Here’s a startling number: 58% of the calories consumed by adults and 67% of the the calories consumed by children in the United States are ultraprocessed foods.
Ultraprocessed foods are the breakfast cereals, soft drinks, protein bars, flavoured yogurts and frozen pizza, many of which are filled with highly manipulated ingredients and chemical additives. They are hard to define, because these days almost all food is processed in some way. But think of the industrial element of our food supply, made more in factories than in fields.
This article takes a look at the debate around ultraprocessed foods, both on a personal level (how should we approach eating them) and on a policy level (how should we regulate this food and the companies that make them). Because ultraprocessed foods are not all bad. Firstly, it is a category that includes a huge variety of different foods, all of them produced differently and having different health credentials. But ultraprocessed foods have also helped make food more affordable, safe from food-borne pathogens, easy to prepare and, in some cases, more sustainable.
However, there is a growing list of observational studies that tie an increased consumption of ultraprocessed food with increased health risks.
These studies have consistently found that people who ate more ultraprocessed foods were more likely to develop cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, some types of cancer, obesity, depression and inflammatory diseases of the gastrointestinal tract such as Crohn’s disease, as well as to die during the course of the studies.
The modern food system is both grotesque and a miracle. The fact that we can feed so many billions of people and that today, more people now die from obesity than malnutirition is testament to the modern food industry. Yet, how we achieve this mass production is often concerning.
Policy makers are now paying more attention to the industrial food system and are making changes. Chile, Canada, Brazil and Mexico are just some of the countries considering adding warning labels to unhealthy foods. More than 50 countries now tax sugary drinks. And, as this article explains, this is just the start of our reckoning with our modern food system.
This is an excerpt from our Thought Starters email. Once a week we send you 5 interesting articles that have caught our attention, to get you thinking. No spam, we guarantee.