Guest Essay by Kip Hansen — 4 January 2025 — 1000 words/4 minutes
Prologue: This is a new entry to a series-of-many which have discussed ongoing scientific controversies, a specific type of which are often referred to in the science press and elsewhere as “Wars” – for instance The Monarch Wars, The Meat Wars, The Obesity Epidemic, The Salt Wars, The War in Sugar and the Great Barrier Reef Wars.
All of these controversies, these scientific wars, share common features which I laid out in Modern Scientific Controversies Part 5: Common Elements”.
The War on Food could stand as an exemplar for all of the controversies – and, in fact, it over laps with three of the previously covered Wars: The War on Sugar, The Meat War and The Obesity Epidemic.
Note: This piece is just a short introduction into the multi-part series on Ultra-processed Foods, UPFs. There will be several more similarly short essays in this series.
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The nutrition and food news today, including radio, TV, blogs, is full of stories decrying the consumption of Ultra-Processed Foods – UPFs. Normally I would give a series of links to the latest headlines but I doubt anyone could have missed them – they have been ubiquitous. Here is one typical piece, asking the main question: Ultraprocessed Foods: Are They Bad for You?
The YaleMedicine article refers to a number of recent review papers in major journals and uncritically quotes or paraphrases their conclusions in statements such as: “A review, published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) in 2024, looked at 45 studies involving almost 10 million participants. The review authors suggest that eating more ultraprocessed foods is linked to a higher risk of dying from any cause and has ties to 32 health conditions, including heart disease, mental health disorders, type 2 diabetes, and other problems”.
The “review” mentioned is Lane et al. 2023 [ pdf here ], which comes with a link to the BMJ Editorial “Reasons to avoid ultra-processed foods”. The editorial includes this statement:
“The quality of the evidence was strong for all cause mortality, obesity, and type 2 diabetes (this evidence was rated as of moderate quality using the GRADE system, which initially considers all observational studies as low quality evidence). Overall, the authors found that diets high in ultra-processed food may be harmful to most—perhaps all—body systems.”
The authors of the study report their findings like this:
As an introduction to this whole topic, let’s just examine the actual evidence found in Lane et al. 2024 and compare it to the characterization from the BMJ and the authors’ conclusion. I supply the figures from the paper, annotated, along with two explanatory graphics on evidence strength.
Let me attempt a more pragmatic, unbiased interpretation of those two tables of findings:
Every item highlighted in Yellow indicates reasons to doubt the validity of the finding, for the following reasons:
1. Odds ratios (ORs) of a magnitude of 1.02 to 1.07 are vanishingly small and are doubtfully of any significant, real world importance – and certainly are not Minimal Clinically Important Differences.
2. In all charts, any highlighted finding with Confidence Interval whiskers that include “1”, there is no significant difference – or, in plain English, “nothing done” and the effect cannot be considered either positive or negative. These individual finding should not be included in any overall result of the study and not combined with other findings for an “overall score”.
3. Studies with a GRADE rating [“a method used to assess the quality of evidence in research studies”] of Low or Very Low do not return “strong evidence”, they produce low or very low quality evidence.
4. Findings of Studies with a Credibility Score of III, IV and V are not actually evidence. They are restatements of summaries [and as we shall see are often inaccurate summaries] about the evidence found in other systematic reviews and are prone to be what John P.A. Ioannidis describes as “simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias.”
5. All Cause Mortality is neither caused nor prevented exclusively by diet. An Odds Ratio as low as 1.02 (1.01 to 1.03) is not likely to be a significant result considering the multitude of possible confounders.
There is one interesting finding in Lane 2024 that warrants a closer look: the mental health finding. The ORs are high enough to be something but the GRADE rating of the studies used are low. I would want to dig in there and see which way the Arrow of Causation is pointing – do mental/emotional problems cause increased eating of UPFs or does the eating of more UPFs cause the mental/emotional health issues. Observational studies such as these cannot answer that question, they only find an association.
We will see this same pattern repeated through all the major systematic reviews of the UPF issue: Tiny ORs/HRs, ORs/HRs with CIs that include ‘1’, studies included in reviews even though they are of Low and Very Low quality, low Credibility Scores due to type of study, studies that measure a vague, not agreed upon, shifting and ill-defined range of foods – labeled UPFs – and results claimed for a broad heterogeneous range of foods.
The next essay in this series will cover: The Shifting and Indefinite Definition of UPFs.
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Author’s Comment:
I am trying a new thing by keeping the essays in this series short enough to be read by the average reader with limited time. The result will be several shorter essays, around 1000 words, with a reading time of 4 or 5 minutes. Let me know in comments (start with “Kip – “) if this is better or not. The upside is that more readers can actually read the entire piece if they are interested. The downside is that the shorter essays will cover a limited part of the whole topic – leaving lots of questions that will have to be (hopefully) answered in subsequent essays.
Lane et al. 2024 does have some findings that may be interesting to researchers. But is uses language in the conclusion referring to “the strongest available evidence” for evidence from studies that are acknowledged to be of Low and Very Low quality. Such evidence is Not Strong (or Strongest) – it may be the “strongest” of a lot of weak evidence, but it should be so stated. Lots of weak evidence just does not add up to strong evidence.
These large observational studies can raise interesting questions but cannot and do not supply any definitive answers.
Next in this series will try to answer the question: What is Ultraprocessed Food, exactly?
Thanks for reading.
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Kip, I definitely find a shorter essay easier and don’t mind getting the big picture piecemeal. I open the longer essays in separate windows and sometimes don’t get to them. But this way odds are I read them straight away.
Decaf ==> Thank you for that — it is what I was hoping for .
I am sure that Kip Hansen will limit his diet in future solely to ultra-processed food.
rtj ==> I am agnostic on the issue regarding my personal diet — my family follows a religion-based health/diet code. When our kids were little (now grown and having their own kids), we basicially homesteaded, grew 80% of our own food, didn’t eat any meat we didn’t know by its first name and table sugar was banned from the home.
My pre-Med years at Uni taught me enough human physiology to know the anti-UPF Food Fad is based, like many modern issues, on little or no evidence, as is shown above and in my earlier essay.
Correlation is not causation, but the rise of sugar and high fructose corn syrup in food consumed by Americans certainly coincides with increasing obesity.
I wonder how much of it is due to eating while watching TV, or while scrolling on your phone, or while commenting on WUWT. Meaning you’re not paying attention to how much you’re eating.
Agree… I want to concentrate on the taste, with little distraction.
The trouble is that things were changing rapidly at the outset of the obesity epidemic. It’s hard to prove which things are to blame.
I stumbled over this video. It points out that people used to eat in a manner that would horrify most dieticians, and yet being thin was the norm. I have a pretty clear memory of the 50s and 60s, and the video accords with what I remember. (caveat emptor: the folks who made the video are selling something. They could be leading us on with small truths so they can betray us in deepest consequence.)
For what it’s worth, Nina Teicholz points out that the increase in heart disease corresponds with the increase in vegetable oil consumption. She doesn’t say it explicitly, but the obesity epidemic also correlates.
Teicholz favors a carb restricted diet, but as the Everybody Used to be Thin video points out, the obesity epidemic wasn’t caused by an increase in carb consumption.
If I were looking for something that changed, to cause the obesity epidemic, I would look at high fructose corn syrup and vegetable oil.
I think the obesity epidemic is associated with TV and other screen time, sitting still and doing nothing physical for hours on end, and an overall sedentary lifestyle. When I was a kid, and we ran around outside all the time, we could eat anything we wanted and stay thin. Physically active kids still can. The patterns you set in your childhood are the patterns you live with your entire life.
My current life is very different than my childhood life, not entirely by choice.
I think we will all slow down a little as we get older, and sometimes we get the choice taken away from us to be more active. But I also think active people tend to stay more active as they age, if they can. I am reminded of my grandmother, who never owned or wore a pair of pants, and wanted to learn to ride a bicycle in her 50s. Her doctor(!) discouraged that effort. I can’t help but believe that the lack of encouragement to be more active shortened her life. She was only 46 when I was born but looked and acted like an old lady to me all my life.
PS Grandma was a terrible cook. She didn’t need ultra-processed foods to boil the nutrition out of everything she touched, and she loved desserts. Maybe that had something to do with her overall poor health in later life.
I would look to ‘fresh air and exercise’…. far too many ‘gadgets’.
I don’t know the truth of it all but there is considerable research evidence, as has also been my personal evidence, that much exercise vs little or no exercise, make no difference is the total calorie utilization at the end of the day. The only thing that makes an actual difference is the intake amount of calories. However, I would not be surprised if the activity part of the equation has a quite significant impact on the type of tissue made by the body.
By my reading, corn syrup is just glucose. Glucose is not very sweet. Fructose is added in various measures to make it into a convenient sweetener for industrial food processing. I would guess that is less expensive than using sucrose, regular table sugar.
Sucrose, honey, cactus and date sugar, and just about any other sugar one can find, are more or less a molecule that is made of glucose and fructose, about 50/50. Just about immediately upon reaching the stomach that molecule becomes separate glucose and fructose molecules, which have different metabolic pathways. There seems to be considerable research that supports the fructose part as being the most problematic vis a vis the health of the sedentary human.
Of course over indulgence in any form puts extra burdens on multiple bodily systems. Anyway, High fructose corn syrup is really just a cheaper path to cane sugar or sugar beet sugar, etc. It isn’t any more evil in itself.
Most vegetable oils commercially available are from seeds processed at high temperature using petroleum solvents to extract to oil from the solid vegetative material. Various nutrients, such as vitamin E, are destroyed by that processing The petroleum solvent is than filtered off — but how thoroughly? and does it matter? I suspect that the source seeds are highly nutritious, as are many other seeds..
The price of sugar from sugar cane is kept high by the federal government that restricts it’s import.
No increase in carb consumption? I recall the very clear warning to kids when I was young the eating starchy foods would make you fat.
Then the government jumped in with the new “food pyramid,” claiming that no, it is eating fat that make you fat.
Then we got the obesity epidemic.
So does lack of physical activity, exercise, etc. It also correlates with the increases in volume of cheaper space travel, obnoxious public behavior, transgender activism, stupid reality shows on TV, and every single thing in the universe that has increased in the last decades. And so what?
Correlation is not causation.
Can you find any evidence that increased caloric intake does not result in increased body fat, whether cause or not? Increased muscle building exercise, wherein mostly muscle tissue is made, is an example. Both are increases in body mass.
The problem is that the rise in obesity also coincides with many things.
An increase in meat consumption.
An increase in sedentary life styles.
A rise in over all wealth meaning people could eat more in general.
Etc.
Any of these could be the cause, or they all could.
There’s a huge difference between saying it is unproven that UPFs are bad for you, and declaring that they will eat only UFPs from now on.
That is a completely nonsensical conclusion.
Yes, shorter, with “Executive Summary” at top is preferable.
Thanks so much for your contributions here and to the world at large.
ems ==> Thanks — I hoped it would be more suitable for most….but, I am a detail guy and it makes me nervous to leave so much for “the next in the series”…..
make them as long as you feel comfortable. but a concise and complete Exec Summary (there are many guidelines how to do that, eg Henrietta Tichy’s writings about Technical Writing. without a good Exec Summary upfront forces reading all and the length then becomes an issue for many as one impatiently hunts for the big picture. Writing good Exec Summaries is hard and sometimes takes more time than the author willing to take after the slog of writing something.
I enjoy longer essays when the topic is interesting and this was interesting. Shorter summaries followed by more detailed discussions have always worked for me. A good series. Thanks Kip.
BCBill ==> I am going to give it a try — in the past, I always have had the tendency to please myself, maybe at the expense of the readers….
Kip – Short is fine with me as long as the subject allows it.
Re UPFs: There was an article a week or so ago that maintained that the current definitions of UPFs look to be somewhat irrational. For example: most vegetarian meat substitutes are technically UPFs even though pragmatically many look to be reasonably healthy. Quite possibly healthier overall than the meat they are imitating. Unfortunately, I didn’t bookmark it and I can’t remember anything that would help in searching for it.
I might add that having watched nutritional guidelines shift wildly a number of times during the past 80 years, I’m skeptical that we currently know enough about nutrition to lay down any hard and fast guidelines at all other than eat what your body will tolerate and not too much of it. Until a real science of nutrition based on a solid understanding of biomechanics develops (And we look to be decades if not centuries away from that), it’s probably OK to mostly ignore this month’s food fad.
“Implications of food ultra-processing on cardiovascular risk considering plant origin foods: an analysis of the UK Biobank cohort” ?
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanepe/article/PIIS2666-7762(24)00115-7/fulltext
Leefor – No although the Lancet article is interesting. The article I’m thinking of more addressed the probable weaknesses of the current guidelines for determining if a food is ultraprocessed. BTW, I’d question the whole assumption that natural is good and processed is bad. For example, there is very little difference chemically between honey (natural) and High Fructose Corn Syrup (processed). Honey contains traces of a few nutrients, but not a lot. Hardly anybody thinks HFCS-55 is good for you unless you just need a bunch of calories. But a lot of folks think honey is just fine because it’s natural.
The purists also make me wonder how pure they really can be if they wash their food or cook it; surely our not-so-distant ancestors were eating raw meat and fruit and vegetables straight from nature. Would they prefer stone-ground flour with stone fragments to modern milled flour? Would they shrink in horror from eating an apple straight from the tree or a tomato straight from the vine?
But are current human bodies that close in total functioning to those primitive ancestors? I write “primitive” because those no-so-distance ancient Egyptians and ancient Chinese, etc. most likely did wash and cook their foods.
don k ==> HFCS-55 has just a tiny bit different ratio of sugars than table sugar. Anti-HFCS is just another food fad.
leefor ==> Thanks for that link — wasn’t yet in my research stack. I’ll take a look at it.
leefor — found the article I was thinking of — by searching on “seitan” and “ultra processed” — https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/391795/ultra-processed-foods-science-vegan-meat-rfk-maha The Title is: You’re being lied to about “ultra-processed” foods–Coverage of the latest nutrition buzzword is overly broad, arbitrary, and wildly misleading. The problem goes deeper.–by Marina Bolotnikova–Dec 19, 2024, 12:00 PM EST.
I flip my eggs only once, and carefully, then salt and pepper to taste.
Excellent! I add a dash of Frank’s and ketchup to each yoke.
I’m sure your oxen are appreciative, but what about each yolk?
How do you make an egg roll?
.
.
.
.
Just give it a little push.
bnice ==> I almost gave you a recipe….. chuckle.
Just trying to make a yoke out of it !. 🙂
Or not be careful enough where you place it on the kitchen counter.
cute.
Good point.
“eat what your body will tolerate and not too much of it“
The latter part is the key.
And the hard part, for me. I like cooking, no matter how poorly. I like handling food, cutting it up, feeling it, smelling it. trying new combinations, chewing it, the texture, everything about food, and when my cooking actually succeeds in making something good, I want to eat more of it to reward myself and enjoy it, rather than refrigerating it and reheating it later, which seldom makes it taste better.
It’s a good thing I’m not a good cook.
lol, I hear ya. I’m the opposite, hate to cook. So I probably eat way too many UPFs.
don k ==> Good to hear from a real critical thinker.
“the current definitions of UPFs look to be somewhat irrational.” That’s the topic of the next in the series, so stay tuned.
“it’s probably OK to mostly ignore this month’s food fad” Yes, it is. I have written about nutrition and diet many times, and my best understanding is: “Eat well balanced varied diet which includes many fruits and vegetables, not too much of any one thing.”
“not too much of any one thing.” Except chocolate.
I pretty much eat whatever I want, but try to follow an “all things in moderation” philosophy.
Just don’t overdo it.
The wisest view on this I have seen came from Michael Pollan.
Eat food, mainly plants, not too much of it.
Where ‘food’ means made from ingredients your grandmother would recognize. Well, it would maybe admit excessive quantities of sugar, but as a 10 word shorthand, its not bad. The classic experiment on these lines was Britain in WWII, when sugar was rationed (as was meat) and bread mandated to be made with 85% extraction flour. And the health of the population is said to have improved.
Talk to anyone in the UK over 70, and they will tell you that being hungry before meals was regarded as entirely normal, and snacks were routinely denied on the basis that you would ‘spoil your dinner’. And obesity was not unknown, but was very rare. Whereas now any feeling of hunger, however temporary, whether experienced by adult or child, is thought of as an emergency to be treat instantly by a candy or sugar laden drink.
“Real” food makes sense, but why “mostly plants”? Carnivore vs vegan. Everyone has advice, some have an agenda. Mistakes will be made.
Eggs, once verboten, have quietly been slipped into the food guide, because it’s now understood that dietary cholesterol does not affect serum cholesterol. Oops!
Great irony in this 1989 ad: These healthy “cholesterol free” fries contained trans fats which are now banned. Oops again.
https://youtu.be/dQmuRzb4MtM?si=PUUDYoTZKBeeicHm
Next on the menu: bugs. For the environment of course.
https://nationalpost.com/opinion/trudeau-9-million-bet-on-edible-crickets-runs-into-trouble
I am very fond of eating sea bugs, provided I shell them.
Plants want to kill you…look at vegans 😉
michel ==> I am over 70….and obesity was not unknown — in fact, my grandparents generation felt that prosperous people should be what would today be considered obese or overweight.
You might read my essay (a few years old now) on The Obesity Epidemic.
Kip, my own observation is that obesity has ballooned in 70 years, no pun intended.
The statistics confirm this, whatever the root cause(s).
Dave ==> There has been an increase in obesity and overweight — partly due to changing definitions — but the reality is there…there are a lot of people who are way too heavy for good health.
And they all wear ‘clinging’ clothes.
Remember, even nuclear weapons are made from all-natural ingredients.
Wouldn’t you consider the enriched uranium to be “highly processed”?
Partially homogenized….
“And the health of the population is said to have improved.” Because of the running from bomb shelter to bomb shelter.
It is also claimed that the death rate in Southern California went way down some decades ago when the doctors went on strike over the rapidly raising insurance rates.
Kip, the tiny print in some of your figures are very hard to read – can’t they be enlarged?
Sea Dog ==> If you are reading on a laptop or a monitor, in a real web browser, right-click on the image and select “Open Image in New Tab”. The new tab will contain only the image and most browsers then allow Cntrl-+ to magnify the image.
Let me know if that doesn’t work for you.
Otherwise, the studies that contain the images can be accessed directly with the links given.
Reading on a desktop.
I’ll try what you suggest.
Tried but get response “Lane-2024-None-dose response”
I suspect this old computer isn’t up to it.
Thanks anyway.
I love the way that we are at risk by being “exposed” to ultra-processed foods.
Campsie ==> All of the studies (almost) do not actually measure real exposure (eating UPFs). They do 24 hour Food Frequency Questionaires — often only ONE — and then consider that the individually eats identically, every day of the year, for years on end. Some of the studies measure national sales of foods….
Kip, thanks for the translation. Most of us do not read runic alphabet, so would never know how poor these studies are to real life.
Runic? Here I thought it was Cuneiform. It’s all Greek to me.
At 89, it is Ancient Greek to me.
So you can read it !! 🙂
Nutritional studies may be doomed from the start because people tend to lie about how much junk food they ate, and how much exercise they got.
The second problem with any study is that most people have existing beliefs BEFORE they do any study. They have expectations, confirmation bias and career pressures of an existing consensus.
With nutritional studies, 20 years later the consensus could be reversed. Meat is good. Then meet is bad.
Mr Hansen does not reveal his beliefs at the beginning of this article. Based on past articles, I believe he is biased against any claims from nutrition studies. We also do not know if Hansen eats a lot of junk foods and enjoys such foods. For all we know, he could be 4 foot tall and weigh 495 lbs., with pockets full of Oreo cookies.
If I had written an article about nutrition, I would started it by revealing my favorite foods are pizza, chili, hamburgers, salami and Coke Zero. I may not live as long as people who eat kale, Brussel’s sprouts and tofu, but at least I will enjoy my meals.
My father lived on eggs, bacon, steaks and potatoes. Not processed much except the bacon. But a very high fat diet. He died of a massive heart attack. But that was at age 98 while living on his own not in a nursing home. The theory that a high fat diet was bad news has changed too
Diet advice from expert:
https://youtu.be/u05gAMMazWY
NOTE: To save the planet, I favor a ban on the sale and consumption of baked beans to reduce methane pollution. This will offset cow burp pollution, which scientists say is the main cause of global warming. I say leave them cows alone.
Mr. Hansen reviewed and critiqued a clinical statistical meta-analysis and commented on significance of their published results. For example, one of his comments was:
This was an objective criticism of the significance of their findings. This has absolutely nothing to do with Kip’s (or your) food preferences or biases. Do you have a good understanding of statistics and do you agree with his analysis or are you just being a jerk?
The truth must be that junk foods are bad news for human health, neutral. or good news. Perhaps no one knows. Studies may not reveal the truth. I mentioned one important reason: Potential inaccuracy of self-reporting on diet and exercise. People will tend to claim they eat better diets and get more exercise than they actually do.
Hansen might have cherry picked a study that was easy to refute. Proving a bad junk food study is bad does not reveal the truth about junk foods.
Your comment, however, proves you are rude and have no sense of humor.
Thanks for the response and my mistake. You’re right. I didn’t see the humor in your post.
Richard ==> Lane et al. is the type of systematic review study called an “umbrella review”…and covers the results from “45 unique pooled analyses, including 13 dose-response associations and 32 nondose-response associations (n=9 888 373).”
Pooled analyses themselves are systematic reviews covering many other studies.
Systematic reviews or meta studies = so what? Every study has the potential for errors and biases of the authors. A systematic study adds another layer of potential errors and biases by eve more authors. Averaging a batch of bad studies does not result in a good study.
All studies have general problems:
(1) Publication bias: Favors studies with exciting results
(2) .Replication of results failures
(3) Nutrition studies add inaccurate self reporting of food intake and a large number of confounding variables such as genetics. People who eat healthier tend to also have other healthy lifestyle choices. Higher BMI people tend to get less exercise than lower BMI people
Nutrition studies are notorious for problems. Even the NIH admits that:
The Challenge of Reproducibility and Accuracy in Nutrition Research: Resources and Pitfalls
The Challenge of Reproducibility and Accuracy in Nutrition Research: Resources and Pitfalls – PMC
Sounds like you are describing climate models….
People need to be put into cages and fed controlled diets. Then some real data might emerge.
Richard ==> I often cannot tell when you are joshing and when you really mean what you say….
I am not giving nutritional advice — am am writing about studies about UPFs, I am writing about the science. I will admit — I am unabashedly biased against Junk Science.
In other essays about foods, I have pointed out tat I follow a health/diet code encouraged by my religion which does include eating meat “sparingly”.
The UPF issue is not about “Junk Food” — which you will learn in the next post in this series.
Sorry that I revealed you are 4 feet tall, weigh 495lbs. and have pockets filled with Oreo cookies. I don’t care about college degrees or what job you have. But I’d like to read an honest summary of an author’s own diet before I read his or her article about nutrition.
I think junk food “science” is an oxymoron
But Commiefornia Governor Gruesome does not. When a popular leftist gets a wacky idea, other leftists usually jump on the bandwagon”
Newsom Signs Executive Order to Crack Down on California’s Consumption of Soda, Candy, Processed Foods | The Gateway Pundit | by Cristina Laila
My bias continues to be that if it is a government-sponsored study or is government-promoted, it should be treated with the highest level of suspicion. Likewise if it is eagerly promoted by the legacy media.
Joe loved baked beans. He would have eaten them three times a day, with a bowl for dessert, if he could have.
Then Joe fell in love and got married, and had to sacrifice his beloved baked beans.
One day his car broke down on the way home from work. He was only a couple of miles from home, so decided to hoof it into town. And what did he pass on the way but a diner whose special was Boston Baked Beans?
How could he resist! Besides, the walk home would work them out of his system. So he indulged. And they were so good, he indulged again, and again, then came to his senses and toot-tooted all the way home.
His wife, the love of his life, greeted him at the front door and insisted he wear a blind fold for a surprise she had waiting for him. She guided him to the dinner table, and then the phone rang. Her mother. Oh, that could go on for hours! He could feel the pressure building, raised a leg, and let loose a good silent one, but oh the smell! Why did he have to succumb to two extra helpings! He took his napkin and waved the smell away.
On and on went the phone call, and he had to wave away three more leg lifts. Finally he heard the call winding down, and frantically waved away the last remnants.
“Joe, honey, I’m sorry it took so long. Are you ready for your surprise?” He was. She removed the blindfold and he came face to face with the realization that she had arranged a happy birthday party!
😀
I should add that Joe has a REALLY fast metabolism.
Eh, make it five miles. He can stop at a park on the way.
no need for pedalling on his bike !
“Meat is good. Then meet is bad.” Depends upon where and when one ‘meets the meat”.
It should also be pointed out that statistical significance does not automatically translate to clinical significance.
When the term “processed food” is used, those with an agenda are hoping the naive reader pictures the MacBeth Witches cackling and stirring their boiling cauldron….In fact, it usually just means someone else cooked your food first.
For some unknown reason, corn makes it’s starch in a glucose:fructose ratio of 45:55 instead of the more usual plant starch ratio of 50:50, hence the moniker of “hi fructose corn sugar.”….Fructose and glucose are freely interchangable hexose isomeres in vivo, the isomerase involved requires no energy to work its magic.
As an aside, while practicing medicine for over 40 yrs, I treated dozens of cases of colon cancer, and found that every single pt admitted to swallowing small amounts of saliva on occasion over their lifetimes…..Shouldn’t saliva be declared a toxic pollutant and banned?
I would also suspect that their diets included exposure to extraneous Dihydrogen monoxide.
That DHMO is potent stuff.
That kind of remark is all wet.
Hydrogen hydroxide is even worse. !!
Thank you. More knowledge from this site. (I have very few ‘grades’ of public schooling.)
guidoLaMoto ==> Thank you for your spot-on medical viewpoint. In fact, one “anti-UPF expert” said the if you bought a plastic wrapped food item in the grocery store, it was a UPF”.
And, you are the rare reader that knows anything about the HFCS issue and are quite right. Don’t they teach human physiology to freshmen and sophomores in Uni any more?
Maybe you could write a short educational piece on some of the most egregious nutrition/food nonsense being promulgated in the popular press? Use the submit a Story link at the top of the page.
https://dishdashboard.com/is-corn-starch-sugar/
https://www.livestrong.com/article/443630-the-relationship-between-corn-starch-and-glucose/
There are many other sources that will tell you the same thing.
Corn starch contains NO fructose. High fructose corn syrup is a frankenstein concoction.
You’re right……..I meant to write sucrose (table sugar) has a 50:50 ratio of gluc:fruc…..Corn starch is a polymere of amylose (glucose). When hydrolyzed at the factory, it produces the 55:45 ratio of fruc:gluc…As I said, those two isomers are freely interchangeable.
The reason HFCS is used in the commercial food industry is because it’s much cheaper to produce from our huge corn crop than to extract sucrose from our relatively small sugar can & sugar beet acres. Purifying sucrose is also an energy intensive process to rid the mix of caramelized sugar inevitably produced slong the way.
Kip– it’s been a long time since students were educated (Latin educere- to lead or draw out, as in the Socratic method) Now they are in-doctrinated (docere- to teach), spoon fed the Woke Agenda.
An actual definition of what Ultra Processed Foods are would be nice.
I live in the boonies of northern Florida on a fixed government income. While the grocery store in town is convenient, the prices are not. Walmart is really about the only grocery store nearby that may have everything for a one stop shop at about 20 miles away.
Some may consider white bread to be an ultra processed food. In the bread aisle at Walmart, a good 7/8th’s of that aisle is different varieties of white bread.
derbrix ==> As you will discover in the next part, store bought bread was and is considered a UPF.
“Many breads are considered ultra-processed foods (UPFs), including mass-produced white breads and commercially prepared whole-grain breads:
Labeled a UPF because it contains preservatives and additives. (All of which have been studied for years and years and declared safe for food).
In the current scheme, “artisanal breads” are not UPFs….see Part 2.
I go out of my way to avoid bread without preservatives. I don’t eat enough for it to last long enough, even in the fridge. My preservative-laden breads last several months.
Exactly….We already waste half of the food produced. Preservatives are good for the environment, as are hi yield, industrial ag techniques– more food on fewer acres
Generally one of the distinguishing traits is addition of preservatives. I’m sure Kip will get to the other traits in his next article. But one needs to remember these preservatives are added so that purchasers aren’t stricken by salmonella, ptomaine, campylobacter, etc. In fact, it is minimally processed foods such as salads and inadequate cooking temperatures that are “hands down” the health problem, NOT the addition of preservatives to your ground-up-and-squirted-thru-a-nozzle flavored, colored, anti-viral laced bag of corn puffs that has sat on the room-temperature shelf for a couple of weeks. Try a 2 week old chicken salad if you want clarity on the benefits of those preservatives.
DMac ==> Yes, very true — those who battle against preservatives are misguided. I did humanitarian work in the 3rd world for a decade – and food borne illnesses were rampant, due to lack of refrigeration and the inability to store foods safely in very warm climates.
I purchased a dozen eggs today at the local “grocery store” for $5.49. I saw some four ears of raw corn (unsheathed), wrapped in plastic for $8.99.
The nearest any other food store is 100 miles away.
Food is what grew from the ground or in the water, and what ate that food. Nothing in an Oreo cookie is food.
“Sugar, unbleached enriched flour, high oleic canola oil or palm oil, cocoa, high-fructose corn syrup, leavening agents, corn starch, salt, soy lecithin, vanillin, and chocolate.”
Hmm, a lot of those ingredients did grow from the ground.
I was going to stop eating Oreos, but you mentioned Chocolate…
Do you wash it after harvesting it? Do you cook the meat?
Congratulations! You have processed your food. I sure hope you never grind flour or combine various ingredients.
So only grains themselves, fruit vegetables and meat qualify as food?
Nope. They are all processed by nature starting with CO2 and H20.
They lost me when they decided that Whisky is “ultra-processed”:
From the British Heart Foundation”
The term ‘ultra-processed foods’ comes from the NOVA food classification system, which was developed by researchers at the University of São Paulo, Brazil.
…
Ultra-processed foods: Ultra-processed foods typically have more than one ingredient that you never or rarely find in a kitchen. They also tend to include many additives and ingredients that are not typically used in home cooking, such as preservatives, emulsifiers, sweeteners, and artificial colours and flavours.
…
Ultra processed: …, and some alcoholic drinks including whisky, gin, and rum.
Compare the above to:
Scotch whisky must: Be made of only water and malted barley, plus other cereal grains (optional); Be mashed, fermented, distilled to no more than 94.8% ABV, and matured in oak casks not exceeding 700 liters for a minimum of three years in Scotland; Not contain additives other than water and caramel coloring (e150a)
(Commonly known as plain caramel or caramel colour, E150a is a food colouring made by heating carbohydrates from various sources, like sugar (sucrose), glucose syrups, or molasses).
StuM ==> Alcoholic beverages is a stumbling block for the anti-UPFs crowd. I am a t-totaller so it doesn’t concern me.
But, and I’ll cover this in Part 2 because there seems to be an interest, it is the distilling process that they have decided (well,almost decided) that makes it a UPF.
UPFs are all about the processing — not the nutrients or ingredients.
Interesting article..but. I anxiously await your second article concerning what is an “ultra-processed food.” From that I expect to learn what you are talking about. I just had sausage (Jimmy Dean) and eggs (scrambled) for breakfast. Both get a lot of processing before arriving at my plate, including that which I do myself, but is the processing of the kind that is at issue? Is packaging, the type of packaging used, refrigeration (or not), addition of preservatives, addition of coloring agents and other very common practices are certainly “processing” but are they part of ultra-processing?
Agreed, definition would be nice.
If you buy bread from a baker, it’s processed.
If you bake the bread yourself, it isn’t. Even if both you and the baker follow exactly the same process?
MarkW ==> Or if it has an added preservative, to keep it fresh long enough to consume it all.
Kip: An old saying that is still true is: Brevity is the soul of wit.
I have long since retired from the practice of law. I had all of the fun that I could possibly have with my clothes on. One of the truly valuable lessons one of my clients taught me was that he refused to even look at any memorandum that was more than one page with bullet points and lots of white space and a typeface of less than 12 points. If you couldn’t explain what he needed to know within that compass, he couldn’t understand it and you probably didn’t understand it either.
From my Navy days, Brevity consistent with Clarity.
I look forward to your explanation of What is Ultraprocessed Food, exactly?
Is Johnnie Walker Black a UPF? What about Talisker? How about aged Parmesan? Chocolate?
All of those foodstuffs long preexisted the 20th century, none of them even vaguely resembles their raw agricultural base input, and they all represent enormous amounts time and energy invested in processing the base input into the final product.
Walter ==> It is the definition that gives more and more nutritionist and food experts a real problem — thus, next part in the series.
Gollum had the right idea.
He only ate non-processed fish with an occasional rabbit thrown in. (That is, raw.)
As a result, he had a very long life that only ended when he got cooked.
Rrrraw and rrriggling !
You can add milk to that
Milk? Is it distilled and aged in barrels for 12 years?
Its flash pasteurized at high temperature and then pumped at very high pressure through a small orifice to homogenize. An extract of sheep’s wool grease that has been treated with UV light is added to it
It is pasteurized, unless it’s whole milk, a lot of fat has been removed and most brands add vitamin D to it.
Vitamin D source is uv treated lanolin from sheep’s wool grease
Adding milk to whiskey… umm no thanks !!
Kip – A few typos, but the one that jumps out the most is in the footnote for the charts. It starts with “Entires”, which I assume should be “Entries”.
Good start, though. I also would like to see some sort of definition of UPF.
Jeff ==> Like my kids’ baseball coach used to shout: “Good Eye!” I’ll get to the correction later today….my image processing software doesn’t have spell-checking and I often make lazy errors when I type labels in.
It’s all good, Kip. For some reason these things catch my eye. It’s a curse.
Jeff ==> My wife was, once-upon-a-time, a word-level editor for an international magazine. She has the same eye — for her a blessing. I can’t do it at all.
She does not edit the images — I do — thus errors remain.
Food has been politicized and made a matter of religion for a very long time. Ultra Processed Food seems like a revival of Sylvester Graham or John Harvey Kellogg from the mid 19th and early 20th centuries.
Then, one has Ancel Keys and his pet theory about saturated fat and heart disease added onto vegans preaching.
I tend to take anything written about nutrition and purported health effects very cynically.
Tom ==> My personal view is that the entire field of nutrition has been taken over by food faddists and precautionary principle adherents.
It used to be a valid field of study when there were still discovering the low hanging fruit — Bodies need Vit C or they get scurvy…
Now the field flounders about, mired in statistical associations.
Scurvy is making a comeback in Canada.
Hell, the Canucks elected him!
There are a number of diseases that are making a comeback in many “western” countries.
I have a relative who is a cardiologist. One of the things that has happened heart wise
during/after covid is a large increase in Afib. I was told that for many of these new Afib patients
their #1 trigger is processed food. These patients can eat a small amount of say Ritz crackers
but if they eat a larger amount they will go into ectopic heartbeats then to afib within 10-15 minutes
Certain groups of people have no afib but
here in the US it is most common globally. The Chinese for example have
nearly no afib and live much longer than here in the US. Read some labels
while grocery shopping some time, 20+ ingredients is not a food but a food item IMO.
Mr Ed ==> The study on this is: Otto et al. 2023, Heartbeat: ultra-processed foods and atrial fibrillation risk . Thanks for the hint. It comes with a comment from peers:
“In the accompanying editorial, Hall, Raju and Nalliah comment that “Although this study identifies that ultraprocessed foods are independently associated with incident AF, it raises the issue of whether this is driven primarily by the diet type or by other associated factors” (figure 1). For example, weight changes and sleep patterns were not assessed over the follow- up period; perhaps an increase ultra-processed food intake is associated with weight gain or an increase in obstructive sleep apnea, either of which might explain the higher AF risk.”
This is a repeating problem with the UPF studies….as we will see in the following arts of the series.
Kip=====>
Your comment has conflated the root cause of a heart condition with
a symptoms of said condition. The dynamics of afib is very complex.
There are several stages of afib with no known cure.
In the beginning the afib comes and goes, and is medically known as paroxysmal atrial fibrillation. These episodes often but not always have have triggers. My comments above were in regards to said triggers not the root cause. Your above cited study is in reference to a root cause not an episode trigger. There is a significant difference. Do a web search for afib food triggers then scroll down and read the section about processed foods. They are referenced there as episode triggers not a root cause of afib.
As noted above,confounding factors are the most likely real cause of increased rates of a fib (if that is even true), but could also be explained by the scenario of increased salt intake–> increased fluid retention–> increased blood volume–> increased atrial stretch–> at fib. Cf- mitral stenosis & at fib.
The ‘jabs’ is where it’s at.
Ancel Keys was a very biased liar about foods.
Keys was a True Believer, not a scientist, when he refused to publish a major study of his that did not confirm his model of fats and heart disease.
One that was rejected by the AHA until he managed to get himself on the board.
“In the 1980s, tobacco giants Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds acquired the major food companies Kraft, General Foods and Nabisco, allowing tobacco firms to dominate America’s food supply and reap billions in sales from popular brands such as Oreo cookies, Kraft Macaroni & Cheese and Lunchables.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2023/09/19/addiction-foods-hyperpalatable-tobacco/
The #1 item purchased with food stamps is soda pop. Visit a Wal Mart the first week of the month
and pay attention to the carts and their contents some time.
Mr Ed ==> Why do you think people buy soda pop? Why do they buy bottled water? Why do they buy flavored bottle water? Why do they buy any articular on of the now-hundreds of varieties of beer?
Soda pop is caffeinated sugar water. They get a buzz off it. Bottled water in my
area has quite a bit to do with rural subdivisions with well water and septic tanks.
Some of these areas if you drink the well water you’re drinking out of your neighbors
septic tank–literally. In town it depends on where you live, some have a spring
source so its very good the other it’s treated. I dumped the SAD diet around 50 yrs of
age for good after a family gathering with a couple of MD’s in the mix. Most of
my shopping is around the outside of the store, not a much in the aisles.
This just came out the other day==============>
https://www.hhs.gov/surgeongeneral/priorities/alcohol-cancer/index.html
This Advisory describes the scientific evidence for the causal link between alcohol consumption and increased risk for at least seven different types of cancer, including breast (in women), colorectum, esophagus, voice box, liver, mouth, and throat.
Back during the Vietnam War the drinking age was lowered to 18 in MT due to the draft
lottery. A large number of kids I knew got into drinking regularly. For some reason
I never got into it. The ones I knew that stopped by their watering holes after work
never made it very far, 60ish then some sort of cancer. Pancreatic cancer seemed to be
common. We’re near the #1 per capita in beer consumption, the state capitol is full
of brew pubs and pot shops–literally. I guess being a poor rancher out in the sticks
had it’s benefits.
Mr Ed ==> Yes, quite right, most soda pop is fizzy sugar water with various flavors. Much of it today is “sugar free” (various artificial sweeteners). Those that drink non-sugar sodas still buy them — in my grocery store, it it the Pepsi and Coke Zero (non-sugar) that sells out the quickest. So, the “sugar buzz” his does not explain WHY people buy so much soda and bottled waters, with and without fizz and with and without flavors.
Eating well is important, for those who can afford it. The poor do not buy $7 loaves of arty bread.
Alcohol is a social curse for sure. It may or may not actually cause cancers. I too have been amazed by the incredible increase in the sheer numbers of craft beers and specialty alcoholic beverages — many aimed at the soda pop crowd.
I do not drink alcoholic beverages of any type, and haven’t for more than 40 years.
“Eating well is important, for those who can afford it”
I’ve noticed over the past 5 yrs or so is there are more food
items that when you read the ingredients list there is not
the msg-ish stuff the the UPF has in it. The price is a bit more
but not excessively.
The big food groups are heavy into the
processed glutamic acid ingredients and hide it under different names.
A web search under “processed glutamic acid” will yield
a long list of articles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monosodium_glutamate
https://www.truthinlabeling.org/hiddensources.html
https://www.salisburypediatrics.com/images/Handouts/Hidden_Sources_of_MSG.pdf
My wife and daughter are both nurses. For a number of years my
wife was in a endrochronolgy unit. She used to have a good
number of type 2 diabetics patients that were told if they would lose
weight they would not need insulin. Most wouldn’t even try. Processed
food addicts.
I’m buying RO water from the grocery store, put into my own containers The issue is taste. First I installed an RO filter system in the kitchen. Testing by a meter says the filters remove almost all of the dissolved solids. There are also three activated carbon filters for organic substances in the system. The similarly filtered store bought water from 100 miles away, almost certainly starting as the local water supply, still tastes better.
I have read much about the science/chemistry of food over the years. I find much of the dietary advice in the media science fiction. All you need to know is there are 3 things that are food carbohydrate, fat and protein. Your gut breaks down carbohydrates into the sugars and proteins to amino acids. The sugar glucose is the main metabolic fuel of the human cell. The other plant sugar is fructose which your liver converts to glucose. There is one other sugar from dairy galactose. It is also converted to glucose. The body uses the amino acids to build proteins for many uses. Fat is the secondary fuel of the human cell. That is if the body is deprived of carbs it uses fat. Fat also has various functions depending on type
Mike ==> So very good to hear from someone who knows the basics of mammalian physiology. Must have gone to school and listened in class. They used to teach this is High School….
And you are just so so right — the nonsense (non-science) they print makes me crazy!
Kip thanks. I’m retired chemist. I took an interest in food years ago when i began to see contradictions in diet and health.
From what I remember of what I’ve read, most fructose that isn’t used immediately is converted to the special type of fat that surrounds the internal organs, leading to fatty liver disease, just as drinking excess alcohol does. Fructose can be a boost for heavy exercise as it enters the system through a different metabolic path but when consumed in much quantity beyond what can be used in exercise, or without much physical activity, it has nowhere to go but to fat which is harder to use for fuel than other body fat.
Fructose is converted to glucose in the liver. Fructose is found in many fruits and vegetables. It’s particular high in fruits from which it gets its name. Cane sugar is half glucose and half fructose.
Timely, Kip. I look forward to the rest of the UPF series.
You know it is a political fad when Newsom of California issued an executive order on UPF today.
Covered a number of past food fads as examples in ebook The Arts of Truth.
Rud ==> I’ll have to check the California Kook News for the Exec Order.
READERS: Read Rud’s book, The Arts of Truth.
Man has been preserving food for thousands of years. Salting things. Smoking things. Drying things. Turning milk to cheese. Turning grains to alcohol. Without doing some type of preservation our food would very expensive and many not available to all.
We need to know what specifically is harmful at what dose. I.e. Are all sugars bad?
mkelley ==> Yes, of course, you are right — the processing to which the anti-UPF people object is what has made our food supply safe, economical, longer-lasting and more palatable.
The poison is in the dose — yet look at the evidence….
Sugars are the energy source for human bodies! (so, they are not, cannot be, bad.) It migh be possibl to eat too much of it though….
I think there is a simple cause of obesity in the US and elsewhere food has become very cheap relative to income. So people eat more. The green revolution and all that. I have a subscription to digitized historical newspapers. If you look at food ads say from the 1940-50’s and use an inflation calculator on the prices its amazing how expensive they were
Mike ==> I have looked at the Obesity Epidemic — and certainly there are far fewer people who are skinny due to the fact that they can’t afford to eat as much as they’d need.
But obesity is complicated. Much of the adverse effect of so-called UPFs is due to the correlation between consumption of large amounts of UPFs and weight gain.
Some types processing could make glucose more available thus more easily absorbed by the gut which would explain a lot.
A good historic example is the milling of grains
Studies, and even moreso studies of studies, that rely solely upon correlation without addressing causation are not scientific. They are nothing but flimflammery.
For the entire history of mankind until very recently, the vast majority of human health problems associated with consumption of food were due to either eating too little, or eating too much.
All food is subject to so-called “ultra processing” by a combination of food preservation, preparation, cooking, and digestion. One person’s “ultra processing” is mere demagoguery and name calling. The fact is all food gets reduced to fats, sugars, proteins, fiber, and trace nutrient elements in order to nourish the cells in our body. The order in which they are processed is immaterial.
Kip, this is very important work and it is crucial to keep your articles short and easy to understand. The most important person for you to reach is the average guy. You are doing important work.