Hard concerns are being raised by scientists about how highly processed meals affect our health. The solutions are convoluted—and unexpected.
How highly processed meals affect our health
Carlos Montenegro detected an oddity in the cuisine that Brazilians were consuming in the late 2000s. The dietitian had been sifting through surveys from the previous three decades that had asked grocery buyers to list every item they had purchased. Montenegro observed that Brazilians were far less likely to purchase salt, sugar, and oil in more recent polls than they had been. Despite this, people continued to gain weight. Adults in Brazil are now more than twice as likely to be overweight or obese than they were in 1975.
Montenegro was puzzled by this inconsistency. Why were people becoming bigger if they were buying less sugar and fat? The data contained the solution right there. Brazilians were simply eating these nutrients in a completely different way; they hadn't actually reduced their consumption of fat, salt, or sugar. Traditional foods like rice, beans, and vegetables were being substituted by people for prepackaged bread, snacks, sausages, and other items. Since the initial household survey in 1974, the proportion of cookies and soft drinks in Brazilians' shopping baskets had increased by threefold and five fold, respectively. Wherever you looked, the difference was evident. Brazilians weren't eating enough, Montenegro had feared when he first became a doctor in 1972. His nation was facing the exact opposite issue by the late 2000s.
At first glance, Montenegro's conclusions appear clear. People gain extra weight if they consume an excessive amount of unhealthy food. But, that justification didn't satisfy the dietitian. He believed that our food system had undergone a fundamental change, and that scientists needed to find a new way to discuss this. Nutrition research has been centered on nutrients for more than a century: Eat less saturated fat, stay away from too much sugar, get enough vitamin C, and so on. Montenegro, however, desired a new system for classifying food that focused on the manufacturing process rather than merely the ingredients. Montenegro reasoned that a dish's unhealthiness was due to more than just its contents. It was the entire process: how the food was prepared, how rapidly we consumed it, and how it was handled.
A brand-new, four-category food classification system named NOVA was developed by Montenegro. Foods with little processing, like fruits, vegetables, and unprocessed meats, are the least concerning. Oils, butter, and sugar are the next processed food elements, followed by canned vegetables, smoked meats, freshly baked bread, and basic cheeses—substances that should be utilized with caution as a part of a balanced diet. Ultra-processed foods are another option.
Several factors can cause a product to be classified as ultra-processed. Such "industrial techniques" as extrusion, intensification, carbonation, hydrogenation, molding, or preferring may be used to create it. It could include flavorings intended to make it extremely pleasant or preservatives to keep it stable at room temperature. Another possibility is that it has high concentrations of fat, sugar, and salt in mixtures that are uncommon in whole meals. According to Montenegro, all of the items have one thing in common: they are made to replace freshly prepared dishes and keep you going back for more. "You are consuming something that was meant to be over consumed every day from breakfast to dinner," claims Montenegro.
Since it was first announced in 2009, the idea of highly processed food has gained a lot of traction. Some countries, including Brazil, France, Israel, Ecuador, and Peru, have included NOVA in their dietary recommendations. Numerous health and diet blogs extol the merits of avoiding highly processed foods; in fact, both advocates of the carnivorous and raw vegan diets agree that doing so is a good idea. Companies that produce plant-based meat have been criticized for using the name, but they have also embraced it. The vegan burger from Impossible is described as "unapologetic ally processed." Others have argued that we must rely on processed food if we are to feed billions of people.
Food that has undergone extreme processing has caught our attention. But, we are incredibly ignorant about these foods' effects on our health. Even on the definition of an ultra-processed food or the relevance of such foods, scientists cannot agree. There is no doubt about it: These meals play a significant role in our daily lives.
Ultra-Processed People
My kitchen cupboards are a world of ultra-processed food, all of it ready to consume with either no preparation or very little effort. You'll find instant r amen, potato chips, biscuits, canned soup, candies, and cereal bars there. Not only me, but many people are addicted to quick eats. The average diet in the UK and the US both contain about 57 percent and more than 60 percent of ultra-processed food, respectively.
And it appears that all of this consumption is harming our health. Very processed food consumption has been associated to a variety of health problems, including breast and correctional cancer, obesity, depression, and all-cause mortality. It's exceedingly challenging to determine how our diets affect our health, and any armchair statistician will tell you that correlation does not imply causation, yet it seems obvious that eating too much ultra-processed food is bad for us.
According to Stacey Locker, a senior nutrition scientist at the British Nutrition Foundation, one explanation for this is that foods that have undergone extreme processing frequently contain high levels of salt, sugar, and fat, all of which practically everyone believes we should be reducing. Nevertheless, if certain foods are unhealthy just because of their nutritional content, perhaps the ultra-processed category isn't necessary at all. Might Montenegro's NOVA classification simply be old nutrition science in a new package?
Initially, Kevin Hall was a highly processed skeptic. He conducts research on how nutrition affects body weight and metabolism at the US National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. In 2015, he first learned about the NOVA classification method from a Brazilian researcher at a conference. The researcher questioned him, "Why are you still looking at nutrients since they're not vital any more?" According to Hall, this is a "profoundly odd way to think about food." He had devoted his entire professional life to researching the effects of nutrition on the body. He reasoned that food was simply different means of combining nutrients.
Still, Hall was intrigued enough by the NOVA categorization that he put together the first randomized control trial comparing ultra-processed and unprocessed diets. In 2019 Hall asked 20 volunteers to stay at a clinical research hospital in Bethesda where they would be fed a diet of only ultra-processed or whole foods for two weeks, then switch to the other diet for the subsequent two weeks. Those on the ultra-processed diet were fed a selection of dishes including tater tots, turkey sausage, Spam, and an ungodly amount of diet lemonade. The whole-food diet was mostly made up of fruit, vegetables, and unprocessed meat. For both diets, Hall and his researchers provided double the recommended portions of food so participants could eat as much as they liked. The critical part, however, was that the two diets were nutritionally matched, so each contained roughly the same amount of protein, fat, carbohydrates, fiber, and so on.
Hall was shocked by the study's findings. Those who followed the highly processed diet consumed roughly 500 more calories daily and gained about two pounds. Despite the fact that the meals on offer had nearly the same component contents, participants who followed the whole-food diet consumed fewer calories and lost weight. This suggested to Hall that something other than the presence of salt, sugar, and fat was driving people to consume too many calories and acquire weight. It implied that this NOVA categorization mechanism might be unique, he claims. Perhaps food is more than the sum of its parts. er.
Hall's study revealed a strong connection between junk food and excessive calorie intake, but it was unable to explain why persons who consumed an ultra-processed diet consumed more calories. Hall received a deluge of recommendations from other experts when he published the findings. Some people hypothesized that it was because junk food has more calories. Processed foods contain more calories per gram than whole foods since they are frequently deep-fried and heavy in fat. Or perhaps it was because junk food was consumed more quickly; in the study, persons who ate a diet high in processed foods consumed food substantially more quickly than those who consumed whole meals. Other researchers hypothesized that chemicals may be at play or that eating junk food altered the gut microbiol in a way that affected calorie intake.
The impact that highly processed meals have on our brains may have a significant role. In her research, Virginia Tech Carillon School of Medicine assistant professor Alexandra Differentiation examines how junk food affects the reward circuits in the brain. "We have a lot more knowledge about the signals that fat, sugar, and carbs send to the gut and the brain. We know very little about how ultra-processing affects any of those signals, according to Differentiation.
Her theory is that because ultra-processed meals are high in calories that are readily available, they trigger a strong reward response in our brains that makes us want more.
In his writings, Differentiation compares the cigarette industry to junk food. Differentiation and her colleague Ashley Hardhearted believe that highly processed foods should be classified as addictive substances if we compare them to the requirements set for tobacco products in an editorial for the journal Addiction. But legislation will never catch up to research until we fully comprehend how ultra-processed food affects our bodies. When we had really strong, scientific, biological facts, Differentiation claims, "we witnessed major shifts in things like tobacco policy and policy for opioids."
Taking on Big Food
So, what should health officials do about it? Brazilian government standards advise individuals to avoid ultra-processed meals entirely, whilst French guidelines advise limited intake. Yet, other countries' rules make no mention of ultra-processed foods. In 2021, the UK government commissioned an independent investigation that advocated a number of reforms aimed squarely at the ultra-processed food business. The report proposed a levy on sugar and salt in processed meals, as well as requiring large corporations to record how much unhealthy food they sold. A year later, the government's response mainly rejected these recommendations. The only reference to processed food in the UK's official nutrition standards is that adults should eat no more than 70 grams of red or processed meat each day.
While the role of processing in our diets has come under greater focus, public agencies have been slow to respond. Stanford nutritionist Christopher Gardner sits on the US Dietary Guidelines Committee and is a member of the American Heart Association. “For both of them, processed food is an issue they have to address next, because the public is so interested in this,” he says. “We don’t have a position yet. We need a position on this.”
Meanwhile, Hall is conducting a new study to determine what it is about ultra-processed foods that leads us to overeat, and the first participants have already arrived at the Bethesda clinical research center. The experiment is identical to his previous one, but this time he will modify the ultra-processed diet he provides volunteers to see if the energy density or repeatability of the food effects how much they consume. If he can figure out what it is about ultra-processed foods that causes people to overeat, he may be able to devise better policies to assist people eat healthier diets, or he may be able to persuade food businesses to reformulate their goods.
It is also possible that we will narrow our definition of ultra-processed food. Packaged and processed foods are such a vital source of nourishment for so many people, says Hall, that we must tread carefully before demonizing the entire category. They're convenient, tasty, and inexpensive. According to Hall's 2019 research, the weekly cost of ultra-processed meals was $45 less than the whole food diet. "If you design policies to try to eradicate those things without also offering cheap, inexpensive, quick, convenient alternatives, you're going to have a lot of people who will suffer as a result," he says.
Things get even trickier when you factor in the climate impact of our diets. Most plant-based meats are highly processed, but that doesn’t necessarily make them less healthy than their meat equivalents. Meat substitutes tend to be lower in calories and saturated fat and higher in fiber, but lower in protein. But on an environmental level, plant-based beef is much better than the real thing. “If you’re comparing a highly processed beef burger or pork sausage with its plant-based equivalent, then the plant burger or sausage is generally going to have lower environmental impacts,” says Tara Garrett, a food researcher at the University of Oxford. Montenegro admits that ultra-processed foods are sometimes better than their unprocessed alternatives, but he’s concerned that plant-based burgers might displace other, healthier plant-based foods.
Even so, the picture is complicated. During eight weeks, individuals swapped animal meals for plant-based meats in an experiment led by Christopher Gardner. They dropped weight and had reduced cholesterol levels after the plant-based portion of the research. Gardner believes that the ultra-processed term may be doing a harm to plant-based meats.
Montenegro believes that we cannot afford to wait until we have a complete understanding of ultra-processed foods before public health authorities take action. "We're dealing with something extremely complicated. Understanding all of these systems will take many years. "But do we have to wait till we know everything to start doing something to stop this?" he asks. For the time being, science on ultra-processed foods is developing slowly, but the argument is louder than ever.
food and drink,food science,health,diseases,food,public health
food and drink,food science,health,diseases,food,public health
