These days, it seems like there is no end to things that can harm you: vaping, social media, sitting for long periods of time, too much sun, too little sun. Now, a growing body of research suggests that the majority of foods Americans eat every day may be linked to a huge range of diseases and disorders.
I’m talking about ultra-processed food.
What are ultra-processed foods?
Though we refer to UPFs as “foods,” common definitions imply that they are more akin to chemical concoctions that happen to be edible. In September 2016, the Global Panel on Agriculture and Food Systems for Nutrition defined UPFs as industrialized formulations, depleted in crucial nutrients like fiber and protein.
Not all processed foods are made equally, though. A number of different classification systems describe different levels of food processing. Per one system, the NOVA classification, which Monteiro devised, there are four categories. Here’s the breakdown:
- Group 1: Unprocessed or minimally processed foods, which include produce, meat, and grains that are usually cooked prior to consumption, and pasteurized milk and eggs
- Group 2: These are your “processed culinary ingredients,” like oils, butter, lard, honey, molasses, sugar, and salt. There’s some sort of pressing, refining, grinding, milling, drying, or other action.
- Group 3: Think of this group as any meal you’ve ever made. You probably added salt and olive oil — Group 2 foods! — to sweet potatoes (a Group 1 food) before roasting them in the oven. Group 3 is when we combine different groups together and undergo some kind of cooking or preservation (canning, curing, or pickling). Cheeses (real block cheese where only salt is added), tofu, and tempeh also fall into Group 3.
- Finally, there are the Group 4 foods: UPFs. These foods begin as unprocessed foods — like rice, corn, wheat, soy, beef, chicken, pork, fish, and so on — but are then stripped down into their component parts and added piecemeal into UPFs.
Let’s walk through an example of how an unprocessed food transforms into a UPF.
Take, for example, corn. Through a series of industrial processing steps, corn can be broken down into corn protein, corn fiber, corn fat, and cornstarch, explained Chris van Tulleken, an infectious diseases physician and author of the book Ultra-Processed People. Additional processing can transform these ingredients into others. Cornstarch, for instance, can be heated with hydrochloric acid to make corn syrup. These ingredients are then combined piecemeal with varying amounts of sugar, oil, and flour to make everything from Twinkies and spreadable cheese to certain types of peanut butter, hot dogs, and Doritos.
When ingredients are processed, some of the natural fibers, vitamins, and minerals they contained are lost. This means that these piecemeal ingredients also require a whole slew of additives to keep them together or to make them more palatable. Additives are artificial colors and flavors; foaming and anti-foaming agents; bulking ingredients; and emulsifiers. Vitamins and minerals are also sometimes added back during processing.
These additives are a hallmark of UPF and an easy way to determine if what you are eating is ultra-processed or not. “The main way of telling is if the food contains an additive, which you don’t normally find in a domestic kitchen,” van Tulleken explained. Unless you work at a Michelin-starred restaurant or have some niche interest in gastronomy, you probably don’t have maltodextrin or tartrazine sitting in your cupboards at home.
What the science says — and doesn’t say
The hard thing about nutrition science is that it’s notoriously difficult to untangle all the different things that impact health on top of understanding why people make the food decisions they do. Where you grew up, how much money you make, and genetics can all factor into health and nutrition. Because of this complexity, researchers cannot design experiments where they manipulate each of these factors one by one and see what effect that has on health. Instead, scientists rely on observational studies, collecting demographic data and information about the dietary habits of participants including their UPF consumption.
But even collecting data on dietary habits is challenging. “In nutrition, what makes it even harder is that diet is so extremely complex,” explained Filippa Juul, a nutritional epidemiologist at New York University.
We’ve known for a few decades that something about modern, prepackaged foods leads to negative health impacts. In the 1980s, as breakneck globalization ushered in a new world where mass production reached more people than ever before, diets around the world changed, too. In the early 2000s, nutritional epidemiologist Carlos Augusto Monteiro was studying dietary habits of fellow Brazilians. He and his team studied associations between breastfeeding and obesity and the impact of income and education on fruit and vegetable consumption. Importantly, Monteiro was also tracking changes in both the prevalence of chronic diseases and changes in Brazilian diets.
One study, in which Monteiro and his colleagues studied data on dietary habits from 1987 to 2003, found that the consumption of traditional foods such as rice and beans had declined while the consumption of processed food items such as store-bought cookies and soda had increased, in some cases by more than 200 percent. Monteiro and his team had captured, in real time, a trend that has taken place in nearly every developed country in the world: a huge increase in the consumption of what Monteiro later termed “ultra-processed foods” alongside a parallel rise in obesity and chronic diseases.
Ultra-processed foods, or UPFs for short, are those prepackaged foods that can be forgotten in your pantry seemingly forever and still taste great when you happen upon them. UPFs are your sodas, potato chips, granola bars, protein bars, protein powders, instant noodles, candy, and even most types of store-bought bread. These foods are already innately familiar to anyone who has ever stepped foot into a grocery store, a gas station mini-mart, or a fast food restaurant.
Today, the average American consumes some 60 percent of their calories from ultra-processed foods; some studies found that number to be higher among children. UPFs tend to be calorie-dense, high in fat and sugar, and easy to overconsume, so it’s not surprising that eating more of these foods has long been linked with increasing prevalence of obesity, diabetes, and high blood pressure.
But emerging research has also linked UPF consumption to other diseases and disorders, including depression, anxiety, inflammatory bowel disease, and autoimmune disorders. Studying the impacts of nutrition on human health is notoriously tricky given how so many factors — such as race, income, genetics, and the like — can play a role. However, according to researchers and epidemiologists, when you look across all the available research together, there is an overwhelming sense that UPFs negatively affect human health.
To be clear, almost all of the food we eat is processed in one way or another, but there is a sliding scale of food processing. We cook meat; pasteurize milk and eggs to kill harmful bacteria; can vegetables to store and preserve them. Processing not only makes food safer to eat, it allows us to spend less time and energy feeding ourselves each day.
When you cook, pickle, or cure foods, they largely retain their original identity — steamed broccoli still looks nearly identical to raw broccoli. Ultra-processed foods, however, are made of ingredients that are extracted from whole foods through a series of industrial processing steps and then recombined with additives to give you this whole new food that’s shelf-stable.
It seems that somewhere in all this food processing, food can become harmful. But the jury — or science, rather — is still out on exactly how that happens. Despite the still-emerging scientific evidence, it seems that reducing UPF consumption could improve your health. But, to make things more complicated, we live in a food environment where UPFs are not only aggressively marketed to us from a young age, but also are often the only affordable and accessible option for millions of people.
What are ultra-processed foods?
Though we refer to UPFs as “foods,” common definitions imply that they are more akin to chemical concoctions that happen to be edible. In September 2016, the Global Panel on Agriculture and Food Systems for Nutrition defined UPFs as industrialized formulations, depleted in crucial nutrients like fiber and protein.
Not all processed foods are made equally, though. A number of different classification systems describe different levels of food processing. Per one system, the NOVA classification, which Monteiro devised, there are four categories. Here’s the breakdown:
- Group 1: Unprocessed or minimally processed foods, which include produce, meat, and grains that are usually cooked prior to consumption, and pasteurized milk and eggs
- Group 2: These are your “processed culinary ingredients,” like oils, butter, lard, honey, molasses, sugar, and salt. There’s some sort of pressing, refining, grinding, milling, drying, or other action.
- Group 3: Think of this group as any meal you’ve ever made. You probably added salt and olive oil — Group 2 foods! — to sweet potatoes (a Group 1 food) before roasting them in the oven. Group 3 is when we combine different groups together and undergo some kind of cooking or preservation (canning, curing, or pickling). Cheeses (real block cheese where only salt is added), tofu, and tempeh also fall into Group 3.
- Finally, there are the Group 4 foods: UPFs. These foods begin as unprocessed foods — like rice, corn, wheat, soy, beef, chicken, pork, fish, and so on — but are then stripped down into their component parts and added piecemeal into UPFs.
Let’s walk through an example of how an unprocessed food transforms into a UPF.
Take, for example, corn. Through a series of industrial processing steps, corn can be broken down into corn protein, corn fiber, corn fat, and cornstarch, explained Chris van Tulleken, an infectious diseases physician and author of the book Ultra-Processed People. Additional processing can transform these ingredients into others. Cornstarch, for instance, can be heated with hydrochloric acid to make corn syrup. These ingredients are then combined piecemeal with varying amounts of sugar, oil, and flour to make everything from Twinkies and spreadable cheese to certain types of peanut butter, hot dogs, and Doritos.
When ingredients are processed, some of the natural fibers, vitamins, and minerals they contained are lost. This means that these piecemeal ingredients also require a whole slew of additives to keep them together or to make them more palatable. Additives are artificial colors and flavors; foaming and anti-foaming agents; bulking ingredients; and emulsifiers. Vitamins and minerals are also sometimes added back during processing.
These additives are a hallmark of UPF and an easy way to determine if what you are eating is ultra-processed or not. “The main way of telling is if the food contains an additive, which you don’t normally find in a domestic kitchen,” van Tulleken explained. Unless you work at a Michelin-starred restaurant or have some niche interest in gastronomy, you probably don’t have maltodextrin or tartrazine sitting in your cupboards at home.
What the science says — and doesn’t say
The hard thing about nutrition science is that it’s notoriously difficult to untangle all the different things that impact health on top of understanding why people make the food decisions they do. Where you grew up, how much money you make, and genetics can all factor into health and nutrition. Because of this complexity, researchers cannot design experiments where they manipulate each of these factors one by one and see what effect that has on health. Instead, scientists rely on observational studies, collecting demographic data and information about the dietary habits of participants including their UPF consumption.
But even collecting data on dietary habits is challenging. “In nutrition, what makes it even harder is that diet is so extremely complex,” explained Filippa Juul, a nutritional epidemiologist at New York University.
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