingredients.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Potatoes, oil and salt.
And like lots of French fries also are just three ingredients, right?
It's potatoes, oil and salt.
That's kind of like the canonical food of like, you shouldn't be eating so many potato chips. You shouldn't be eating french
fries. But those actually count as minimally processed foods under this definition.
Yeah.
You're saying ultra-processed foods are bad for you. But then you have this definition
of ultra-processed foods that includes a lot of foods that are not particularly bad for you.
And then you have this definition of unprocessed foods that includes a ton of foods that are bad
for you. Or like at least they're calorie dense, energy dense.
I was thinking because he includes milk in this sort of unprocessed category,
like a creme brulee would count as like unprocessed.
Even though it's extremely calorie dense, it's still mostly cream, right?
Yeah, and just so very similar ingredients-wise to like ice cream.
Ice cream always makes the list of ultra processed foods,
but like I looked this up,
Haagen-Dazs ice cream has five ingredients.
It's like cream, sugar, vanilla.
There's nothing you can't pronounce in there.
As a person who occasionally makes ice cream,
there's not much to it.
But then the second problem with this definition
is that it includes these concepts
that are just not related to human nutrition.
So he goes into
this whole thing that the real problem with ultra processed foods is that they're profit
maximizing. They're produced by large corporations. They're these kind of international commodities.
Ah, yes. More vibes. Exactly. So he says ultra processed products are typically branded,
distributed internationally and globally, heavily advertised and marketed and very profitable.
But the problem with this is that fucking like fruits and vegetables and food that is
good for you is also very profitable and also produced by fucking international global corporations
like if you go to the grocery store and get strawberries, they're going to be from fucking
Driscoll's.
Driscoll's is like a massive corporation.
I mean, I think here's the interesting thing here
There is a critique to be had about the behavior of any number of multinational corporations
that
Criticism of corporate behavior isn't the same thing as proving that there are negative health effects as a result of that bad corporate behavior
I can they're trying to kind of ride the coattails
of like, this kind of makes sense to you, right?
You kind of know that corporations are like bad,
so they're probably also bad for your health, right?
We found this in the Michael Pollan book too,
that people keep presenting these dietary choices
as somehow like a break from capitalism
or somehow virtuous in all of these other larger
economic ways and they just aren't.
Food can be healthy and produced by miserable corporations.
This is the way that we've chosen to structure our economy.
You cannot escape from this by buying virtuous food.
I think this is a huge mistake in the way that people frame this stuff.
And if you can, then the escape is only an escape that is available to people who can afford it.
Exactly. Then the escape is only an escape that is available to people who can afford it exactly
Maybe the push then should be a we first have to establish that there is hard and fast evidence that this is like
Actively uniquely bad for you and B
Then I think the task becomes then you like regulate healthier products
So as we just covered like this this definition is like not all that useful
I I think this paper is like actually quite bad like kind of shockingly bad considering it like began this entire field
Like it's just obvious contradictions. You know that I love like a petty like academic paper opera
You know, I love like peer-reviewed like hmm interesting you and I both love the Big Brother House aspect.
Exactly.
Of academia, absolutely.
So I found an article on all of the ways
that they had to change the definition of this term
over time.
Between 2009 and 2017, they changed
the definition of ultra-processed foods seven times.
Yeah, that tracks.
And there's this article called Ultra-processed Foods,
Definitions and Policy Issues by Michael
J. Gibney that follows all of these changes in like a super petty but also very useful
way.
Oh, it's our Weight Watchers episode.
Yes.
You're the 17 different diets that Weight Watchers has been.
So in 2010, the definition of ultra processed foods is updated to durable, accessible, convenient
and palatable, ready to eat or ready to heat food products liable to be consumed as snacks
or desserts or to replace home prepared dishes.
I like that they keep throwing in highly palatable, which is just like if it tastes good, it's
one of these.
It's good.
The other like the first thing that jumped out to me about this the first time I read it,
is this ready to eat thing?
Was like, these are often ready to eat,
but like, do you know what else is ready to eat?
A fucking apple?
Totally, and some of that is like a grilled chicken breast
that's cut up and thrown in a package at the grocery store
and then you pick up, right?
So like, to refer to a food like that
while conjuring an image of just like a heap of like hostess cupcakes and Cheetos feels misleading in a way that really verges on deliberate here.
There's also the thing, you know, it says it says they're they're intended to replace home prepared dishes.
But also, this is not a biological concept.
The purpose of making food does not affect your body differently.
If I'm eating a brownie to replace a meal that doesn't make the brownie
like affect my body differently, it's like, again, we're just throwing in
these concepts that are not actually related to nutrition.
At least let's just be honest about what we're grappling with.
Exactly. You already know which foods it is.
It's the foods you already don't trust.
Right. And you already know who eats those foods, and it's people who probably make less money than you do.
We then in 2012 get another update where
older processed foods are defined as,
these are formulated mostly or entirely from ingredients
and typically contain no whole foods.
So this is yet another message that you see in this world.
Even in academic articles, it's like, they're not even food they're like edible food like substances right
this is the frankenfood yeah I'm sorry but like a Dorito is mostly corn I'm
sorry yeah I mean to your point earlier about lays another one of those is
Fritos where you're like oh it's just corn and oil and salt so okay so finally
we finally this is the whole episode, Aubrey.
Just walking through technical
definition, walking through definitions.
These efforts go on for like a decade
to like try to come up with a classification.
They finally in 2017 come up with what's called the NOVA classification,
which is now what is used in all of the studies.
And from three groups, they've now made it four groups.
There was a period where they're like with 3A and 3B
or whatever, but now they're just like, fuck it,
there's four groups.
So I'm gonna send you a JPEG of like the current definitions
and some examples.
Group one is unprocessed or minimally processed foods,
naturally occurring foods with no added salt, sugar,
oils or fats.
Group two is processed culinary ingredients. Group three is processed foods defined as
food products made by adding sugar, oil and or salt to create simple products from unprocessed
or minimally processed foods with increased shelf life or enhanced taste. And then the
last one is like a brick.
And that is the definition of ultra processed foods.
Industrially created food products
created with the addition of multiple ingredients
that may include some group two ingredients,
as well as additives to enhance the taste
and or convenience of the product,
such as hydrolyzed proteins, soy protein isolate,
maltodextrin, high fructose corn syrup, stabilizers, flavor enhancers, non-sugar sweeteners, and
processing aids such as stabilizers, and bulking and anti-bulking agents.
They're industrially created food products created with the addition of multiple ingredients
to enhance taste and or convenience.
The examples here are commercially produced breads, rolls, cakes, cookies, donuts, breakfast
cereals, soy burgers, flavored yogurts, ready to heat meals such as frozen pizzas, soft
drinks and candy.
Soft drinks are not ready to heat.
I know it's such a weird order.
The order that they're doing it in is weird.
The people who are doing this defining are not writers. I'll say that.
I think the greatest challenge that they come up with is this thing of there's processed foods, which are fine,
and then there's ultra processed foods, which are bad.
Yeah.
This is like, I think what they spent 10 years kind of trying to figure out,
because obviously everything is processed, and there's stuff like cheese,
which is produced in like a very processing kind of process. God damn it. But they don't
want to call that bad for you because that's kind of traditional or kind of virtuous, I
guess. So that's in like group three.
Yeah, it just feels like so clearly such a line drawing exercise around like, how do
I keep in the things I like
and cut out the things I don't?
There's also the one that really stuck out to me
the first time I saw this was,
in group three, which again is good,
you have freshly made bread.
And then in group four, which is bad,
you have commercially produced bread.
Yeah.
Again, these are not nutritional concepts.
Something can be made in very large batches
and also be very good for you.
And the other way around and like, at what point does bread become
commercially produced on some level?
All fucking bread is commercially produced.
I bought it at the bakery.
Well, also, group four talks about like high fructose corn syrup.
But group two includes honey and maple syrup.
Exactly. So what is the metabolic difference?
Right. It feels like they're trying to have like a hundred sort of like scientific conversations
at once. And I'm like, no dudes, you got to go through beat by beat and be like, here's the
problem with emulsifiers and why they might be bad for your health. Here's the evidence for that.
Here's why honey is different than high fructose corn syrup. It is also Aubrey. What no one even like
in academia can can fucking agree on what the four groups
are. I have seen honey in all four groups. Good. Yes. No one
can decide. This is when I turn into that like Elmo in front of
flames like yes. There's also I mean, maybe this is me being annoying, but like I also kind of object to
like cakes and cookies being an ultra-processed because like, yeah some cakes and cookies
are ultra-processed, but some cakes and cookies you bake at home with like five ingredients.
And surely the whole point of a fucking processing scale is to organize foods according to how processed they are,
like the processes by which they are made.
You just have like all cakes and all cookies are in here,
presumably because they're very high in fat
and high in sugar, but then if we're just putting in
all foods that are high in fat and sugar,
then why isn't this just the fucking
how high are foods in fat and sugar scale?
You could also argue that like,
while they've got like cookies in group four, that if you're talking
about macarons, those are made with ground up almonds instead of wheat flour.
So does that mean that they're sugar nuts?
They're really trying to put a real fine point on it, but in the process of so doing, they
are revealing how blunt that point is.
I could yell that on the internet for saying this the other day but like there's also the thing of like
ultra processed foods are characterized by the addition of multiple ingredients and then they
list like maltodextrin and all this kind of stuff but am I losing my mind Aubrey?
Ingredients are not the same as processing. Like if I make bread with like water, flour, yeast,
and cyanide that's not bad because it's processed.
The process of making that is precisely the same,
as if it wasn't poisonous.
The reason it's poisonous is because of the ingredient?
None of this stuff is processed.
It's like, if the ingredients are bad, then it's bad for you.
But then the original article that kicked all this off
was like, it's not what's in the food, it's the process.
But then they define it, and it's like, oh, it's not what's in the food, it's the process. But then they define it and it's like,
oh, so it is what's in the food.
It really mimics the kind of way that I feel myself behaving
when I'm looking for like shampoo or something.
And the container will say like,
no parabens and no phthalates.
And I'm like, I don't know what those things are,
but it seems good.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, totally.
But they don't have them.
And you're like sort of creating
this weird, weird deliberate Byzantine
Definition that carves out all the things that you trust and leaves in all the things that you don't trust
So, okay
So that was the sort of decade long and I think unsuccessful effort to define what this term means we then in 2019
Get the first evidence that this category of food is uniquely bad. So this comes from a researcher
named Kevin Hall who was previously a physicist but sort of drifted into diet research. He was
the guy that wrote the Biggest Loser study, the study that found that like their metabolisms were
still hella slow like years after they were on The Biggest Loser, he in 2015 meets Carlos Montero at a conference.
And Montero was like, you're looking at this the wrong way. You shouldn't be looking at
nutrients. You should be looking at processing. According to the lore, he's like, I don't
really buy this. I don't know about this whole ultra-processing. I'm going to design a study
to disprove this concept." And then he like accidentally
ends up proving the concept.
I feel like what you're ramping up for is like what I was ramping up for when I was
like, Richard Simmons says he got a book deal by sitting next to someone on a plane. I don't
have concrete evidence to be like, no, that definitely didn't happen. But I'm going to
go out on a limb and be like, but really doesn't happen so the way that he does this is he gets a grant from the NIH to
basically take 20 people and like lock them in a room not really but like
Metaphorically and monitor their diets. And so what he does is he gives them for two weeks a unprocessed diet
So like completely whole foods and then for the next two weeks
unprocessed diet, so like completely whole foods, and then for the next two weeks he gives them a ultra-processed diet. And he switches this so like 10 people start with unprocessed and then go to
processed, 10 people start with processed and then go to unprocessed, so that way he's like flipping
them around. They're given this food and they have 60 minutes to eat as much of it as they want,
and then when they're done the researchers take it and they weigh it to see exactly, like gram by gram,
exactly how much of it did they eat so that way they can measure their intake.
And then of course, there's like a ton of tests at the beginning and at the end.
You and I have talked about sort of like there are a couple of ways to do
nutrition research, and one is like in a lab in a vacuum. Yes.
It gets you much more limited in scope kind of data,
or you can go sort of larger scale, more longitudinal,
but that's usually dependent on self you can go sort of larger scale, more longitudinal, but that's usually
dependent on self reports and people sort of like, uh, adhering based on the honor code.
Yes.
So much of what I've heard about processed foods is about long term health effects.
Aubrey, are you saying you can't measure the long term effect of lifestyle on health in
two weeks with 20 people?
I, Aubrey, I don't know.
Mike, I'm not a scientist. Have you co-hosted the show?
I don't know. I don't know, maybe. I don't know.
Let me just make you read the description of the results. This is from a New Yorker article by
Dhruv Kular. When participants were on the ultra-process diet, they ate 500 calories more per day and put on an average
of 2 pounds. They ate meals faster. Their bodies secreted more insulin. Their blood contained
more glucose. When participants were on the minimally processed diet, they lost about
2 pounds. Researchers observed a rise in levels of an appetite-suppressing hormone and a decline
in one that makes us feel
hungry. So this is very decisive. It's like people who ate ultra processed foods gained a bunch of
weight, they ate more, all of these markers got worse. The unprocessed people, they did great.
They lost weight. They felt awesome. This study, when it comes out, is like, it's wild how popular
the study was. The study has been cited 1200 times. Yeah, and I don't know, this feels sort of like the glycemic index all over again, which
is like a teeny tiny group of people have a specific response to a food or group of
foods, and that then somehow becomes conventional wisdom in really short order.
This study is so much worse than just the fact
that it was two weeks. So the whole kind of point of a study like this is to hold everything else
constant and only look at the effect of quote unquote processing. But then if you read the
fucking text of the study, that was not remotely true. The ultra processed diet had twice the
energy density of the unprocessed diet, it had twice
the saturated fat, and it had 1.5 times more sugar.
So these are not equivalent diets at the most basic level.
And this is like in the fucking study!
You're like one group had a green salad and the other one had like a value meal from Wendy's.
And the ones who had a value meal from Wendy's gained weight, would you believe it?
Aubrey, Aubrey, Aubrey.
Oh no, is it gonna be a fucking biggie sized frosty?
Is that what we're about to talk about?
The supplementary material of this study
includes the daily menu.
So for every day, it includes specifically what they ate
for breakfast, lunch and dinner with photos.
Gogurt.
I am about to send you.
Pudding packs.
We're gonna do day two dinner. Unprocessed menu, day, and dinner with photos. Go-Gurt. I am about to send you. Pudding packs. We're gonna do day two dinner.
Unprocessed menu, day two dinner.
Stir-fried beef tender roast with broccoli,
onions, sweet peppers, ginger, garlic, and olive oil,
basmati rice, orange slices, pecan halves,
and salt and pepper.
So it's like a nice dinner of like,
I guess essentially like a stir fry.
Yeah. Sauteed vegetables, sauteed beef.
It looks nice, right? Sure.
And then we have day two processed.
What? What are you talking about?
Just the visual.
Just the visual is so fucking funny.
It is two whole chicken salad sandwiches for dinner white bread dinner
Cup that appears to be an entire can of canned peaches in heavy syrup
Have you sir up you get two Keebler shortbread cookies and four fig Newtons and then you get five
crystal lights with fiber added.
Even in my darkest days of like 80s, 90s, low fat fucking dieting,
I did not get through five crystal lights in one day.
This is actually the reason why the energy density is so different between the two diets
is because I think in an effort to hold the fiber constant—there's no fiber in ultra-processed
foods, it's like one of the things that makes them ultra-processed foods—so the only way
to get participants fiber was to basically give them sodas every day with, like, fiber
supplements in them.
So these are diet lemonade, but oftentimes it's just, like, juice or like a little smoothie
or milkshake, something like that, but like like there are drinks with every meal for the ultra
processed people. There are no drinks for the unprocessed meal. Every once in a while
they get a milk or something, but like they're not getting like diet sodas or anything. So
that's a, that's a huge difference between the two diets.
If you were sitting down to make yourself a meal, the chances that you that like most people
would make two whole sandwiches and eat an entire can of peach it like right.
It just is it's not representative of like how people eat.
Well also the thing that really stuck out to me is that there are three desserts with this meal.
There are cookies, there are fig Newtons, and there's a can of peaches in syrup.
Almost every single meal of the ultra-processed comes with like cookies or shortbread or like
some sort of like pudding.
There are no desserts with any of the unprocessed meals.
The other like really striking thing about this is that they're not the same meal.
They're completely different.
If you want to do a one-to-one on your ultra processed, you get the, I don't know, Stouffer's
version of beef and broccoli.
Exactly.
And go, okay, let's go head to head with similar dishes.
This is the thing.
It's like what they're actually fucking doing.
They're calling this a test of like, are ultra processed foods worse for you?
But it's literally, it's like you give one group of people salads
It's like a lot of salads you give another group of people fucking cookies and they're like, oh my god
The people ate more cookies therefore ultra processed foods are bad for you, right? You gave them six cookies with every meal
Yeah
I actually think there's like a huge
Miss opportunity here because something people always talk about in this field is it like well pizza isn't
Necessarily bad for you right if it's if it's a frozen pizza from the grocery outlet then it's bad for you
But if it's like artisanal and there's like three ingredients in the dough and it's like lovingly made then it is good for you
Right, it doesn't have to be bad. Yeah, so why didn't you fucking test that hypothesis?
Can we look at their final meal? They're like the goodbye meal.
The farewell.
Um, is that it?
Sorry, I have so many files called supplementary material.
I have no doubt.
Oh, there it is.
Day seven, dinner.
It was only seven days?
I thought it was 14.
I think they must have repeated.
Oh, they repeated.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay.
The ultra processed menu for day seven dinner is.
It looks so, it looks so bad.
Also, look, there's fucking two desserts.
Is made for a child.
Yeah, it really is.
All of them are.
It is two PB&Js that are packed to the gills.
Yeah, they really are like overflowing.
Two cups of 2% milk with fiber added.
Woof.
Horrible.
And then you get a snack pack of chocolate pudding,
graham crackers, baked Cheetos.
That's the way you disappoint everyone.
They're the color of glow sticks at a rave.
They're the color of delicious.
I hate Cheetos, dude. They're the color of like glow sticks at a rave. They're the color of delicious.
I hate Cheetos, dude. Oh, my God. I love, dude, anything with powdered cheese.
Anything with powdered cheese. I love it so much.
There's there's these long sections of these articles where they're like,
people can't stop eating Doritos. And I'm like, really?
Day seven dinner, unprocessed menu.
What you're seeing is a pretty sizable bowl of pasta.
It looks like a salad with a side salad.
It does look like it.
This is my nightmare, Aubrey.
This is it.
This is where I flip over the table.
Also with a side salad of green leaf lettuce, baby carrots and broccoli.
Can't have too much salad, apparently.
God, it's raw broccoli too. Woof. Wow. I wonder why people ate 500 fewer calories. Wow.
We gave them the most boring food imaginable. They're not listing the giant bowl of grapes, you glutton. I guess that's the dessert. It seems visually like there's an implication here.
Like if you weren't having two cookies,
you would be eating a bowl of grapes.
And I'm like, I just don't think
that's how people think and eat.
But also if the title of the study was like,
people eat more cookies than grapes,
I'd be like, yeah.
I don't know that this says anything
about processed versus unprocessed foods.
These are different foods.
But listen, if you sort of scrape off this top layer
of like sort of window dressing kind of stuff around
like we're actually concerned
about long-term health conditions,
we're actually concerned about blah, blah, blah.
Most of those things are things like diabetes,
like heart disease and things that we associate
with fat people.
So I think part of what you're seeing here
is an assumption about how fat people eat
and how poor people eat.
Okay, so that was the experimental study.
That was the attempt to prove
that ultra-processed food is bad for you, like in a lab.
We then, of course, get a huge wave
of observational studies.
You can look up on Google Scholar,
there are dozens of studies that measure ultra-processed foods
versus non-ultra-processed foods,
and they all basically find the same thing.
It's higher rates of cancer,
higher rates of cardiovascular disease.
It's all the stuff that you would expect.
This is sort of the second way
that you can measure the effect of food on health,
is you take these big
studies of like hundreds of thousands of people, you give people food frequency questionnaires,
how often are you eating something?
Oftentimes they'll do this in two ways at the same time.
They'll be like, how often do you eat these foods in general?
And they'll also do a 24 hour recall.
Like, what did you do yesterday?
This is like kind of as good as it gets, although people are so bad at estimating what they're
eating. Especially
the amounts. If you go to a restaurant and you have Pad Thai, can you say how many ounces
you ate? There's that sort of layer of just gathering the basic information. But then
on top of that, researchers will then go in and they will code people's answers for ultra
processed food. They get these answers, this is what I
eat, I ate cake yesterday, cookies yesterday, whatever. And then researchers will go in
and go, aha, cake is ultra processed. So this person is yes, eating ultra processed food.
So there's two layers of errors with this. And the biggest thing with this is that they're
not fucking measuring whether people are eating ultra processed food. They're just having these food categories.
So again, fucking cake.
Cake can either be ultra processed or not ultra processed.
It depends on the fucking cake.
Well, and also again, like I wonder about like, how are they coding things like tofu?
Exactly.
We've seen now multiple ways that processed and ultra processed foods are categorized. And we've already sort of explored that like reasonable minds can differ, right?
That like two people could in good faith put the same thing in like any of the
four different categories or two of the four categories or whatever, right?
And they do some of the studies do actually attempt to control for that.
They'll have blinded like one researcher will do it and then another researcher will also do it like independently.
And they'll say like, okay, we have 95% agreement. They're attempting to control for this. But then
what the real problem is that it's not actually the coders. It's the actual designers of the
research. They all say like, oh, we use the NOVA classification system. But if you read studies,
different studies have like different classifications. So like we mentioned honey before shows up in all
different categories. I also noticed alcohol. Some studies just like remove it all together.
They're like, we're not looking at alcohol consumption. Some studies will put it as like
not ultra processed. Some studies will put it as ultra processed. I also found one that put wine
and beer as not ultra processed, but like vodka as ultra processed.
Mike, it's a potatoes, it's a carbs.
The same study also put it was bread was not ultra processed, but pretzels were ultra processed.
When you put it in a shape that's processing, Mike.
The other one that really bugs me is like hamburgers are always in the ultra processed category,
but like I look
this up a McDonald's hamburger is 100% beef. It's beef. It doesn't have a bunch of weird
ingredients in it. Do you think there may be counting on like buns and American cheese
and ketchup and all of that kind of stuff? Well, that's the thing is like, technically,
yeah, you could put it in there. But you again, it could be ultra processed or it could not
be like everything fucking
else, like the cookies and the cakes and the pizza, like pizza is always in ultra processed
as well. But like, it kind of matters for your whole thesis, whether it's like a frozen
pizza or like homemade artisanal whatever, quote unquote, nice pizza.
Has anyone hazarded a guess at what the mechanism is here?
Yeah, this is this is something that you find in the critical literature, is that they're like,
we're actually, as a research field, we're actually missing a crucial component and we're
kind of leapfrogging over this because we thought it was saturated fat, then we thought
it was sugar, now we think it's processing, but no one can agree on what the fuck processing
is.
There's also, Aubrey, I wrote down nine other problems with these studies.
I'm going to try to go through them
Very quickly. I know you were talking a big game about we're gonna record for two hours
I know I'll tell you what I'm looking at that ticker. We're at 1 hour 54
Well, we're getting we're on page 40 of 91
Another problem with these studies is they don't distinguish between different types of ultra processed food. Oftentimes. It's just this weird binary
is they don't distinguish between different types of ultra processed food. Oftentimes it's just this weird binary distinction between like ultra processed food and everything
else.
So all three of the first three categories are just like good and ultra processed is
bad.
But there's a couple of studies that actually look at different categories of ultra processed
food.
They're like, okay, breakfast cereal, candy bars, various other things.
In this study that looked at 10 categories of ultra processed foods, the only
ones that showed a clear and consistent association with worse disease was soda, processed meats,
and alcohol. All the other ones like cookies, refined bread, all this other stuff, it was like
too mixed to really say anything. But even within those, right? Like if we're talking about breakfast
cereals, my guess is that grape nuts is going to have a different health effect than like Lucky Charms.
All of this breaks down once you try to get granular.
Yeah, that's kind of what I'm thinking.
And like, okay, so you've got the entire category of sodas.
I think there are probably a lot of people out there drinking like Poppy and Oli Pop
and all of the like probiotic sodas thinking that that's a different thing.
So, and the final thing I want to mention is the lack of a dose response.
So, the way that they do these studies is they compare the people who eat the least
ultra processed foods to people who eat the most ultra processed foods.
And it's like a really wide gap.
Like some people are eating like 60% ultra processed foods and some people are eating
like 7%.
When you compare the least versus the most,
you do get these pretty large effects.
However, there's some studies actually list the effect
for each of the quintiles in between,
and there's something weird that the death risk
actually goes down sometimes
if you eat more ultra-processed foods.
Okay, you heard it here first, team.
A real effect should have a dose response. A little bit of ultra-processed foods is Okay, you heard it here first, team. A real effect should have a dose response.
Like a little bit of ultra-processed foods is a little bad for you.
A lot is a lot bad for you.
But we don't find that in the results.
One of the papers found a 50% higher cancer risk if you're eating a ton of ultra-processed
foods.
But then once they adjusted it for the dose response, they only found a 5% difference.
Some people, if you eat a little bit of ultra-processed foods, you're actually less likely to get cancer.
That's something that never comes up.
I mean, I don't think this is causal, right?
And also it's based on these fucking food frequency questionnaires, so who knows?
But it's like, to the extent that we can give diet advice, which we all know everybody's
going to give diet advice on the basis of these fucking correlational studies, to the
extent we can give diet advice, it's like, well, yeah, if you're if you're not eating any ultra processed foods,
you should start eating some because those people actually have a lower
risk of dying.
Well, this is sort of like the like for seniors, it can be more beneficial
on a number of health fronts to be in the overweight category
versus the quote unquote healthy weight category. Right.
But you're not seeing that as like health guidance for folks. Right.
Because like this this we already have
some sort of cultural conclusions drawn. Right. Ultra processed foods or Cheetos
and candy bars and those are bad for you and you shouldn't eat them. This is maybe
more damning than I mean it to be but like it feels like it's sort of
masquerading as science. This is what I mean with this like is this a scientific
term or is this just like a thing people say?
Yeah, because I don't really mind if people say processed food
But if we're gonna have a scientific term
We should have clear consistency about what is in that category and what is not in that category. You don't read
Biology papers that like can't agree on what a mammal is. Yeah, like yes, there's some edge cases like there's platypuses
But also like in general,
that's like a pretty fixed category. For this, it's like, sorry, we can't decide where bread
goes.
I would argue that honey is processed by bees. It's flowers processed by bees.
If it's animal processed, then it's fine. I mean, I guess milk is processed by cows.
Maybe we're onto something, Aubrey. Let's publish. So this brings
us to the massive mainstreaming of this term in 2023 when a guy named Chris VanTuliken comes out
with a book called Ultra-Processed People. Why do we all eat stuff that isn't food and why can't we
stop? As soon as it came out we got so many episode requests for it. So many episode requests. So Chris Vantelecan is a professor at my alma mater, UCL.
Do you know what UCL stands for?
University College of London.
It's the worst name of a university
in the whole fucking world.
University College?
Guys.
That's really funny.
Yesterday I had lunch at Food Restaurant.
Listen, I went to a school called Portland State.
Oh, Portland's not a state? Do they Portland's not a state do they know that?
correct correct I know oh no also you went to Brown why are you pretending you went to a different school?
I went to two years of Portland State and two years of Brown no I do know this I just like reminding
listeners that you went to Brown because you hate him
any excuse now you're gonna leave all this shit in too because you hate him. You're doing the fucking shit. Any excuse.
Now you're gonna leave all this shit in too.
The brown?
Ugh.
So the thing is, we're not gonna go super duper
into this book, mostly because like,
I already have a podcast that does that.
I'm like, I can't just like do fucking book all the time.
The book, honestly, I've read worse
from like British TV presenters.
As I was going, I would double
check things and most factually, it mostly checks out. You don't catch him saying anything
completely false. But I think the core problem of the book is that this concept of ultra-processed
food just does not hold up to 300 pages of discourse. I think throughout the book, you keep getting this sense that
the ultra-processed concept is not really helping us understand anything. So he has
a whole section about climate change, that the way that we're eating is really bad for
the climate, which is absolutely true. And then he says, well, ultra-processed foods
are driving climate impacts. And I was like, are they though? I went to the various NGOs that have
rankings of foods that are the worst for the climate. And so the top 10 foods that have
the worst climate impacts are beef, lamb, cheese, cow's milk, kind of like dairy products
generally, chocolate, coffee, shrimp, palm oil, pork, and chicken.
Aw, shrimp!
And Chris Ventilican admits this. He's like, well, you know, these aren't necessarily ultra-processed foods,
but they're part of like this ultra-processed food system, and he sort of tries to like make that work,
but it's like if you if you want to reduce your climate impacts, you wouldn't stop eating ultra-processed food,
you would stop eating meat. Like meat is like
catastrophically bad for the climate, cows anything involving cows is really bad well
And you could argue just as much if you're saying like beef is part of the problem
Imported beef is also a big part of the like fine dining landscape
This is the thing is he's constantly straddling
Ultra processed and unprocessed because you can eat a steak which is unprocessed, but that's terrible for the planet.
Even worse if it's like wagyu from Japan being shipped to the US.
Yeah, like flown in, frozen.
It's just like I don't, like over and over again in the book,
you're like, this is interesting as like a critique of the food system,
but processing isn't like a very good entry point to this.
He also has a whole section about how ultra-processed food is addictive. So I'm going to send this to you.
Nicole Avena is an associate professor at Mount Sinai in New York and a visiting professor
at Princeton. Her research focuses on food addiction and obesity. She told me how ultra-processed
foods, especially products with particular combinations of salt,
fat, sugar, and protein, can drive our ancient, evolved systems for wanting.
Some ultra-processed foods may activate the brain reward system in a way that is similar
to what happens when people use drugs like alcohol or even nicotine or morphine. The neuroscience is persuasive,
if still in its early stages. There is a growing body of brain scan data showing that energy dense,
hyper palatable food, ultra processed, but probably also something a really good chef
might be able to make, can stimulate changes in many of the same brain circuits and structures affected by addictive drugs.
Is this just pleasure?
Yeah, this is...
Are you just experiencing pleasure?
I read a really good paper on this called Food Addiction, a Valid Concept.
Where like it was basically a debate like here's the case for food addiction as a real thing
and here's the case against food addiction as a real thing.
And like again, there's a colloquial definition of food addiction
where people say, I'm addicted to chocolate.
The authors are actually very compassionate about this
and are like, if that helps you, that makes sense.
The way that people talk about it colloquially is fine.
However, as a scientific concept,
the term addiction means something specific
in brain science.
And we don't actually have good data on that for food.
I think that there are pitfalls to the ways that people talk about it
colloquially, because there is a point at which it stops being
your own internal lens and starts being a lens that you apply to other people.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
It also turns into like scrutinizing other people's eating and eating habits
through the lens that works for you, right?
I don't think that it's totally unproblematic how people talk about it colloquially, but
agreed that the research should have a higher threshold than that.
Yeah, exactly.
And a lot of it basically is based on these functional MRI studies where they show you
pictures of food or you eat food and you can see different parts of your brain light up
as you do that.
And so we always get these studies that it's like,
it lights up the same part of your brain as cocaine.
But yeah, that's just the I'm happy part of your brain.
This is the same part of your brain that lights up
when you see your best friend.
We talked about this with the idea of quote unquote
sugar addiction or sugar episode, right?
That like, yeah dude, you get that when you eat
like a chocolate bar, but you also get it
when you pet your dog.
It's also very different person to person,
like which part of your brain lights up.
It's not as easy to say it's like,
oh, the cocaine part, like you're touching
the cocaine part of your brain.
It's just like, that's like the happy part
and it's very different for people.
It's not really, it's not like a mature enough science
to say that this exists.
And then the other kind of category of evidence for food addiction is rat studies.
Oh, your favorite.
You can't really do rat studies on ultra processed foods because rat, like they feed rats like little
pellets of like specific formulations, right? Of like it's 40% carbohydrates and 20% protein. So
like that's basically as processed as it comes. You're making like a slurry and then drying it into pellets and feeding it to rats. So
all rat food is like equally processed, like as processed as it can possibly be. There
is something, there are studies where they feed, this is literally what it's called,
they feed rats sweet fat chow, which is like a specific kind of chow, and then they measure like what they do. I'm like, there's some evidence. But also most of the rat study work is on sugar
addiction. And sugar addiction, as we talked about, is like very disputed in the literature.
And it's just like not clear that it exists.
Hang on, I gotta go on Etsy and find a like a potter to make me a cookie jar with a label
that just says sweet fat.
I know I love sweet fat.
I had a very basic level.
It's sort of indicative this sort of stuff, but it's it's very we're
we're very far from like kind of proving that food is addictive.
And we're also very far from proving that ultra processed food is specifically
addictive. It is sort of feels like a frustrating thing when we do cover concepts like these that like
the assumption from jump is that this has to be a biological reality and that culture plays little
or no role in how all of this stuff you know sort of gets metabolized by people.
It also brings us back to the definitional problem because there's actually a study by
Nicole Avena, this researcher that he's quoting here, where it's just like a qualitative survey.
They just asked people like, what food are you most quote unquote addicted to? Like what
are the foods that you feel out of control around? And the number one answer-
Beans. My bean shelf. I'm clawing at my bean shelf all the time.
That's only you, Aubrey.
And if you want to talk about it like that, that's fine.
But scientifically, the bean shelf is not in the rock studies.
Listen, get back at me when you see me at 2 a.m. in the kitchen just chomping down on
dried beans. But the top five foods that people feel addicted to are chocolate, ice cream, french fries,
pizza and cookies.
Most of these are not ultra processed.
Another thing that really bugs me about this ultra processed food research is that it always
includes fucking chocolate and like any, you pick up any, almost any, like milk chocolate, basic milk chocolate bar at
the store, and it has like five ingredients. Like I looked at Giordelli, it's unsweetened
chocolate, cane sugar, cocoa butter, vanilla extract, and soy lecithin. And the only sort
of Franken food ingredient in there is soy lecithin.
Like are there health effects of soy lecithin?
Well exactly. Then it's sort of like, we're back to this issue of like, what's the mechanism
here? Because are we saying soy lecithin is addictive in food or harmful? Because soy
lecithin is in a shitload of foods. It's in like salad dressings, bread, etc. Those
foods aren't addictive the way that chocolate is, right? People don't have the same relationship
with those foods that they have with chocolate. So it's like, sorry, what is this theory?
Is it that soy lecithin is bad?
Or is it that like, well chocolate is an ultra processed food because it's high in sugar
and high in fat.
If it's ultra processed because it's high in sugar and high in fat, then ultra processed
isn't doing anything for us.
Right, I mean like, if you're gonna take aim at like stabilizers and emulsifiers, uh oh
green juice. Because if you don't put something in the green juice,
it separates and then you end up with like yellow liquid
and green silt in a bottle on the shelf
and nobody's buying that shit, right?
Another emulsifier is when you put a little bit of mustard
in your vinaigrette.
You can sort of give all of these things
more sort of nefarious sounding names or whatever more complicated names
but like that doesn't actually
Establish the case make the case that they are harmful to your health. I feel like there's there's this
systematic lack of precision because I'm actually open to the idea that like there's stuff in food that is harming us
I don't love the fact that there's like weird fucking hormones in the beef
and shit. I don't love the artificialness of our food supply. However, I would much rather that
conversation be led by actual scientists who know the dosages that are shown to be harmful and the
ways in which it is harmful. We need actual evidence for these things. We can't just say
there's chemicals in the food because baking soda is a white powder that you add to bread.
It's in everything. Is that bad for us?
Well, and again, we're throwing all of this stuff in the same bucket, right?
And if you sort of chase down each one of these ingredients individually,
some of them may have some mixed scientific evidence.
Some of it may have none. Right.
We're just shunting so many things into this sort of giant
bucket labeled ultra-processed foods.
Yeah, I think, I mean, this also sort of brings us back to his own problems with defining the term.
Because throughout the book, the definition of this term changes a bunch of times. He starts out by
saying that an ultra-processed food is any food with any ingredient that like you wouldn't find in a standard home kitchen
Well, it doesn't matter the amount of that ingredient
It doesn't matter sort of like some of these ingredients
There's like things you haven't heard of cuz like you're not a chemist
Well, and also some of them are like the chemical names for shit
You already know the gimmick of the book is he's doing a supersize me thing where he's like for 30 days
I'm gonna only eat ultra processed food
And of course he like gains a bunch of weight and he feels worse.
And he says his like MRI is different, whatever.
Well, yeah, he's eating two PB&Js and a half a pack of graham crackers for every meal.
Again, it's just very hard to separate this from like the actual contents of the food.
But so he has this section.
As my diet went on, I became obsessed with what is and isn't ultra-processed food.
So did everyone around me.
Friends started sending me ingredients lists.
Does fruit concentrate mean this is ultra-processed food?
Yes it does, by the way.
To reiterate, that means one ingredient.
If it has one ingredient, it's ultra-processed.
And also like, fruit concentrate is just like boil down fruit
Yeah, you could also get fruit juice and boil it down yourself and make that barbecue sauce or what?
like I just like
I met B Wilson at a food festival at which we spoke on a panel together
She's a food journalist and author who has written about ultra processed food
She asked whether I would classify baked beans as ultra-processed food.
She didn't think that they were.
Canned baked beans, comprising white beans in tomato sauce, are a staple in the British
diet.
As Wilson put it, although they're obviously not the healthiest food in the world, quote,
"...in the context of so much else that's in the average diet, there's quite a lot
of real food in the can of so much else that's in the average diet, there's quite a lot of real food
in the can. This is true. Most of a tin of baked beans is actually beans and tomatoes.
So these are these are back to back paragraphs, by the way, it's like if it has fruit concentrate
in it, one ingredient means it's ultra processed. But then as soon as we get to baked beans, he's
like, well, a lot of people like them. And, most of it's, you know, beans and water
Sorry, is this a scientific concept or not? Hang on. I'm looking it up, dude
Michael
Would you like to know the ingredients to Heinz baked beans? Oh, I have it. That's like the next thing in my notes
Water white beans tomato tomato puree, sugar, salt, calcium
chloride, mustard, onion powder, paprika extract, spices, and garlic powder. Now, sir. They're
fucking ultra processed by your own definition. You can't just say, oh, well, they're like
a big part of like the British diet and it's important culturally, and it's mostly beans.
Sorry, what are we doing here?
If it's this qualitative, where just anything
can sort of jump from this category to the other category,
then this is not a useful category for scientific research.
Well, and if you're talking about like ingredients
that you don't have in your kitchen, calcium chloride.
If you're right, like tomato puree,
like I don't know guys, I don't know know what is tomato paste if not a fruit concentrate this is like really
this is not the end of the book but this is like to me the culmination of like my
engagement with the book because I got so annoyed at this section so he's
trying to eat a healthy diet while also doing ultra processed food so he's like
okay I can't just like cheat and like eat fucking cookies all the time so like I
need to look for some ultra-processed food
that isn't so bad.
He goes to Sainsbury's,
which is the relatively high-end grocery store in the UK.
He gets a frozen lasagna.
But the problem with the frozen lasagna
is that it's all normal ingredients.
It's just wheat, pasta sauce.
It doesn't count as ultra-processed in his own definition.
But then he looks, he goes to Aldi,
which is like the much cheaper grocery store.
And that one has a bunch of like additives
and emulsifiers and stuff.
And he's like, okay.
So then he calls a member of Carlos Monteiro's team
to kind of ask about this.
Like, well, is lasagna then kind of ultra processed
and not ultra processed at the same time?
So here's sort of the answer.
Some products are not technically ultra-processed food, she explained, but they use the same
plastics, the same marketing and development processes, and they're made by the same companies
as ultra-processed food. The additives are part of the definition, but they are not the only problem
with the food. Some additives are harmless,
whereas others cause direct harms. But in either case, their presence indicates that a product
probably has lots of other properties that may cause harmful effects. According to Lusada,
the Sainsbury's lasagna is not ultra-processed food if you apply the technical classification,
quote, but these foods are like a fantasy.
They are not homemade foods.
There is a very consistent snobbishness throughout this book. And I think this whole concept,
you're basically looking at frozen lasagnas, which meet all of the criteria you say that
you want, right? These are whole foods. They don't have too many ingredients. They don't
have a bunch of chemicals in them. And you're like, oh, but they're
still older process because like they're not homemade. People should be making it at
home. Again, is this a scientific concept or not? Because like, do we all want people
that more time to make stuff at home? Yes, fine, whatever. But it's like, now we're
just judging people for like, microwaving a dinner.
Also just like, you really could say, hey, some frozen foods are actually not ultra processed.
Yeah.
You could actually add some nuance.
And this appears to be leaning away from that nuance.
Right.
I'm going, no, no, no.
It's frozen.
It's still bad.
You didn't make it.
It's still bad.
Also, like I have made plenty of bad food.
Yes.
My housemate and I, when I was in my 20s,
decided that we were going to make cheese
sticks at home and instead of using bread crumbs, we used Flamin' Hot Cheetos. That
is a homemade meal, I would argue. It's maybe not nutritionally our strongest effort, but
also, again, not nutritionally devoid of value, right?
Yeah.
Mozzarella cheese has a bunch of fat and protein in it
that are like generally pretty good for you.
Like, you know what I mean?
Like, there's like a bunch of stuff.
Well, I think the only thing I like ever like bake at home
because I'm really bad at baking is banana bread.
It's like any dumbass can make banana bread.
Banana bread is extremely bad for you.
It's really good.
But it's a fucking cake.
It's not like.
At one point in the book, he actually says, well, if something is made with love, then
it doesn't count as an older processed food.
I'm just like, dude, please have a fucking definition and stick with the definition,
man.
Yeah, I think increasingly as we talk about this, the more I'm sort of in your camp of
like, oh, well then just say junk food, because that is honest.
Yeah, just say fucking junk food.
It's not my favorite term, but it is more honest than being like, Oh, well, then just say junk food, because that is fucking junk food. Yeah, it's not my favorite term, but it is more honest than being like,
actually, there are these like extremely concrete health effects
that are like widespread for like every preservative that is ever used in foods
or every ingredient that you can't pronounce.
What a deeply weird bar. Yeah, I can't pronounce shit.
People know it's like all of our inboxes me not being able to pronounce
Let's hope there's not a denouement in your food. York is technically ultra processed food
I
Know no conclusion Aubrey cuz all I had was the junk food thing where you talked about the junk food thing
Sorry, sorry. No, I have no clothing. Can I tell you a conclusion? Oh, yeah, what is yours?
You were talking about Pringles earlier and I remembered that there was a specific name for the shape of Pringles.
Saddle? Saddlebags? No, Michael. It's the universe. It's called a hyperbolic
paraboloid. Wait, what? It's mathematically known as a hyperbolic
paraboloid. Put that on the fucking label, nobody will ever buy them again. Like I will give you a food that is that uniform in color, flavor, texture, and shape.
I'm like I won't fight you on that being ultra processed.
Yeah I mean this is the thing is I feel the need to reiterate that like both of us are
like relatively careful about how we eat and like I really do go out of my way to like
try to eat healthy and part of that is like avoiding like, I don't know,
foods that should go bad, but don't go bad.
That's like one of my like little food rules.
I'm like, if it should be perishable
and it's not perishable, I probably don't wanna eat it.
I don't know how like scientific that is.
I think if people have food rules like this
and they're kind of arbitrary or like kind of weird,
like fine, I don't really police other people. Obviously, diet related diseases like is real
and is like something that we need to address. But also, we need to have scientific concepts
if we're going to have like scientific approaches to issues.
We're still so deeply in the process of discovery about this stuff. Yeah, totally. Yeah. But
the stuff that takes off is the stuff that comports with our cultural ideas of what is and isn't healthy, which are not the result of science. Right. I just wish that we were able to have a cultural conversation about the cultural stuff and a science conversation about the science stuff. Yeah, I think it's just worth being honest with ourselves. Yeah, that most of our sort our sort of like hardened fast thinking about what is and is not
okay to eat comes much more from like a set of assumptions and sort of a
mismatch of like life influences.
And also if it's working for you, then keep doing it.
And I'm not going to tell you not to.
We're not going to tell you what to eat or what not to eat.
I am here to tell you not to eat hyperbolic paraboloids.
I'm here to tell you to eat them to eat hyperbolic paraboloids. I'm here to tell you to eat them.
Only hyperbolic paraboloids.
Get the pizza flavored ones. Thanks for watching!