Ultra-processed foods (UPFs) are displacing healthy diets “all over the world” despite growing evidence of the risks they pose and should be sold with tobacco-style warnings, according to the nutritional scientist who first coined the term.
Prof Carlos Monteiro of the University of São Paulo will highlight the increasing danger UPFs present to children and adults at the International Congress on Obesity this week.
“UPFs are increasing their share in and domination of global diets, despite the risk they represent to health in terms of increasing the risk of multiple chronic diseases,” Monteiro told the Guardian ahead of the conference in São Paulo.
“UPFs are displacing healthier, less processed foods all over the world, and also causing a deterioration in diet quality due to their several harmful attributes. Together, these foods are driving the pandemic of obesity and other diet-related chronic diseases, such as diabetes.”
Sigh.
Given how difficult it is to be famous these days it’s necessary to go ever further off into hte wolds in order to become famous.
People have climbed Everest so it’s got to be Kilimanjaro onna pogo stick. Sputnik has already happened so billionaires require their own whole rocket company. We grasp the basics of diet now, carbs, vitimins and so on, so now it’s got to be some blather about being made in a factory.
Shrug.
I note the Guardian chooses to illustrate this story not with a picture of any of the tortured ‘meat’ products on the shelves for vegans, but with stuff no one else would call ‘food’ but rather sweets and snacks….
‘we need food – just not in the quantities most of us are consuming.’
At least Dr Hilda Mulrooney makes a bit more sense. Though I think she’s overdoing it when she says ‘most of us’.
Had we had nutritional “scientists” back in the neolithic, they’d have said exactly the same thing about this new-fangled farming lark. Farmers and their children were badly nourished and chronically ill compared to fit and healthy hunter gatherers. Yet you don’t see many hunter gatherers these days, and those that do exist improve their survival chances by taking advantage of the many products of the agriculturally based world.
There’s eight billion of us and we’re living longer than ever. Ergo the only possible effects of the undefined UPFs is to make us healthier, on balance, than when we were eating solely unprocessed, stale, rotten stuff.
@Boganboy – Maybe not you, but if you look around you, on average we’re a lot fatter than we were 30 years ago. There are lots of reasons for that, mostly around the fact that our lives have become less labour intensive, but our calorie intake and meal habits haven’t changed to reflect that.
On average…
So Dr Hilda Mulrooney does have something of a point.
As for the whole ultra processed foods thing, I think that’s misleading, it’s the additives that are included in foods for things like preservatives, flavourings and colourants.
A particular problem is things like high fructose corn syrup (mostly an American problem due to farm subsidies for producing the crap) and seed oils, which require vast amounts of processing to extract. It is these that I think are the problem.
For myself, I now only eat one meal a day which is quite sufficient and it is almost exclusively home cooked from original ingredients and is usually meat or fish and green vegetables along with kimchi or sauerkraut for good gut health.
Filling and tasty.
@JG: what’s your beef with “high fructose corn syrup”?
“Ooh look, those people over there are eating X and we don’t like that.”
“I know, let’s claim it’s a UPF.”
“Great idea”
…
“Ooh look, people are eating more UPF in their diet, we need the power to control what they eat. For their own sake, of course.”
And so the puritanical ratchet makes one more click.
AtC @ 7.38.
Reminds me of the famous cartoon of two blokes sitting in a cave around a bonfire.
Says one to the other: “Somethings just not right….. our air is lean, our water is pure, we all get plenty of exercise, everything we eat is organic and free range, and yet no one lives past thirty”.
In summary, this:
6 Reasons Why High-Fructose Corn Syrup Is Bad for You
Mostly, because too much of it can lead to insulin resistance as a precursor to Type II diabetes, of which I have experience both with it and curing myself of it by cutting out most sugar from my diet and increasing leafy green and other carbohydrate fibre.
Report: “More Than Half of Americans Take Prescribed Meds Daily”
And that’s vastly and overwhelmingly due to UPFs. Those who change to a wholefood diet – ideally meat-based, high in saturated fat, and very low in carbs and excluding seed oils – can get off their pills and get their lives back. All manner of medical conditions may disappear: from skin complaints, through depression, IBS, gout and migraine, diabetes II and high blood-pressure, through to auto-immune conditions. Obviously you’ll lose weight as well. And all just by eating proper food.
As they say, if the benefits of a proper diet could be matched by a pill it would be the most powerful and greatest selling treatment of all time.
Unwelcome information, I realise, since UPFs are – by design – delicious and addictive. Nobody wants to hear it.
John Galt,
The biggest problem in the USA is people not getting exercise. Everyone drives everywhere. They park at the mall, they have drive-thru banks. You go to the suburbs of Florida and they don’t have a footpath to the Albertson’s half a mile from some housing because no-one walks there.
All of this stuff is just politicians pandering to the voters, that no, it’s not their fault that they’re fat, it’s the evil corporations. And we’re on your side. It’s a general problem with voters and politicians. Almost no-one wants to take responsibility for their situation.
Ban Tofu! Foul disgusting highly processed muck.
@JG: sorry, I can’ see your link without accepting God-knows-what on my computer.
You say, however, “curing myself of it by cutting out most sugar from my diet”
That suggests your problem was with sugars rather than specifically HFCS.
Sure, which is one of the reasons I gave up my car in 2012 and haven’t had one since. I basically walk any where that I want to go. However, I have the privilege of living in a small city (Perth, Scotland) with good transport links which makes that possible.
As for exercise, as the late Dr. Michael Mosley often said, exercise is essential, but diet is the key. The two together are vital components for good health and neglecting either causes problems.
…and that’s the problem. Many of these fast foods are specifically designed to provide the sort of flavourful taste that kicks the dopamine levels into high gear, because those corporations selling them want repeat customers to maintain their profit margins.
The edible equivalent of crack cocaine.
The whole UPF thing is just new panic. You find a new term, a new thing, you make it a lot of long words, with an acronym, attach a few shady academics and a most of the public don’t go googling too hard.
There’s ingredients and there’s cooking it. If a food off the shelf has terrible ingredients, it might not be good. But the process of Pataks preparing a curry sauce in a factory is going to be not a whole lot different to doing it at home.
All the diet/health industry runs on a load of PT Barnums making promises and flogging a load of books. One year its fibre, then it’s no carbs, UPFs, organic. Because no-one wants to hear the truth: cut back on the cakes and get some exercise. Not even particularly hard exercise. Walk 20-30 minutes a day, do something like swimming a couple of times a week. Why are women in their late30s so husky now compared to when I was a kid? Because they used to walk kids to school every day, walk to the local shop.
All this dietary stuff seems nonsense to me. Since the digestive system breaks everything down to same things that the body utilises, what does it matter? The problem’s really psychological. Poor control of the hunger stimulus. People being slaves to their appetites.
@bloke in Spain: Unfortunately, it’s because the body responds differently to different types of food and while we’re running about in sporty cars and using the internet, our bodies are still running on hardware that is built for a hunter / gatherer type lifestyle, where things like fructose are an occasional seasonal treat rather than something we consume all year round. Diseases like insulin resistance and diabetes are the result.
By going back to basics and making home cooked food from raw ingredients, you cut out a lot of the additives and preservatives that go into fast food and ready to eat meals. I also find it enjoyable to cook, which is a bonus.
I agree. Most evenings I walk an hour or two (depending upon the weather) around the local parkland and I find it both refreshing and invigorating. It gets me away from the computer, gets me in the fresh air and allows me time to think, which is a godsend. Best of all, it is free.
“. Many of these fast foods are specifically designed to provide the sort of flavourful taste that kicks the dopamine levels into high gear, because those corporations selling them want repeat customers to maintain their profit margins.
The edible equivalent of crack cocaine.”
And your problem with people enjoying themselves is?
The majority of studies in to UPFs were badly designed, poorly carried out and the analysis was at best self serving. The one very good study was very small and didn’t claim what some people think it did.
https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/episode-6-ultra-processed-foods/id1699090757?i=1000624483073
I might have mentioned it a few dozen times before but I like to do endurance sports, less so now as I’m starting to get too old. I have type 2 diabetes and while training for a big event I tend to lose so much weight that I would temporarily go into remission. The training always makes me hungry and I always end up craving pizza. Is pizza ultra processed? Cheese certainly is, it’s a complex process for making sour milk into something edible. I do top my pizza with veggies, mushrooms, peppers, onions, tomatoes etc. so it isn’t all bad. Anyway I’m sixty six and still in good health generally so make of this what you will.
“All this dietary stuff seems nonsense to me. Since the digestive system breaks everything down to same things that the body utilises, what does it matter?”
The hormonal effects on the body are vastly different. Carbs (i.e. sugar) trigger the insulin response to control blood-sugar, which sends a significant proportion of the intake straight to fat storage rather than being available as energy or for building body tissue. Soon you’re hungry again, particularly after insulin over-shoots and blood-sugar drops too low. And so you repeat the cycle: eating too much because a lot of it is being locked away as body fat. Carbs and UPFs also mess up hunger and satiety signalling, and trigger cravings.
By contrast, on a wholefood keto/carnivore diet essentially all the food remains available for energy etc, and the body’s fat stores – in the absence of insulin – will readily supply any shortfall. Satiety signalling works properly. You can comfortably run a deficit, not feel hungry, and lose weight.
Seed oils are obesogenic, but are also inflammatory and in many scenarios result in toxicity. Nina Teicholz, an actual journalist who wrote The Big Fat Surprise, is a good starting point for this. Many interviews and presentations on YouTube.
And if you want to get into the weeds with the whole insulin thing, videos with Ben Bikman are recommended.
“The biggest problem in the USA is people not getting exercise. Everyone drives everywhere. ”
Since working from home I get zero exercise, yet weight control is not an issue. I’m back to being as lean now as I was when I was a young man. I’d certainly benefit from exercise, but not for weight control.
“And your problem with people enjoying themselves is?”
Knock yourself out. But let’s not pretend there are no consequences.
Not totally off-topic.
I cannot see how to make comments on substack – today’s post is tangential to this one: The Grauniad is complaining because some take-aways contain more than 600 calories, so “too much for one meal”.
I only eat two meals a day (I used to have, very rarely, a third comprising bread and marmalade before a big race but i don’t have big races any more) and (according to my smartphone, which will understate it ‘cos I leave it on the desk when I’m in the house or garden and in the car during a race) I burn up more than 1,200 calories per day (a couple of weeks ago I *averaged* 2,100 per day. Yesterday the ‘phone reckoned 1,560 calories *excluding housework and a 10km “race” in the evening*.
So why should I be limited to 600 calories (or kilogramme calories for the numerate – Grauniad is, yet again wrong by 10^3) per meal?
I meant more than 1,200 calories *every* day – per day is correct but can be misleading