In this article, we discuss the rise and dominance of ultra processed food.
Have you been struggling for years with weight loss? Do you have a family history of type-2 diabetes, obesity and heart disease? Are you suffering from these diseases yourself? Separately, do you ever wonder where the food in your shopping basket comes from? How it’s made? If it’s healthy or if it contains harmful substances?
Today, we discuss a key culprit causing a global health crisis. If you are reading this article, you’re almost certainly one of its many victims – whether you know it or not.
What is Ultra Processed Food?
Ultra processed food is food that has been substantially altered from its natural state. If you look at a food and you’re unsure what it’s made of, chances are it’s ultra processed. This is especially the case when you look at the ingredients list and don’t recognise most of what you see. Or, at least, you don’t use most of the ingredients in your home cooking.
Often, ultra processed foods contain a host of preservatives, chemicals and/or artificial colourings. More generally, they contain highly manipulated industrial ingredients. For convenience, we will use “processed food”, “ultra processed food” and “UPF” interchangeably in this article.
Rise & Dominance of Ultra Processed Foods
If you don’t think that you consume ultra processed food, or that you consume it minimally, think again. A non-comprehensive list of ultra processed foods includes:
- Industrialised bread;
- Packaged meals;
- Breakfast cereals;
- Sausages/hot dogs;
- Chicken nuggets;
- Candy; and
- Packaged soups.
The dominance of ultra processed food in today’s diets is unquestionable. For example, one BMJ study has shown that nearly 57.9% of calories in the US come from UPF. In the UK, it’s 56% of daily calories. While the studies are somewhat out-dated, things seem to have only gotten worse.
Ultra Processed Foods Modes of Production: A Mystery
How much do you know about the way these processed foods are made? If the answer is very little, you’re not alone. These foods’ modes of production are almost a complete mystery.
What do you think the “kitchen” that “cooks” processed foods looks like?
For most of us, we might visualise a much bigger version of a normal kitchen. In reality, places producing ultra processed foods are industrial plants. In most instances, they don’t have a single piece of machinery that you’d recognise in a home kitchen. If you drive past them, it’s easy for them to go unnoticed as vast, quasi-deserted buildings.
Interestingly, one thing that stands out is that they generally have no windows. Why are there no windows? Could it be about guarding recipes and preserving commercial confidentiality? That’s what we’re told.
In reality, one sensible explanation is that Big Food doesn’t want you to see what’s going on in there. Because if you do, you might never grab that ready meal again. The less you know about the processed food you ingest, the smoother it is for everyone. The smoother it is, the more money Big Food makes.
Playing Devil’s Advocate?
Executives of Big Food would argue that there are a number of distinct advantages to processed foods. For example, ready meals and ultra processed foods more generally “broke the housewife’s shackles from the kitchen”. From an economic perspective, the message is that households are now spending much less of their income on food – and the rise of processed food takes the credit. At the moment, the US spends less on food than any other country, with the UK holding third place.
While these benefits are technically correct, the question is – at what price? Homo Sapiens is overfed but malnourished. The obesity crisis is through the roof. Type 2 diabetes is at record highs, and so is heart disease.
Just because you can grab a jumbo soft drink with a bag of crackers for 99p doesn’t mean that you should. It’s not cheap if you’re paying for it with your health.
Below, we move from the general to the specific. We discuss two key components of processed foods and their links to sub-optimal health.
Ultra Processed Food’s Ultimate Weapon: Sugar
Sugar is, arguably, Big Food’s ultimate (secret) weapon. Despite Big Food’s best efforts and its countless PR campaigns, there is mounting evidence that sugar is an addictive substance. In some instances, studies have shown that sugar could potentially be as addictive as cocaine.
Sugar is EVERYWHERE
This might be part of the reason why sugar is in almost everything we eat today. No, I am not just talking about obvious items like desserts. Sugar is in your pasta sauce and dips. Ketchup and mayonnaise. Salad dressings. It’s in those “healthy” cereals you pay a premium for.
Crucially, sugar is in most ‘low fat’ products you buy. The vilification of fat for the last 50 years – and Big Food’s successful substitution of fat with added sugar – is one of the greatest, unforgivable health tragedies. This is however a topic for another day.
For now, the key point is this: if you pick any ultra processed food, regardless of its category, chances are it’ll have added sugar. This would include savoury ultra processed food items.
Sugar: a Slow Poison?
Most of us know that sugar is harmful. However, with credit to Big Food’s formidable PR machine and countless (counter)scientific investments over the decades, most of us don’t know the extent of sugar’s detrimental effects. Increasingly, mounting evidence has been linking sugar to (inter alia) obesity , type-2 diabetes and heart disease. Separately, studies have also shown an association between sugar and worse cognitive and mental health.
Beyond “Calories in Calories Out”
Contrary to popular belief, sugar is not harmful only because it’s “empty calories”. Big Food and people who don’t know any better have told us, for decades, that all calories are created equal. They have told us that as long as we are hitting our caloric goal (bearing in mind the sacrosanct “calories in calories out” model), sugar has a place in our diets. We could enjoy soft drinks, indulgent desserts and anything else that Big Food has to offer “in moderation”. Regardless of the intention(s) behind perpetuating this narrative, this narrative is uncontrovertibly and irredeemably wrong.
It is of course true that “a calorie is a calorie” if we are strictly discussing a calorie as a unit of energy. However, not all calories are created equal with respect to their effects on our health. One calorie of sugar is, in a fundamental meaningful sense, not the same as one calorie of broccoli. Why? Because sugar and broccoli have different nutritional profiles. The body metabolises them differently. In particular, they have distinct hormonal responses.
Sugar & The Hormonal Response
A key effect of consuming sugar is the substantial spike in your insulin levels – especially if it is refined sugar as is the case with processed food. Consuming broccoli for example or a whole host of non-starchy foods wouldn’t have such a pronounced insulin response.
In light of sugar’s pervasive presence in our diets, it is not uncommon for our insulin levels to be continuously elevated. With time, as we continue flooding our bodies with insulin, our bodies become insulin resistant. This has substantial links to a whole host of diseases – key ones being obesity and type-2 diabetes.
The role of insulin, as well as the science of weight loss and the calories oriented model more generally, are intensely debated. To do these topics justice, we will be publishing a comprehensive article sharing our views on this. Stay tuned.
A More Nuanced Take on Nutrition
For the time being, the bottom line is this. While calories certainly do matter (you can’t expect not to gain weight if you are consuming more than your body needs), focusing on calories is too simplistic. Leading a healthy lifestyle requires a more holistic approach to our health. At a minimum, we should be considering any food’s nutritional profile and our body’s physiological and hormonal responses to it.
So, Where Did We Land on Sugar?
By this more sophisticated reading, and in light of the ever denser scientific body of evidence, one thing is increasingly clear: sugar is a clandestine, slow-acting poison. While this might sound hyperbolic, the scientific data supports the claim. You and your family would do substantially better if you significantly reduce it or eliminate it altogether.
Ultra Processed Food & Chemicals: An Inseparable Pair
Not too long ago, if you’d look at the ingredients list of processed foods, you’d have no idea what you’re reading. The label would have a long list of of absurdly long chemicals. We were, in many instances, unknowingly ingesting these. Even worse, these chemicals of dubious health effects were a substantial component of our children’s and loved ones’ diets.
The “E” Label – & What It Stands For
In the European Union and the UK, ingredients starting with E would signal additives. With time, the E label became synonymous with nutritionally poor, industrialised processed food.
For example, if you’d look at a host of cured meats, yogurts and desserts, you might see carrageenan (E407). Carrageenan’s functions are diverse and Big Food often uses it to thicken, emulsify and preserve foods and drinks. Interestingly, while this is not fully settled, a number of studies suggest that carrageenan is linked to colon and gastrointestinal cancer.
Chemicals of dubious health effects are, tragically, the rule rather than the exception. In many instances, Big Food uses chemicals with little to no understanding of their long-term effects on human health. Big Food then unleashes its formidable PR machine to muddy the waters and discredit critics – all while protecting their profit margins.
Big Food’s Push for “Clean Labelling”
As consumers became more aware of Big Food’s travesties, and as the absurdly long lists of chemicals started raising eyebrows, Big Food embarked on a ‘clean label’ campaign. Instead of genuinely cleaning up the ingredients, Big Food has been trying to replace flagrantly obvious chemical names with nicer sounding ones.
For example, instead of seeing carrageenan (E407), you might now see “functional flour” or “starch”. What the heck are these exactly? They sure sound more appealing than chemical names which are sometimes too long to pronounce. They certainly raise less consumer alarms. However, do we know what exactly they’re made of, how they’re made, and more importantly what their long (or even medium) term effects on human health are? What about “tapioca starch” and why is it in my cured meats? If you pick any ultra processed food, chances are you’ll be asking the same questions with respect to different “clean label” ingredients.
With a key focus on maintaining profits, Big Food still needs to find alternative products that are a fraction of the price of their natural equivalents. This has been the case with the nasty sounding chemicals – this remains the case now with the mostly disingenuous push for “clean labelling”.
What About “Processing Aids”?
The list of ingredients aside, did you know that “processing aids” don’t even have to be listed on the label? Think about all the chemical “processing aids” that are integral to Big Food’s manufacturing process. Big Food is slipping an abundance of potentially hazardous substances through the back door with hardly anyone ever noticing – & it’s time we raise the alarm about this.
So, What Can You Do About It?
In this article, we have discussed how Big Food mostly feeds us hazardous garbage. Slow poison that gradually chips away at our health. We have seen how sugar, a key component of ultra processed foods, is in almost everything we consume. Ultra processed foods more generally dominate the supermarket aisles.
So what do we do? Do we turn into self-sufficient hermits who grow their own food in the (probably non-existent) backyard? For most people, this is not an option. We rely on Big Food for our essentials. Ultimately, if we can’t be self-sufficient, we have to be pragmatic. Below are couple of suggestions.
Giving Sugar the Middle Finger – Once & For All
We can, and we should, minimise and if possible cut out all sugars from our diets. This is much more difficult than it sounds.
In addition to cutting out the obvious culprits – such as indulgent desserts and sweetened cereals – we need to eliminate clandestine sugars. These are sugars that Big Food slips into foods generally perceived as sugar free (e.g. cured meats, tomato sauce and savoury salad marinades). As sugar is arguably addictive, trying to quit is likely to leave you with serious cravings.
Furthermore, over the decades, Big Food’s PR machine has made sugar an integral part of our culture. Do you want to sooth a child? Give them a sweet treat. Want to celebrate an accomplishment or a birthday? Indulgent cake it is. Leaving behind such an important part of our lives is both psychologically and physiologically challenging. Be prepared to fight.
Home Cooking: A Powerful, Underestimated Tool
Once you have eliminated sugar, a key thing to focus on is home cooking with minimally processed ingredients.
Your first thought might be: who has time for that? Especially if you have been accustomed to the convenience of ready meals and other UPF garbage. While finding the time might be a challenge, it is one you can overcome. The key here is meal planning. Instead of cooking every day (and in some instances multiple times per day), you could meal prep couple of times a week.
If you insist on eating your food “fresh” (not that any ultra processed food is anywhere close to being “fresh”), there are easy healthy meals that you could prep for under 30 minutes. Whatever you choose to do, you could find a way to make it work. The stakes are too high not to. In this day and age, cooking has become a powerful statement. It’s not just about feeding yourself and your family. It’s about giving Big Food and its astounding power the middle finger. Most importantly, it’s about taking ownership of your own health and longevity.
Beyond Good Intentions
Having good intentions is not an enough. Neither does having a vague plan of action. Ultimately, meaningful change is about developing the right systems and routines in your life. To do this, check out our articles on how to build good habits and break bad ones.
Bottom Line
As George Orwell put it in 1937: “We might find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine gun.” Despite Big Food’s tremendous efforts to (i) muddy the waters, (ii) push back against scientific findings and (iii) discredit critics, it’s increasingly clear that George Orwell’s words were prophetic.
With an unhinged and ever worsening global health crisis, it is high time we take a closer look at what’s in our shopping baskets. What it’s made of. Where it came from. And, whether on the balance of probabilities, it does us more harm than good.
This article arms you with the knowledge you need to push back against Big Food’s insidious attempts to capture more of your “stomach share”. Crucially, this article provides you with suggestions on how to take ownership of your health and your loved ones’. The best time to have done this is ages ago. The second best time is NOW.
As always, we wish you good luck on your journey to strength in adversity, calm amidst the storms, relentless resilience and uncompromising health.
Your self-proclaimed family,
The Sapiens Maximus team
Sources & Further Reading
Pure, White and Deadly: How Sugar Is Killing Us and What We Can Do to Stop It – John Yudkin
Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity, and Disease – Robert H. Lustig
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