Ultra-Processed Foods

Uh... What do you have? I have one too, even though it's not my turn. But what is yours? Wait, I want to know what your...

No, no, no, no, no, no. I want to see what you do with it first. Hi, everybody, and welcome to Maintenance Phase, the podcast that's finding new and exciting ways to stigmatize the foods you love. Oh, that's good. That's very direct. On brand. The other thing that I thought about as an opening is asking you what your favorite ultra-processed food is. Mine is smoked salmon. Oh, Nutella. No, mine was going to be Welcome to Maintenance Phase, the podcast.

that is finally going to tell the story of yellows one through four. I'm Michael Hops. I'm Aubrey Gordon. If you would like to support the show, you can do that at patreon.com slash maintenance phase, or you can subscribe to premium episodes on Apple podcasts. It's the same content, same content, Michael.

We're talking about ultra processed foods. And this is a thing that people are like sort of constantly asking us to cover, asking us to talk about all of that sort of stuff. And I am fascinated to hear where we land. Well, okay. So. The bad news is we have to start with the same tedious caveat that we start every episode with. This is like my test of like, can I do research?

Without going down a bunch of like unnecessary rabbit holes and then cutting like hours of footage out of the show. The one thing we're going to talk about is like the definition. of processed food. I think the core challenge of talking about this in a nuanced way is that there are two definitions. There is the colloquial definition of processed food.

Like when you are going about your business, you constantly hear people say like, I'm trying to avoid processed foods. It's one of those concepts that is sort of like, I know it when I see it. That's what I was going to say is revised tagline is welcome to maintenance phase, the podcast where like pornography.

We can't define ultra processed foods, but we know them when we see them. Right. Like you kind of know that a Twinkie is like an ultra processed food. You know that Wonder Bread is an ultra processed food. And I want to say that like as a colloquial matter, I don't really.

police this stuff like if if i'm with somebody and they say like oh i'm trying to cut back on processed foods i'm not like how are you defining that the research disagrees with you yeah if you are a person who's trying to avoid processed foods like you know what that means there's all kinds of kind of arbitrary I think this is totally fine. The question that we're trying to confront on the show is like, is this...

useful as a scientific concept and as a concept that is now driving policy. So there are numerous countries that are passing taxes on processed foods. We talked in our last episode about how RFK Jr. potentially might want to remove, quote, processed foods from food stamps.

It's kind of fine to have a colloquial understanding of a term that is like a little murky or a little, you know, sort of changes depending on the circumstances. But if we're going to be passing laws and if we're going to be putting out studies that say, okay, ultra processed foods is associated with a fiber. higher risk of cardiovascular disease, we need to have a clear understanding of what this term means.

there is a way that sort of processed food has come to act as a stand in for what folks maybe previously would have referred to as quote unquote junk food. God damn it, Aubrey. This is in my conclusion. Oh shit, I'm so sorry. There's sort of an understanding that it might be uncouth or sort of judgmental to refer to some foods as quote unquote junk foods and processed sounds like more technical or more descriptive.

or something to people. Fine, Aubrey. I'll scroll down to the part of my notes where I have information about this. You know, I was thinking about this episode last night and I was looking at my beloved bean shelf. Do my beans count as ultra processed? What about I have a jar of barley? Lee is that ultra process? Right.

The closer you get to trying to find a line, the murkier it gets, right? It's very sort of impressionist. It makes sense from a distance. And then you get up close and you're like, no. The thing is, the more I read about this, the more I actually, I think I prefer the term.

junk food because when people say junk food, you know that it doesn't actually have a lot of informational content. It basically just means like food I don't like. You're like, okay, everybody's going to define it differently. Whereas processed food feels objective. Yeah. But like...

It turns out to be like just as arbitrary. It just sounds less arbitrary. There is something that is genuinely helpful about people just sort of owning up to their judgments and biases because then you actually can have a conversation about it. Exactly. Versus someone who goes, oh, it's not junk food. It's ultra processed foods. Totally. Where they just sort of keep sort of seeking a new refuge from any kind of conversation about how they actually feel. So.

The first thing to know about the term processed food is that it's been around like much longer than I knew. So I went on that like Google. gram thing that is like how much is this term being used the first reference that it has for processed food is from 1912 you can find old articles in like the new york times like decrying processed food and how it's harming people one of the first

Articles I found was from 1970 called Bread is Fatal to Rats, but that's not the point. Wait, wait, wait, Mike, wait on. Are you doing a rat soundboard right now? No, I'm not. I'm not doing a soundboard. God. I'm trying to find my fucking zoom window to turn on the camera. Oh. wow when is this from this appears to be from the 50s i found this in an antique shop it's a print that says bread helps to keep up your energy in this sensible reducing diet bread helps burn up safely

The fat you lose. Dude, bring back this graphic design. It looks dope, huh? It's so wordy. It's like all these words and then like... people at a prom or something because they ate bread. Also, now I want a rat soundboard. Sorry. This is okay. I know I said I wasn't going to go down rabbit holes and shit, but the first paragraph of this article is for what may be the 1000th time.

The question of whether or not rats can live on nothing but ordinary white bread has been raised once again. I'm like, is there? Is that something we were raising a lot in the 1970s? Sorry, are we coming back to this one a bunch? Just like a first date question. Fascinating. Where are you from? Do you have any siblings? Can rats live on bread? If a tree falls in the woods, it goes around to hear it. Does it make sense?

a sound can rats live on bread so this is a study where they fed rats like ordinary white bread of course like refined flour you know they remove a lot of the fiber a lot of the nutrients etc if you feed rats just white bread, they do die. Like they starve to death basically because there's not enough nutrients. However, if you feed them an enriched white bread that has these vitamins and minerals put back in, they live. But what's interesting to me is like...

In this article, from the very beginning of this term, nobody could really define... What processing is, because one way to think about it is like, okay, you're processing the wheat, you're taking out all the nutrients, but also boiling down foods to get the nutrients out and turning them into powders and putting them into bread is also processing. It's arguably 100%. or processing. This is just a different kind of processing. So it's like everyone uses the term process just to mean like...

Food I don't like. Food that I think is bad. Right. Absolutely. Like there are very few definitions of processed foods in terms of the like colloquial usage that would include like olive oil. This does actually get to like.

The biggest problem with the term and the biggest problem with like efforts to define it. So the term becomes much more popular in the early 2000s, especially with like the rise of Michael Pollan. I went back to the omnivores dilemma for this. And like he refers to processed foods many times, but he doesn't refer to.

ultra-processed foods. The term ultra-processed is coined in 2009 by a Brazilian researcher named Carlos Monteiro, who had been doing kind of field work in Brazil in the 1970s and 1980s, originally on malnutrition. But he was noticing with these poor populations.

Eventually, the problem of malnutrition had started to shift to what he calls overnutrition. You basically have, as the Brazilian economy is developing, there's more of these like commercial foods being produced and traditional diets are starting to give way to like, you know, sodas and... and all the kind of stuff we associate with ultra-processed foods. So in 2009 he puts out the first use of this term in academia, ultra-processed, and also an attempt to define it.

So this is a paper called The Issue is Not Food Nor Nutrients, So Much as Processing. So I'm going to send you the first couple paragraphs. It is now generally acknowledged that the current pandemic of obesity and related chronic diseases has as one of its important causes increased consumption of convenience and... pre-prepared foods.

However, the issue of food processing is largely ignored or minimized in education and information about food, nutrition and health, and also in public health policies. So this is happening in the context of the shifting understanding of food, right?

that the original understanding of like, quote unquote, unhealthy food was food that was high in saturated fats, right? We talked about this coming out of the 1950s. It was like, we need to cut down on fat. Then in the early 2000s, we get this stigmatization of sugar and carbs. Yeah. And so...

What Monteiro is saying is, like, we need a more holistic... understanding of this that it's not just like you measure the grams of sugar and then you're like this food is level eight bad like that's really one-dimensional we need a three-dimensional understanding and that comes from understanding the way that the food is made basically god the whole time you're

talking about this i'm just thinking about other foods that are ultra processed protein protein powder protein powder we're getting there we're getting there we're getting athletic greens you read two more paragraphs aubrey and then we'll get to the fun part which is us Trying to define what ultra processed food is. Fucking dunking on Huel. Yeah, exactly. Yes. Fuck you, moon dust. So I'm sending you these paragraphs about where he lays out, like, what is the problem with ultra processed food?

foods modern diets usually do contain some unprocessed plant foods and meat and milk but also keep several of the unhealthy features of the processed ingredients they are mostly based on low nutrient density little dietary fiber and excess simple carbohydrates, saturated fats, sodium and trans fatty acids. What makes snacks, drinks, dishes and meals mainly made up from the ultra processed foods different from traditional dishes and meals is that they are in.

They come ready to eat or heat diets that include a lot of ultra processed foods are intrinsically nutritionally unbalanced and intrinsically harmful to health. Well, now hang on.

Are you going to, are you going to mention exactly what I was about to say? Like you can say this, but we just talked about like enriched flour and enriched cereals, right? That like growing up, yes, absolutely. Breakfast cereal was kind of everywhere, but all of that. breakfast cereal was like very prominently labeled as being enriched with vitamin A, vitamin C, vitamin B. I don't know that you can argue necessarily that it's intrinsically nutritionally unbalanced.

Again, athletic greens is an ultra processed food that advertises itself as being nutritionally balanced, right? There's also this... core problem that you find in like every single paper about this where it says, okay, it's not about the nutrients. It's not about what's inside of the food. It's about the processes by which the foods are made. And then it's like, okay, why are ultra-processed foods bad?

It's about what's in the food. So he's saying they're high in fat, they're high in sugar, and they're calorie dense. Oh my God, Mike, are we going to end up... doing the reporting version of that Briars commercial from the nineties where they made a little kid try to read the ingredients on a.

bucket of ice cream. Oh, that was a Breyers commercial? I actually looked up the ingredients of Breyers for this episode. Yeah, because they were like, but look at Breyers. And the kid was like, milk, cream, sugar. Guar gum? That kid could pronounce guar gum?

It just really feels like that's sort of where we're headed. We finally get to like the meat of this paper and like just such fucking mic bait. The attempt to actually operationally define what ultra processed food is. So he proposes in 2000. nine, this classification that has three groups, every single person who writes about ultra processed food has like the same paragraph where they're like, well, all food is processed. Yeah. Slicing up an apple.

is processing it but it has no nutritional content whatsoever but also like pringles like making like a slurry of potato and then shaping it into like chip shape is also processing. It's like this term encompasses such a wide range of activities that it's probably better to just find a different term. So he does...

acknowledge this. So the first group in his classification is minimally processed foods or unprocessed foods. Obvious stuff, right? Of like you pick an apple from the tree and it's like a group one food, right? But then... He also acknowledges that even these foods include processing. So he says such processes include cleaning.

Removal of inedible fractions, portioning, refrigeration, freezing, pasteurization, fermenting, pre-cooking, drying, skimming, bottling, and packaging. Skim milk process. This is the problem. It's like...

he's saying these are forms of processing, but like they don't count. It's not about whether foods are processed. It's about like the intensity of the process. Yeah. It just feels real goofy to be like the dried beans are not processed, but you put them in a. can and then they are so that is group one these are these are foods that are like

They're processed, yeah, but they're not like ultra processed. So they're good. We're going to look the other way. Yeah, they're fine, right? Yeah. Group two is substances extracted from whole foods. So this is... Anything like, you know, refining flour. Oh, is that my olive oil? Yes, this is olive oil. So when you press olives, you get oil out of them. This is, again, also...

a form of processing, but it's not like the bad kind of processing. You're basically making ingredients out of whole foods. So he says, traditionally they are ingredients used in the domestic preparation and cooking of dishes mainly made up of fresh and minimally processed foods. Because all of this is based on his work.

with like traditional families and like rural poor populations in Brazil. What he's really trying to do with this classification is separate kind of traditional food practices from modern food practices, right? This is a critique of the modern food system. what he's doing with group one and two is like well yeah you know if you look at like a poor family in rural brazil like they might be using some flour

They're probably using some oil when they like saute vegetables. They're using spices. Technically that's processing, but that's not the kind of processing that is going to be harmful to health. These are like traditional practices, right? But then he contrasts this with group three. which is ultra-processed foods. So we're finally getting to the definition of ultra-processed foods. So here is this.

These are made up of group two substances to which either no or relatively small amounts of minimally processed foods are added, plus salt and other preservatives, and often also cosmetic additives such as flavors and colors. This group of foods includes breads, cookies, ice creams, chocolates, candies, breakfast cereals, cereal bars, potato chips and savory and also sweet

snack products in general, and sugared and other soft drinks. That's the kind of you-know-it-when-you-see-it thing. Meat products such as nuggets, hot dogs, burgers, and sausages made from processed or extruded remnants of meat can also be classified... as ultra processed foods boy if anyone ever describes anything i'm eating as extruded remnants of meat i mean that's what they are it's true and i don't want to hear it i know don't think about it I don't know.

Ultra processed foods are basically confections of group two ingredients, typically combined with sophisticated use of additives to make them edible, palatable and habit forming. They have no real resemblance to group one foods, although they may be shaped. labeled, and marketed so as to seem wholesome and quote-unquote fresh. Unlike the ingredients included in group two, ultra-processed foods are typically not consumed with or as part of minimally processed foods, dishes, and meals.

They are designed to be ready to eat, sometimes with addition of liquids such as milk, or ready to heat, and are often consumed alone or in combination, such as savory snacks with soft drinks, bread with burgers. It really feels... like a very vibey definition. The core definition.

is that ultra-processed foods are made up of group 2 substances to which either no or relatively small amounts of minimally processed foods are added. So the idea is that these products are majority like... oil and fat like something like Nutella which is like 13% hazelnuts.

And effectively, everything else is just like oil and sugar. But Michael, that's not typically consumed with or as part of minimally processed foods, dishes and meals, which means I'm sorry, you never have dipped a banana into Nutella.

you know earlier he said like the problem with ultra processed foods right is that they're very high in sugar they're high in fat they're very calorie dense but then he includes things in ultra processed here that are not particularly high in sugar or fat or energy dense like all breads you're including

tortillas. Yeah. This also excludes a lot of foods. This definition does not include potato chips because like I looked at Lay's potato chips, like Lay's original potato chips have three ingredients. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's potatoes, oil, and salt. And like lots of French fries. Also are just three ingredients, right? It's potatoes, oil, and salt. That's kind of like the canonical.

food of like, you shouldn't be eating so many potato chips. You shouldn't be eating French fries. But those actually count as minimally processed foods under this definition. Yeah. You're saying ultra processed foods are bad for you. But then you have this definition of ultra processed foods. That includes a lot of foods that are not particularly bad for you. And then you have this definition of unprocessed foods that includes a ton of foods that are bad for you. Or like at least they're...

calorie dense, energy dense. I was thinking because he includes milk in the sort of unprocessed category, like a creme brulee. would count as, like, unprocessed. Even though it's extremely calorie-dense, it's still mostly cream, right? Yeah, and just so very similar ingredients-wise to, like, ice cream. Ice cream always makes the list of ultra-processed foods, but, like, I looked this up.

ice cream has five ingredients. It's like cream, sugar, vanilla. There's nothing you can't pronounce in there. As a person who occasionally makes ice cream, there's not much to it. But then the second problem with this definition is that it includes These concepts that are just not related to human nutrition. So he goes into this whole thing that the real problem with ultra-processed foods is that their profit...

They're produced by large corporations. They're these kind of international commodities. Ah, yes. More vibes. Exactly. So he says ultra-processed products are typically branded, distributed internationally and globally, heavily...

advertised and marketed and very profitable. But the problem with this is that fucking like fruits and vegetables and food that is good for you is also very profitable and also produced by fucking international global corporations. Like if you go to the grocery store and...

strawberries. They're going to be from fucking Driscoll's. Driscoll's is like a massive corporation. I mean, I think here's the interesting thing here. There is a critique to be had about the behavior of any number of multinational corporations. That criticism of corporate behavior isn't the same thing as proving that there are negative health effects as a result of that bad corporate behavior. Again, they're trying to kind of...

ride the coattails of like, this kind of makes sense to you, right? Yeah. You kind of know that corporations are like bad, so they're probably also bad for your health, right? We found this in the Michael Pollan book too, that people keep presenting these dietary choices as somehow...

like a break from capitalism or somehow virtuous in all of these other larger economic ways. And they just aren't. Food can be healthy and produced by miserable corporations. This is the way that we've chosen to structure our economy. cannot escape from this by buying virtuous food. I think this is a huge mistake in the way that people frame this stuff. And if you can, then the escape is only an escape that is available to people who can afford it. Exactly. Maybe the push then should be

A, we first have to establish that there is hard and fast evidence that this is like actively uniquely bad for you. And B, then I think the task becomes, then you like... regulate healthier products. So as we just covered, like this... This definition is like not all that useful. I think this paper is like actually quite bad, like kind of shockingly bad considering it like began this entire field. Like it's just obvious contradictions. You know that I love like a petty...

like academic paper opera, you know, I love like peer reviewed, like, interesting. You and I both love the big brother house aspect. Exactly. Of academia. Absolutely. So I found an article on.

all of the ways that they had to change the definition of this term over time, between 2009 and 2017, they changed the definition of ultra-processed foods seven times. Yeah, that tracks. And there's this article called Ultra... processed foods definitions and policy issues by michael j gibney that follows all of these changes in like a super petty but also very useful way oh it's our weight watchers episode yes you're the 17 different diets

So in 2010, the definition of ultra processed foods is updated to durable, accessible, convenient and palatable, ready to eat or ready to heat food products liable to be.

consumed as snacks or desserts or to replace home prepared dishes. I like that they keep throwing in highly palatable, which is just like, if it tastes good, it's one of these. The other, like the first thing that jumped out to me about this, the first time I read it, is this ready to... eat thing where it's like these are often ready to eat but like do you know what else is ready to eat a fucking apple totally and some of that is like

a grilled chicken breast that's cut up and thrown in a package at the grocery store and then you pick up right so like to refer to a food like that while conjuring an image of just like a heap of like hostess cupcakes and cheetos right feels misleading in a way that really verges on deliberate here. There's also the thing, you know, it says, it says they're, they're intended to replace home prepared dishes.

But also, this is not a biological concept. The purpose of making food does not affect your body differently. If I'm eating a brownie to replace a meal... That doesn't make the brownie like affect my body differently. It's like, again, we're just throwing in these concepts that are not actually related to nutrition. At least let's just be honest about what we're grappling with. Exactly. You already know which foods it is. It's the foods you already don't trust.

Right. And you already know who eats those foods and it's people who probably make less money than you do. We then in 2012 get another update where older processed foods are defined as... These are formulated mostly or entirely from ingredients and typically contain no whole foods. So this is yet another like message that you see.

In this world, even in like academic articles, it's like, they're not even food. They're like edible food-like substances. Right. This is the frankenfoods. Yeah. I'm sorry, but like a Dorito is mostly corn. I'm sorry. Yeah, I mean, to your point earlier about Lay's, another one of those is Fritos, where you're like, oh, it's just corn and oil and salt? So, okay, so finally we finally...

This is the whole episode, Aubrey. Just walking through. Technical definitions. Walking through definitions. These efforts go on for like a decade to like try to come up with a classification. They finally in 2017. come up with what's called the NOVA classification, which is now what is used in all of the studies. And from three groups, they've now made it four groups. There was a period where they're like 3A and 3B or whatever, but now they're just like, fuck it, there's four groups.

So I'm going to send you a JPEG of... Like the current definitions and some examples. Group one is unprocessed or minimally processed foods, naturally occurring foods with no added salt, sugar, oils, or fats. Group two is processed culinary ingredients. Group three is processed foods defined as food products made by adding sugar, oil and or salt to create simple products from unprocessed or minimally processed foods with increased shelf life or enhanced taste.

And then the last one is like a brick. Yeah. And that is the definition of ultra processed foods. Industrially created food products created with the addition of multiple ingredients that may include some group two ingredients. as well as additives to enhance the taste and or convenience of the product, such as hydrolyzed proteins, soy protein isolate, maltodextrin, high fructose corn syrup, stabilizers, flavor enhancers.

non-sugar sweeteners and processing aids such as stabilizers and bulking and anti-bulking agents. They're industrially created food products created with the addition of multiple ingredients to enhance taste and or convene. The examples here are commercially produced breads, rolls, cakes, cookies, donuts, breakfast cereals, soy burgers, flavored yogurts, ready to heat meals such as frozen pizzas, soft drinks and candy. Soft drinks are not rich.

to heat. I know it's such a weird... The order that they're doing it in is weird. The people who are doing this defining are not writers. I'll say that.

I think the greatest challenge that they come up with is this thing of there's processed foods, which are fine, and then there's ultra processed foods, which are bad. Yeah, this is like, I think what they spent 10 years kind of trying to figure out because obviously everything is processed. And there's stuff like cheese, which is produced in like a very processing kind of process. God damn it. But they don't want to. call that bad for you.

Because that's kind of traditional or kind of virtuous, I guess. So that's in like group three. Yeah, it just feels like so clearly such a line drawing exercise around like, how do I keep in the things I like and cut out the things I don't? Also, the one that really stuck out to me the first time I saw this was in group three, which again is good, you have freshly made bread. And then in group four, which is bad, you have commercially produced bread. Yeah.

Again, these are not nutritional concepts. Something can be made in very large batches and also be very good for you. And the other way around, and like, at what point does bread become commercially produced? On some level, all fucking bread is commercially produced. I bought it at the bakery. Well, also four talks about like high fructose corn syrup, but group two includes honey and maple syrup. Yeah, exactly. So what is the metabolic difference? Right. It feels like they're trying.

trying to have like a hundred sort of like scientific conversations at once. And I'm like, no dudes, you got to go through beat by beat and be like, here's the problem with emulsifiers and why they might be bad for your health. Here's the evidence for that. Here's why honey is.

different than high fructose corn syrup it isn't also aubrey what no one even like in academia can can fucking agree on what the four groups are i have seen honey in all four groups good yes can decide this is when i turn into that like elmo in front of flames like yes yes there's also i mean maybe this is me being annoying but like i also kind of object

To like cakes and cookies being an ultra-processed. Because like, yeah, some cakes and cookies are ultra-processed, but some cakes and cookies you bake at home with like five ingredients. And surely the whole point of a fucking processing scale... is to organize foods according to how processed they are, like the processes by which they are made.

You just have like all cakes and all cookies are in here, presumably because they're very high in fat and high in sugar. But then if we're just putting in all foods that are high in fat and sugar, then why isn't this just the fucking how high are foods and fat and sugar scale? You could also argue that like, while they've got like...

cookies in group four that if you're talking about macarons those are made with ground up almonds instead of wheat flour so does that mean that they're sugar nuts they're really trying to put a real fine point on it but in the

process of so doing they are revealing how blunt that point is i could yell that on the internet for saying this the other day but like there's also the thing of like ultra processed foods are characterized by the addition of multiple ingredients and then they list like maldo dexter and all this kind of stuff but Am I losing my mind, Aubrey? Ingredients are not the same as processing. Like if I make bread with like water, flour, yeast, and cyanide.

That's not bad because it's processed. Like the process of making that is precisely the same as if it wasn't poisonous. The reason it's poisonous is because of the ingredient. None of this stuff is processed. It's like if the ingredients are bad. then it's bad for you. But then the whole, the original article that kicked all this off was like, it's not what's in the food, it's the process.

But then they define it and it's like, oh, so it is what's in the food. It really mimics the kind of way that I feel myself behaving when I'm looking for like shampoo or something. And the container will say like, no parabens and no phthalates. And I'm like, I don't know what those things.

are but it seems good yeah yeah they don't have them and you're like sort of creating this weird deliberate byzantine definition that carves out all the things that you trust and leaves in all the things that you don't trust so OK, so that was the sort of decade long and I think unsuccessful effort to define what this term means. We then in 2019 get the first evidence that.

This category of food is uniquely bad. So this comes from a researcher named Kevin Hall, who was previously a physicist, but sort of drifted into diet research. He was the guy that wrote the Biggest Loser study. the study that found that like their metabolisms were still hella slow, like years after they were on The Biggest Loser. He, in 2015, meets Carlos Montero at a conference.

And Monteiro is like, you're looking at this the wrong way. You shouldn't be looking at nutrients. You should be looking at processing. According to the lore, he's like, I don't really buy this. I don't know about this whole ultra-processing. I'm going to design a study.

to disprove this concept. And then he like accidentally ends up proving the concept. I feel like what you're ramping up for is like what I was ramping up for when I was like, Richard Simmons says he got a book deal by sitting next to someone on a plane. I don't have... concrete evidence to be like, no, that definitely didn't happen. But I'm going to go out on a limb and be like, but really didn't happen. So the way that he does this is he gets a grant from the NIH to

basically take 20 people and like lock them in a room, not really, but like metaphorically and monitor their diets. And so what he does is he gives them for two weeks, a unprocessed diet. So like completely whole foods. And then for the next two weeks, he gives them a ultra processed diet.

And he switches this to like 10 people start with unprocessed and then go to processed. 10 people start with processed and then go to unprocessed. So that way he's like flipping them around. They're given this food and they have 60 minutes to eat as much of it as they want. And then when they're done, the researchers take it and they weigh it.

To see exactly like gram by gram exactly how much of it did they eat so that way they can measure their intake. And then, of course, there's like a ton of tests at the beginning and at the end. You and I have talked about sort of like there are a couple of ways to do nutrition research and one is like in a lab in a vacuum. Yes. It gets you much more limited in scope.

kind of data, or you can go sort of larger scale, more longitudinal, but that's usually dependent on self reports and people sort of like adhering based on the honor code. Yes. So much of what I've heard about processed foods. is about long-term health effects. Aubrey, are you saying you can't measure the long-term effect of lifestyle on health in two weeks with 20 people? I, Aubrey.

I don't know. Mike, I'm not a scientist. Have you co-hosted this show before? I don't know. I don't know, baby. I don't know. Let me just make you read the description of the results. This is from a New Yorker article by Dhruv Kular. When participants were on the ultra-processed diet, they ate 500 calories more per day and put on an average of two pounds. They ate meals faster. Their bodies secreted more insulin.

Their blood contained more glucose. When participants were on the minimally processed diet, they lost about two pounds. Researchers observed a rise in levels of an appetite suppressing hormone and a decline in one. that makes us feel hungry. So this is very decisive. It's like people who ate ultra-processed foods gained a bunch of weight. They ate more. All of these markers got worse. The unprocessed people, they did great. They lost weight. They felt awesome. This study, when it comes out...

is like, it's wild how popular the study was. The study has been cited... 1200 times. Yeah. And I don't know, this feels sort of like the glycemic index all over again, which is like a teeny tiny group of people have a specific response to a food or group of foods. And that then somehow becomes like conventional wisdom in really short order. This study is so much worse than just the fact that it was two weeks. So the whole kind of point of a study like this is to hold everything else...

constant and only look at the effect of quote unquote processing. But then if you read the fucking text of the study, that was not remotely true. The ultra processed diet had twice the energy density. Of the unprocessed diet, it had twice the saturated fat and it had 1.5 times more sugar. So these are not equivalent diets at the most basic level.

And this is like in the fucking study. You're like one group had a green salad and the other one had like a value meal from Wendy's. And the ones who had a value meal from Wendy's gained weight. Would you believe it? Aubrey, Aubrey, Aubrey. Oh no, is it gonna be? A fucking biggie-sized Frosty? Is that what we're about to talk about? The supplementary material of this.

study includes the daily menu so for every day it includes specifically what they ate for breakfast lunch and dinner with photos gogurt i am about to send you pudding packs we're gonna do day two dinner unprocessed menu day two dinner Stir fried beef tender roast with broccoli, onions, sweet peppers, ginger, garlic, and olive oil, basmati rice.

orange slices, pecan halves, and salt and pepper. So it's like a nice dinner of like, I guess essentially like a stir fry. Yeah. Sauteed vegetables, sauteed beef. It looks nice, right? Sure. And then we have day two. Processed. What? What are you talking about? Just the visual. Okay. Just the visual is so fucking funny. It is two whole... chicken salad sandwiches for dinner, white bread, dinner, uh,

A cup that appears to be an entire can of canned peaches in heavy syrup. In heavy syrup. You get two Keebler shortbread cookies and four Fig Newtons. And then you get five... Crystal lights with fiber added. Even in my darkest days of like 80s, 90s, low fat fucking dieting, I did not get through five crystal lights in one day. This is actually the reason why. The energy density is so different between the two diets is because I think in an effort to hold the fiber constant.

There's no fiber in ultra-processed foods. It's like one of the things that makes them ultra-processed foods. So the only way to get participants fiber was to basically give them sodas every day with like fiber supplements in them. So these are diet lemonade, but oftentimes it's just like...

juice or like a little smoothie or milkshake, something like that. But like there are drinks with every meal for the ultra processed people. There are no drinks for the unprocessed meal. Every once in a while they get a milk or something, but like they're not getting like diet sodas or anything. So that's a huge difference between the two diets. If you were sitting down to make yourself a meal, the chances that you, that like most people.

would make two whole sandwiches and eat an entire can of peach? Right. It's not representative of how people eat it. eat. Well, also the thing that really stuck out to me is that there are three desserts with this meal. There are cookies, there are Fig Newtons, and there's a can of peaches in syrup. Almost every single meal of the older processed comes with like...

cookies or shortbread or like some sort of like pudding. There are no desserts with any of the unprocessed meals. The other like really striking thing about this is that they're not the same meal. They're completely different. If you want to do a one-to-one on your ultra process, you get the like...

I don't know, Stouffer's version of like beef and broccoli. Exactly. Okay, let's go head to head with similar dishes. This is the thing. It's like what they're actually fucking doing. They're calling this a test of like, are ultra processed foods worse for you? But it's literally, it's like. You give one group of people salads. It's like a lot of salads. You give another group of people fucking cookies.

And you're like, oh, my God, the people ate more cookies. Therefore, ultra processed foods are bad for you. Right. You gave them six cookies with every meal. Yeah. I actually think there's like a huge missed opportunity here because something people always talk about in this field is it like.

Well, pizza isn't necessarily bad for you, right? If it's a frozen pizza from the grocery outlet, then it's bad for you. But if it's like artisanal and there's only three ingredients in the dough and it's like lovingly made, then it is good for you, right? It doesn't have to be bad. So why... didn't you fucking test that hypothesis can we look at their final meal they're like the the goodbye meal the farewell Sorry, I have so many files called supplementary material. I have no doubt.

oh there it is day seven dinner it was only seven days i thought it was 14 i think they must have repeated oh they repeated yeah yeah yeah yeah okay the ultra processed menu for day seven dinner is it looks so bad also again there's fucking two desserts is made for a child yeah it really is all of them are it is

pb and j's that are packed to the gills yeah they really are like overflowing two cups of two percent milk with fiber added wolf horrible and then you get a snack pack of chocolate pudding Graham crackers, baked Cheetos. That's the way you disappoint everyone. They're the color of like glow sticks at a rave. They're the color of delicious.

I hate Cheetos, dude. Oh my God, I love, dude, anything with powdered cheese. Anything with powdered cheese. I love it so much. There's these long sections of these articles where they're like, people can't stop eating Doritos. And I'm like, really? Day seven, dinner, unprocessed menu. What you're seeing is...

Pretty sizable bowl of pasta. It looks like a salad with a side salad. It does look like a salad. This is my nightmare, Aubrey. This is it. This is where I flip over the table. Also with a side salad of green leaf lettuce. carrots and broccoli can't have too much salad apparently god it's raw broccoli too wow i wonder why people ate

500 fewer calories. Wow. We give them the most boring food imaginable. They're not listing the giant bowl of grapes, you gluttons. I guess that's the dessert. It seems visually like there's an implication here. if you weren't having two cookies, you would be eating a bowl of grapes. And I'm like, I just don't think that's how people think and eat. But also if the title of the study was like people eat more cookies than grapes, I'd be like, yeah.

I don't know that this says anything about processed versus unprocessed foods. These are different foods. But listen, if you sort of... scrape off this top layer of like sort of window dressing kind of stuff around like, we're actually concerned about long-term health conditions. We're actually concerned about blah, blah, blah. Most of those things are things like.

diabetes, like heart disease and things that we associate with fat people. So I think part of what you're seeing here is an assumption about how fat people eat and how poor people eat. Okay. So that was the.

experimental study. That was the attempt to prove that ultra-processed food is bad for you, like, in a lab. We then, of course, get a huge wave of observational studies. You can look up on, like, Google Scholar. There are...

dozens of studies that measure ultra processed foods versus non ultra processed foods. And like, they all basically find the same thing. It's like higher rates of cancer, higher rates of cardiovascular disease. Like it's all the stuff that you would expect. This is sort of the second way. that you can measure the effect of food on health. It's like you take these big studies of like hundreds of thousands of people. You give people food frequency questionnaires.

How often are you eating something? Oftentimes they'll do this in two ways at the same time. They'll be like, how often do you eat these foods in general? And they'll also do a 24-hour recall. Like, what did you do yesterday? This is like kind of as good as it gets, although people are so bad at estimating what they're eating.

eating and like especially the amounts, right? Like if you go to a restaurant and you have like pad thai, can you say how many ounces you ate? So there's that sort of layer of just gathering the basic information. But then on top of that, researchers will then go in. and they will code people's answers for ultra-processed food.

So they get these answers. This is what I eat. I ate cake yesterday, cookies yesterday, whatever. And then researchers will go in and go, aha, cake is ultra processed. So this person is, yes, eating ultra processed food. So there's two layers of errors with this. And the biggest thing with this is that they're not fucking measuring whether people are eating ultra-processed food. They're just having these food categories. So again...

Fucking cake. Cake can either be ultra processed or not ultra processed. It depends on the fucking cake. Well, and also, again, like, I wonder about, like, how are they coating things like tofu? Exactly. We've seen now multiple. ways that processed and ultra processed foods are categorized. And we've already sort of explored that like reasonable minds can differ, right? That like two people could in good faith, put the same thing in like.

any of the four different categories or two of the four categories or whatever right and they do some of the studies do actually attempt to control for that they'll have blinded uh like one researcher will do it and then another researcher will also do it like independently

They'll say like, okay, we have 95% agreement. They're attempting to control for this. But then what the real problem is that it's not actually the coders. It's the actual designers of the research. They all say like, oh, we use the NOVA classification system.

If you read studies, different studies have like different... classification so like we mentioned honey before shows up in all different categories i also notice alcohol some studies just like remove it all together they're like we're not looking at alcohol consumption some studies will put it as like not ultra processed some studies will put it as ultra processed i

Also found one that put wine and beer as not ultra processed, but like vodka as ultra processed. Mike, it's the potatoes. It's the carbs. The same study also put it was bread was not ultra processed, but. pretzels were ultra processed. When you put it in a shape that's processing, Mike. The other one that really bugs me is like hamburgers are always in the ultra processed category, but like...

I looked this up. A McDonald's hamburger is 100% beef. It's beef. It doesn't have a bunch of weird ingredients in it. Do you think there may be counting on like... buns and american cheese and ketchup and all of that kind of stuff well that's the thing is like technically yeah you could put it in there but

you again it could be ultra processed or it could not be like everything fucking else like the cookies and the cakes and the pizza like pizza is always in ultra processed as well but like it kind of matters for your whole thesis whether it's like frozen pizza

Or like homemade, artisanal, whatever, quote unquote, nice pizza. Has anyone hazarded a guess at what the mechanism is here? Yeah, this is something that you find in like the critical literature is that they're like, we're actually like as a research field.

We're actually missing a crucial component and we're kind of leapfrogging over this because we thought it was saturated fat, then we thought it was sugar, now we think it's processing but no one can agree on what the fuck processing is. There's also, Aubrey, I wrote down like nine other problems with these studies.

i'm gonna try to go through them very quickly i know you were talking a big game about we're gonna record for two hours i know i'll tell you what i'm looking at that ticker we're at one hour 54 how's it coming well we're getting we're on page 40 of 91

Another problem with these studies is they don't distinguish between different types of ultra processed food. Oftentimes it's just this weird binary distinction between like ultra processed food and everything else. So all three of the first three categories. are just like good and ultra-processed is bad. But there's a couple of studies that actually look at different categories of ultra-processed food. They're like, okay, breakfast cereal.

candy bars, various other things. In this study that looked at 10 categories of ultra-processed foods, the only ones that showed a clear and consistent association with worse disease was soda, processed meats, and alcohol.

All the other ones like cookies, refined bread, all this other stuff. It was like too mixed to really say anything. But even within those, right? Like if we're talking about breakfast cereals, my guess is that Grape Nuts is going to have a different health effect than like Lucky Charm. All of this stuff breaks down once you try to get granular. Yeah, that's kind of what I'm thinking.

OK, so you've got the entire category of sodas. I think there are probably a lot of people out there drinking like Poppy and Olipop and all of the like probiotic sodas thinking that that's a different thing. So and the final thing I want to mention.

is the lack of a dose response. So the way that they do these studies is they compare the people who eat the least ultra processed foods to people who eat the most ultra processed foods. And it's like a really wide gap. Like some people are eating like 60% ultra processed foods.

And some people are eating like 7%. When you compare the least versus the most, you do get these like pretty large effects. However, some studies actually list the effect for each of the quintiles in between. And there's something weird that like... The death risk actually goes down sometimes if you eat more ultra-processed foods. You heard it here first, team. A real effect.

should have a dose response. Like a little bit of ultra-processed foods is a little bad for you. A lot is a lot bad for you. But we don't find that in the results. One of the papers found a 50% higher cancer risk if you're eating a ton of ultra-processed foods. But then once they adjust... it for the dose response, they only found a 5% difference. Whoa! Some people, if you eat a little bit of ultra processed foods, you're actually less likely to get cancer.

That's something that never comes up. I mean, I don't think this is causal, right? And also it's based on these fucking food frequency questionnaires, so who knows? But it's like, to the extent that we can give diet advice, which we all know everybody's going to give diet advice on the basis of these fucking correlational studies, to the extent we can give diet advice...

advice it's like well yeah if you're if you're not eating any ultra processed foods you should start eating some because those people actually have a lower risk of dying well this is sort of like the like For seniors, it can be more beneficial on a number of health fronts to be in the overweight category versus the quote unquote healthy weight category, right?

But you're not seeing that as like health guidance for folks. Right. Because like this, we already have some sort of cultural conclusions drawn. Right. Ultra processed foods or Cheetos and candy bars. And those are bad for you and you shouldn't eat them.

this is maybe more damning than i mean it to be but like it feels like it's sort of masquerading as science this is what i mean with this like is this a scientific term or is this just like a thing people say yeah because i don't really mind if people say processed food But if we're going to have a scientific term, we should have clear consistency about what is in that category and what is not in that category. You don't read...

biology papers that like can't agree on what a mammal is. Like, yes, there's some edge cases, like there's platypuses, but also like in general, that's like a pretty fixed category. For this, it's like, sorry. We can't decide where bread goes. I would argue that honey is processed by bees. It's flowers processed by bees. If it's animal processed, then it's fine. I mean, I guess milk is processed by cows. Maybe we're on to something, Aubrey. Let's publish.

So this brings us to the massive mainstreaming of this term in 2023 when a guy named Chris Van Tiliken comes out with a book called Ultra Processed People. Why do we all eat stuff that isn't food and why can't we stop? As soon as it came out, we got so many episode requests. So many episode requests. So Chris Ventellican is a professor at...

My alma mater, UCL. Do you know what UCL stands for? University College of London? It's the worst name of a university in the whole fucking world. University College? Guys. That's really funny. Yesterday I had lunch at food restaurant. Listen, I went to a school called... Portland State. Oh, Portland's not a state? Do they know that? Correct. I know. Also, you went to Brown. Why are you pretending you went to a different school? I went to two years of Portland State and two years of Brown.

No, I do know this. I just like reminding listeners that you went to Brown because you hate him. Damn it. Fucking shit. Any excuse. Now you're going to leave all this shit in too. So the thing is, we're not going to go super duper into this book, mostly because I already have a podcast that does that. I can't just do fucking books all the time. The book, honestly, I've read worse from British TV presenters.

As I was going I would sort of double check things and like most factually like it mostly checks out. You don't catch him saying anything completely false. But I think the core problem of the book is that this concept of ultra-processed food just does not hold up to like 300 pages.

of discourse. I think throughout the book, you keep getting this sense that like the ultra process concept is not really helping us understand anything. So he has a whole section about climate change. that like the way that we're eating is like really bad for the climate, which is absolutely true. And then he says like, well, ultra processed foods are driving climate impacts. And I was like, are they though?

I went to the various NGOs that like rankings of like foods that are the worst for the climate. And so the top 10 foods that have the worst climate impacts are beef, lamb, cheese, cow's milk, kind of like dairy products generally. Chocolate, coffee, shrimp, palm oil, pork, and chicken. Oh, shrimp! And Chris Ventillican, like, admits this. He's like, well, you know, these aren't necessarily ultra-processed foods, but they're part of, like, this ultra-processed food system.

And he sort of tries to, like, make that work. But it's like, if you want to reduce your climate impact, you wouldn't stop eating ultra-processed food. You would stop eating meat. Like meat is like catastrophically bad for the climate, especially cows. Anything involving cows is really bad. Well, and you could argue just as much if you're saying like beef is part of the problem. Imported beef. is also a big part of the like fine dining landscape. This is the thing is he's constantly straddling.

ultra processed and unprocessed because you can eat a steak which is unprocessed but that's terrible for the planet even worse if it's like Why you from Japan? Yeah, like flown in, frozen. It just is like I don't like over and over again in the book. You're like, this is interesting as like a critique of the food system. But processing isn't like. a very good entry point to this. He also has a whole section about how ultra processed food is addictive. So I'm going to send this to you.

Nicole Avena is an associate professor at Mount Sinai in New York and a visiting professor at Princeton. Her research focuses on food addiction and obesity. She told me how ultra processed foods, especially products with particular combinations of salt, fat, sugar, and protein can drive our ancient evolved systems for wanting.

Quote, some ultra-processed foods may activate the brain reward system in a way that is similar to what happens when people use drugs like alcohol or even nicotine or morphine. The neuroscience is persuasive, if still in its early stages. There is a growing body of brain scan data showing that energy dense, hyper palatable food, ultra processed, but probably also something a really good chef might be able to make.

can stimulate changes in many of the same brain circuits and structures affected by addictive drugs. Is this just pleasure? Yeah, this is... Are you just experiencing pleasure? I read a really good... paper on this called food addiction a valid concept where like it was basically a debate like here's the case for food addiction as a real thing and here's the case against food addiction as a real thing and like again there's there's a colloquial

definition of food addiction where people say like, I'm addicted to chocolate. Like the authors are actually very like... compassionate about this and are like, if that helps you, that makes sense. Like the way that people talk about it colloquially is fine. However, as a scientific concept, the term addiction means something specific in like

brain science. And we don't actually have good data on that for food. I think that there are pitfalls to the ways that people talk about it colloquially, because there is a point at which it stops being your own internal lens and starts being a lens that you apply to other people.

it also turns into like scrutinizing other people's eating and eating habits through the lens that works for you. Right. Right. I don't think that it's like totally unproblematic how people talk about it colloquially, but agree. that the research should have a higher threshold than that. Yeah, exactly. And a lot of it basically is based on these functional MRI studies where they show you pictures of food.

Or you eat food and like you can see different parts of your brain light up as you do that. And so we always get these studies that it's like it lights up the same part of your brain as cocaine. But like, yeah, that's just like the I'm happy part of your brain. Like this is the same part of your brain that lights up.

like you see your best friend. We talked about this with like the idea of quote unquote sugar addiction in our sugar episode, right? That like, yeah, dude, you get that when you eat. Like a chocolate bar, but you also get it when you pet your dog. It's also very different person to person. Like which part of your brain lights up. It's not as easy to say. It's like, oh, the cocaine part. Like you're touching the cocaine part of your brain. It's just like, that's like the happy part.

It's very different for people. It's not really, it's not like a mature enough science to say that this exists. And then the other kind of category of evidence for food addiction is rat studies. Oh, your favorite. You can't really do... rat studies on ultra processed foods because rat, like they feed rats like little pellets.

of like specific formulations, right, of like it's 40% carbohydrates and 20% protein. So like that's basically as processed as it comes. You're making like a slurry and then drying it into pellets and feeding it to rats. So all rat food is like equally processed.

like as processed as it can possibly be. There is something, there are studies where they feed, this is literally what it's called, they feed rats sweet fat chow, which is like a specific kind of chow. And then they measure like what they do. I'm like, there's some evidence. But also most of the rat study work is on sugar addiction. And sugar addiction, as we talked about, is like very disputed in the literature. And it's just like not clear that it exists. Hang on, I gotta go on Etsy and find-

like a potter to make me a cookie jar with a label that just says sweet fat Joe. I know. I love these little studies. Where's my sweet fat Joe? At a very basic level, it's sort of indicative, this sort of stuff. But it's very, we're very far. from like kind of proving that food is addictive. And we're also very far from proving that ultra processed food is specifically addictive. It is sort of feels like a frustrating thing when we do.

cover concepts like these that like the assumption from jump is that this has to be a biological reality and that culture plays little or no role in how all of this stuff, you know, sort of gets metabolized by.

It also brings us back to the definitional problem because there's actually a study by Nicole Avina, this researcher that he's quoting here, where it's just like a qualitative survey. They just asked people, like, what food are you most, quote unquote, addicted to? Like, what are the foods that you feel... out of control around and the number one answer beans my bean shell i'm clawing my bean shelf all the time that's only you aubrey and if you want to talk about it like that that's fine

But scientifically, the bean shelf is not in the rack. Listen, get back at me when you see me at 2 a.m. in the kitchen just chomping down on dried beans. But the top five foods that people feel addicted to are chocolate, ice cream, french fries, pizza, and cookies. Most of these are not... ultra processed. Like another thing that really bugs me about this ultra processed food research is that it always includes fucking chocolate and like...

any, you pick up any, almost any like milk chocolate, basic milk chocolate bar at the store. And it has like five ingredients. Like I looked at Giro Deli. It's unsweetened chocolate, cane sugar, cocoa butter, vanilla extract, and soy lecithin. And the only sort of frankenfood ingredient in there is soy lecithin. Like, are there health effects of soy lecithin? Well, exactly. Then it's sort of like, we're back to this issue of like, what's the mechanism here?

Because are we saying soy lecithin is addictive in food or harmful? Because soy lecithin is in a shitload of foods. It's in like salad dressings, bread, etc. Those foods aren't... addictive the way that chocolate is, right? People don't have the same relationship with those foods that they have with chocolate. So it's like, sorry, what is this theory? Is it that soy lecithin is bad?

Or is it that like, well, chocolate is an ultra processed food because it's high in sugar and high in fat. If it's ultra processed because it's high in sugar and high in fat, then ultra processed isn't doing anything for us. Right. I mean, like if you're gonna... take aim at like stabilizers and emulsifiers uh-oh green juice right because if you don't put something in the green juice it separates and then you end up with like yellow liquid and green silt right in a bottle on the shelf and nobody

Nobody's buying that shit. Right. Like another emulsifier is when you put a little bit of mustard in your vinaigrette. Right. Right. You can sort of give all of these things more sort of nefarious sounding names or whatever, more complicated names. But like that doesn't actually.

establish the case, make the case that they are harmful to your health. I feel like there's this systematic lack of precision because I'm actually open to the idea that like there's stuff in food that is harming us. And like, I don't love the fact that there's like... weird fucking like hormones and the beef and shit. Like I don't love the artificialness of our food supply. However, like I would much rather that conversation be led by actual scientists who know like the dosages that...

are shown to be harmful and the ways in which it is harmful. Like we need actual evidence for these things. We can't just say like, there's chemicals in the food. Because like baking soda is a white powder that you add to bread. It's in everything. Is that...

bad for us. Well, and again, we're throwing all of this stuff in the same bucket, right? And if you sort of chase down each one of these ingredients individually, some of them may have some mixed scientific evidence. Some of it may have none. Right. We're just shunting. so many things into this sort of giant bucket labeled ultra processed foods. Yeah, I think, I mean, this also sort of brings us back to his own problems with defining the term.

Because throughout the book, the definition of this term changes a bunch of times. He starts out by saying that an ultra-processed food... is any food with any ingredient that like you wouldn't find in a standard home kitchen. Well, what? It doesn't matter the amount of that ingredient. It doesn't matter sort of like some of these ingredients are just like things you haven't heard of because like you're not a chemist. Well, and also some of them are like...

the chemical names for shit you already know the gimmick of the book is he's doing a super size me thing where he's like for 30 days i'm gonna only eat ultra processed food and of course he like gains a bunch of weight and he feels worse and he says his like mri is different whatever well yeah he's eating two people B&J's and a half a pack of graham crackers for every meal. Again, it's just very hard to separate this from like the actual contents of the food. But so he has this section.

As my diet went on, I became obsessed with what is and isn't ultra processed food. So did everyone around me. Friends started sending me ingredients lists. Does fruit concentrate means this is ultra processed food?

Yes, it does, by the way. To reiterate, that means one ingredient. If it has one ingredient, it's ultra processed. And also like... fruit concentrate is just like boiled down fruit juice yeah you could also get fruit juice and boil it down yourself and make like a barbecue sauce or whatever like i just like what sugar is i met b wilson at a

food festival at which we spoke on a panel together. She's a food journalist and author who has written about ultra processed food. She asked whether I would classify baked beans as ultra processed food. She didn't think that they were.

Canned baked beans comprising white beans in tomato sauce are a staple in the British diet. As Wilson put it, although they're obviously not the healthiest food in the world, quote, in the context of so much else that's in the average diet, there's quite a lot of... real food in the can.

This is true. Most of a tin of baked beans is actually beans and tomatoes. So these are back-to-back paragraphs, by the way. It's like, if it has fruit concentrate in it, one ingredient means it's ultra-processed, but then... As soon as we get to baked beans, he's like, well, a lot of people like them, and most of it's, you know, beans and water. Sorry, is this a scientific concept or not? Hang on, I'm looking it up. Dude! Michael.

Would you like to know the ingredients to Heinz baked beans? Oh, I have it. That's like the next thing in my notes, but read it, read it, read it. Water, white beans, tomato puree, sugar, salt, calcium, chloride, mustard, onion powder. Now, sir. They're fucking ultra processed by your own definition. You can't just say.

Oh, well, they're like a big part of like the British diet and that's important culturally and it's mostly beans. Sorry, what are we doing here? If it's this qualitative where just anything can sort of jump... from this category to the other category, then this is not a useful category for scientific research. Well, and if you're talking about like ingredients that you don't have in your kitchen, calcium chloride, if you're right, like tomato puree, like, I don't know, guys, I don't know.

What is tomato paste if not a fruit concentrate? This is like really, this is not the end of the book, but this is like to me. the culmination of like my engagement with the book because I got so annoyed at this section. So he's trying to eat a healthy diet while also doing ultra processed food. So he's like, okay, I can't just like cheat and like eat fucking cookies all the time. So like I need to look for some ultra processed food that isn't...

He goes to Sainsbury's, which is like the relatively high-end grocery store in the UK. He gets a frozen lasagna. But the problem with the frozen lasagna is that it's all like normal ingredients. It's just like wheat, pasta sauce. It doesn't count.

ultra processed in his own definition. But then he looks, he goes to Aldi, which is like the much cheaper grocery store. And that one has a bunch of like additives and emulsifiers and stuff. And he's like, okay. So then he calls a member of Carlos Montero's team. To kind of ask about this, like, well, is lasagna then kind of ultra processed?

and not ultra processed at the same time. So here's sort of the answer. Some products are not technically ultra processed food, she explained, but they use the same plastics, the same marketing and development processes, and they're made. by the same companies as ultra processed food. The additives are part of the definition, but they are not the only problem with the food.

Some additives are harmless, whereas others cause direct harms. But in either case, their presence indicates that a product probably has lots of other properties that may cause harmful effects. According to Lusada, The Sainsbury's lasagna is not ultra-processed food if you apply the technical classification, quote, but these foods are like a fantasy. They are not homemade foods. There is a very...

consistent like snobbishness throughout this book. And I think this whole concept, you're basically looking at... frozen lasagnas, which meet all of the criteria you say that you want, right? These are whole foods. They don't have too many ingredients. They don't have a bunch of chemicals in them. And you're like, oh, but they're still ultra processed because they're not homemade. People should be making it at home.

Again, is this a scientific concept or not? Because like, do we all want people to have more time to make stuff at home? Yes, fine, whatever. But it's like, now we're just judging people for like... microwaving a dinner also just like you really could say hey some frozen foods are actually not ultra processed yeah you could actually add some nuance

And this appears to be leaning away from that nuance and going, no, no, no, it's frozen. It's still bad. You didn't make it. It's still bad. Also, like I have made plenty of bad food. Yes. My housemate and I, when I was in my twenties, decided that we were. gonna make cheese sticks at home and instead of using breadcrumbs we used flaming hot cheetos that is a homemade meal i would argue

It's maybe not nutritionally our strongest effort, but also again, not nutritionally devoid of value, right? Like mozzarella cheese has like a bunch of fat and protein in it that are like generally pretty good for you.

know what i mean like there's like a bunch of stuff well i think the only thing i like ever like bake at home because i'm really bad at baking is banana bread because it's like any dumb ass can make banana bread banana bread is extremely bad for you it's really good but it's a fucking cake it's not like At one point in the book,

He actually says like, well, if something is like made with love, then it doesn't count as an older processed food. I'm just like, dude, please have a fucking definition and stick with the definition, man. Yeah, I think increasingly as we talk about this, the more.

i'm sort of in your camp of like oh well then just say junk food because that is honest fucking junk food yes it's not my favorite term but it is more honest than being like actually there are these like extremely concrete health effects that are like wide spread for like every preservative that is ever used in foods or every ingredient that you can't pronounce what a deeply weird bar yeah i can't pronounce shit people know it's like all of our inboxes me not being able to pronounce

Let's hope there's not a denouement in your food. Bjork is technically ultra-processed food at this point.

I now have no conclusion, Aubrey, because all I had was the junk food thing. We already talked about the junk food thing. Oh, sorry, sorry, sorry. So now I have no closing thoughts. Wait, can I tell you a conclusion? Oh, yeah. What is yours? You were talking about Pringles earlier, and I remembered that there was a specific name for the shape of Pringles. Sad.

Saddle bags? No, Michael. It's the universe. It's called a hyperbolic paraboloid. Wait, what? It's mathematically known as a hyperbolic... paraboloid put that on the fucking labels and nobody will ever buy them again like i will give you a food that is that uniform in color flavor texture and shape i'm like i won't fight you on that being ultra processed yeah i mean this is the thing is i feel the need to reiterate that like

Both of us are like relatively careful about how we eat. And like, I really do go out of my way to like try to eat healthy. And part of that is like avoiding, like, I don't know. Foods that should go bad, but don't go bad. That's like one of my like little food rules. I'm like, if it should be perishable and it's not perishable, I probably don't want to eat it. I don't know how like scientific that is. I think if people have food rules like this and they're kind of arbitrary.

or like kind of weird, like fine. I don't really police other people. Obviously diet related diseases like is real and is like something that we need to address. But also we need to have scientific concepts if we're going to have like... scientific approaches to issues we're still so deeply in the process of discovery about this stuff yeah totally yeah but the stuff that takes off is the stuff that comports with our cultural ideas of what is and isn't healthy which are not

the result of science, right? I just wish that we were able to have a cultural conversation about the cultural stuff and a science conversation about the science stuff. I think it's just worth being honest with ourselves that most of our sort of like hard and fast thinking about what is and is not okay to eat.

comes much more from like a set of assumptions and sort of a mismatch of like life influences. And also if it's working for you, then keep doing it. And I'm not going to tell you not to tell you what to eat or what not to eat. I am here to tell you not to eat. hyperbolic paraboloids. I'm here to tell you to eat them. Only hyperbolic paraboloids. Get the pizza flavored ones.