Ultra-Processed Foods—and the Fourth of July Plate
A recent article suggests that “cooking from scratch is often the best choice” to avoid ultra-processed foods (UPFs). That certainly is one way, although no one can agree on a definition of UPFs.
As we fire up the grills and enjoy classic Fourth of July favorites, it’s worth remembering that many of the foods we celebrate with—hot dogs, chips, and condiments—are technically ultra-processed.
This return to the old ways of food preparation may conflict with the National Women’s History Museum which wrote, “How Highly Processed Foods Liberated 1950s Housewives.” Their take was that “technology promised women the freedom from drudgery.” The modern suggestion is that this drudgery should be shared by men and women.
Processed Foods: A Revolution in Nutrition and Safety
Of course, processed foods did much more than that. They reduced malnutrition and starvation around the world starting in the 1950s through canning, preservatives, and sophisticated transportation. At the same time, modern foods included man-produced high-yield crop varieties (i.e., not natural) using synthetic chemicals, pesticides, and improved irrigation. Today, farming has gone well beyond the original Green Revolution with precision agriculture, allowing us to manage each square yard separately.
What’s more, food has been made safer using modern techniques like pasteurization (cooking), freezing, canning, fermentation, drying, UV light, and high pressure.
Modern Backlash: Are we Forgetting the Benefits?
And yet, for all of the great benefits of these technologies, we are discussing regulating these foods and suing food companies. Part of the complaint is that companies are making foods hyperpalatable (they taste good to the point where normal satiety mechanisms fail) which makes them addictive.
Are we really prepared to return to spending a few hours every day in the kitchen (estimates from 90 minutes to 9 hours per day), eating foods that are potentially less safe and more expensive? Home cooked foods may also taste just as good which would not solve the overeating issue.
The Slippery Science of Ultra-Processed Foods Definitions
Using the term “UPF” tries to reduce the science of nutrition down to good and bad foods based on multiple definitions. Those definitions might include ingredients like sugar and salt, nutrients like fats or specific fats like saturated fats, oils, or additives. It may also include pesticide residues or processing like extrusion (pushing food through a narrow opening molding it into a shape).
As Marie Latulippe, Director of Science Programs at the Institute for the Advancement of Food and Nutrition Sciences notes, “One might argue that these details are digging around the margins. However, if UPF guidance is extended, work on these nuances will be increasingly important to avoid unintended consequences and ensure an ultimate benefit to public health.”
The nuances revolve around the multiple possible definitions and must be based on sound, evolving science.
What Really Affects Our Health? 4 Key Factors
To get to which foods may not be good for us to eat, we need to keep several factors in mind:
Dose makes the poison—It depends on how much people eat of a specific food. Decades of nutrition science have shown that it is the total dietary pattern that matters for long-term health, not individual foods.
People are different. We all handle foods differently. Some people can handle fats better and some can handle carbs better. Even identical twins to not metabolize foods, like fat and sugar, in the same way. That is the reason we are studying personalized and precision nutrition.
Food safety is still an issue and if we move away from processed foods, we open the door to more food safety issues.
Natural does not equal safe. “Whether a chemical is natural or man-made tells us nothing about its toxicity.” One teaspoon of naturally occurring botulinum could kill a quarter of the world’s population.
The Fallacy of Lumping Foods Together
The idea of lumping more than 70 percent of the food supply into one health category is the “fallacy of inclusion.” While some foods within the UPF category may contribute excessively to being overweight or chronic disease, many foods should not be in this category (e.g. whole foods are ultra processed but recommended by the Dietary Guidelines). Similarly, there is the “fallacy of composition” where something is true for individual parts, it must be true of the entire whole.”
Or, you could just think of the mistake as prejudice.
The Regulatory Reflex—and Its Pitfalls
These are only fallacies if people using the term have made a mistake. But lumping them together for ease of addressing problems is rampant.
Regulatory agencies routinely include more firms or more industries in their rules even when they know they don’t all have a problem. They use lots of excuses like “leveling the playing field” where everyone must do the same thing even if only a small minority have a problem. In other cases, they use future uncertainty as in, “they may not have a problem now but, as long we’re doing this, let’s include them just in case.” There is the burden of legal proof issue, “They haven’t proved they don’t have a problem.”
Finally, there’s the general issue of always needing regulation. I heard this in the FDA where one regulator suggested (see Fixing Food) that we needed a regulation for dietary supplement manufacturers, even if didn’t have any public health benefits, because, “We have to get them somewhere.”
Any of these could be used to falsely conclude that UPF makes sense.
This Fourth of July, Let’s Appreciate Food Innovation
Lumping so many disparate foods together under one umbrella term, like ultra-processed foods, will not solve the nutrition problem and may bring on food safety problems.
Addressing these major changes to the food supply requires that we consider the science, the trade-offs of one set of foods for others, and the negative impacts of price and convenience, particularly for those less well off.
So as we celebrate Independence Day with cookouts and classic American dishes, let’s not forget the innovations that have made our food safer, longer-lasting, and more affordable. While the research should continue, it’s not clear that continuing to try to lump all these products together will ultimately improve diets and health.