Let's learn about... Ultra Processed food
It's what everyone is talking about but what is it, and how bad is it really?
Oh my this post that’s taken me from many an article and research paper, to debates at the British Library! Like many things in nutrition, there are a lot of opinions vying for attention, not least of which some of the big food companies sponsor convincing ‘research’ to ‘prove’ that its food is not that bad.
Long story short, most ready-made packaged food/meals available in our supermarkets are not really worthy of the title food. As food scientist Fernanda Rauber states, as quoted in Chris Van Tulleken’s eye-opening book Ultra Processed People, “Most ultra-processed food is not food. It’s an industrially produced edible substance.”
I’ll say up front, Tulleken’s book is extensively researched and a gripping read. It also covers a wider picture of food in relation to weight gain and why that has little to do with calories or how much exercise you take. Where you see text in quotes below, this book is often the source.
So, as in my Let’s Learn about Gluten, or Let’s Learn about Sugar posts, I’m presenting what I determined to be facts as I deciphered them taking you from why you might want to know about any of this, to what you could do in response. I’m not presenting it as ‘advice’, simply corroborated research into something that will inevitably impact how well you live. Let’s go…
A lot of food is processed. Extracting oil from olives, or milling flour from wheat are both forms of processing. Tinning and canning fresh produce is processing. This is not the sort of processing we need to be concerned about.
Our attention should be reserved for Ultra Processed food (UPF) which includes many more stages of ingredient modification, some of which are indirect, ie deceptive marketing, secret lobbying, fraudulent research and so forth. But mostly it involves an extreme kind of messing about with raw ingredients (think bleaching, deodorising, neutralising with caustic sodas, the use of acids to remove gums or waxes) in order to make them palatable. And those raw ingredients may not even originate from anything we might recognise as a food in the first place — coal turned into ‘butter’, for example. Truth. It was done by a German team during WW1.
However, inevitably, all that modification has a price. For us. There is now a vast body of data that supports the notion that UPF damages the human body and increases rates of cancer, obesity, metabolic disease and mental illness. It also damages us in other ways, namely displacing native food cultures and driving inequality, poverty and early death. And, it damages the planet because the food systems necessary for UPF production are a leading cause of declining biodiversity (high yield mono crops grown on land that could have been forest, intensive farming and the use of a lot of fertiliser and pesticides).