25 Sep 2024 Speaking up for ‘ultra-processed’ foods

Here’s some food for thought from Jessica Wilson, a California-based registered dietitian fight back against the mounting war on ultra-processed foods (UPFs).…

It all started in mid 2023, when author and infectious-disease physician Dr Chris van Tulleken was promoting his book, Ultra-Processed People. While writing it, van Tulleken spent a month eating mostly foods like chips, soda, bagged bread, frozen food, and cereal.

“What happened to me is exactly what the research says would happen to everyone,” van Tulleken says: he felt worse, he gained weight, his hormone levels went crazy, and before-and-after MRI scans showed signs of changes in his brain.

As van Tulleken saw it, the experiment highlighted the “terrible emergency” of society’s love affair with UPFs.

Wilson, who specialises in working with clients from marginalised groups, was irked. She felt that van Tulleken’s experiment was over-sensationalised and that the news coverage of it shamed people who regularly eat processed foods — in other words, the vast majority of Americans, particularly the millions who are food insecure or have limited access to fresh food; they also tend to be lower income and people of colour.

Wilson felt the buzz ignored this “food apartheid,” as well as the massive diversity of foods that can be considered ultra-processed: a category that includes everything from vegan meat replacements and non-dairy milks to potato chips and candy.

“How can this entire category of foods be something we’re supposed to avoid?” Wilson wondered.

So she did her own experiment. Like van Tulleken, Wilson for a month got 80% of her daily calories from highly processed foods, not much more than the average American.

She swapped her morning eggs for soy chorizo and replaced her thrown-together lunches — sometimes as simple as beans with avocado and hot sauce — with Trader Joe’s ready-to-eat tamales.

She snacked on cashew-milk yogurt with jam. For dinner she’d have one of her beloved Costco pupusas, or maybe chicken sausage with veggies and Tater-Tots. She wasn’t subsisting on Fritos, but these were also decidedly not whole foods.

A weird thing happened. Wilson found that she had more energy and less anxiety. She didn’t need as much coffee to get through the day and felt more motivated. She felt better eating an ultra-processed diet than she had before, a change she attributes to taking in more calories by eating full meals, instead of haphazard combinations of whole-food ingredients.

How could two people eating the same type of foods have such different experiences?

Could it be true that not all UPFs deserve their bad reputation?

These hotly debated questions come at a crucial moment. In 2025, the US government will release an updated version of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, which tell people what they should eat and policymakers how to shape things like school lunches and SNAP education programs.

The new edition may include, for the first time, guidance on UPFs. Officials at the FDA are also reportedly weighing new regulatory approaches for these products.

The food industry, predictably, maintains that UPFs have been unfairly demonised and can be part of a healthy diet. Likely sensing a threat to their bottom line, large food companies have reportedly already started lobbying against recommendations around processed-food consumption.

What’s more surprising is that even one dietitian would take their side, defending a group of foods that, according to 2024 research, has been linked to dozens of poor health outcomes ranging from depression and diabetes to cancer, cardiovascular disease, and cognitive impairment.

Wilson has endured plenty of criticism for her position, which is not popular among the nutrition-science establishment. But she stands by it. Sweeping recommendations to avoid all UPFs stand to confuse people and make them feel bad about their diets, Wilson says — with questionable upside for their health.

What is a processed food, anyway? It’s a rather new concept. Foods are mainly judged by how many vitamins, minerals, and macronutrients (think fat, protein, and carbs) they contain, as well as their sugar, salt, and saturated-fat contents. There’s no level of processing on a food label.

Scientists don’t agree on exactly how to define processed foods. If you give two experts the same ingredient list, “they will have different opinions about whether something is processed or not,” says Giulia Menichetti, a faculty member at Harvard Medical School who researches food chemistry.

Take milk. Some experts consider it a processed food because it goes through pasteurisation to kill pathogens. Others don’t think it belongs in that category because plain milk typically contains few additives beyond vitamins.

The most widely used food-classification system, known as NOVA, uses the latter interpretation. It defines an unprocessed food as one that comes directly from a plant or animal, like a fresh-picked apple. A minimally processed food may have undergone a procedure like cleaning, freezing, or drying, but hasn’t been much altered from its original form. Examples include eggs, whole grains, some frozen produce, and milk…

For the full article, click here: Time.com