Processed Food is Our Evil Overlord

Most of what we as a nation eat is processed food—or technically “ultra-processed food”—to use the nutritionists’ term that allows for the fact that, for example, even triple-washed spinach is technically “processed.” This is pretty much anything that is in a package or can and has a nutritional label on it. Matthew Rees’s November 3, 2021 review of The End of Craving by Mark Schatzker summarizes it this way:

58% of calories in the American adult diet come from ultra-processed foods, 67% among children and adolescents. Such foods—prepared meats, potato chips and other snacks, really almost anything in a package—are high in sugar, salt or fat. Many also contain a witch’s brew of ingredients that make nutrition labels unintelligible: sucralose, methylcelluloses, saccharin, microparticulated protein, Solka-Floc, maltodextrins, carrageenan.

Other than transfats which are very unhealthy, I tend to think dietary fat isn’t as bad as all that, and that even salt has been overly demonized. But sugar is a slow poison. I have often pointed out that, as things stand, it isn’t easy to distinguish between going off of sugar and going off of processed foods because such a high fraction of processed food has sugar as a major ingredient. (And the most common nonsugar sweeteners in processed foods are pretty bad, too. See “Which Nonsugar Sweeteners are OK? An Insulin-Index Perspective.”) And many of the other ingredients in processed food are suspect, if only because they haven’t had a chance to be tested by time in the way things humans have eaten for centuries have been tested by time. The objective function of trying to hook people on the particular processed foods a given company is making is also likely to push processed food toward extremes one should worry about.

The End of Craving has an additional hypothesis about how processed food could mess us up. As Matthew Rees summarizes it:

Consuming foods and beverages that have been designed to fool the brain into believing that it has received nutrition when it hasn’t, says Mr. Schatzker, stimulates a desire to consume more of them. Cravings follow, and they’re satisfied with the supersize concoctions that have become a defining—and depressing—feature of America’s food landscape…. The portion size of entrées at U.S. fast-food outlets, in roughly the past three decades, has grown 24%.

Could it be that fake food—a.k.a. processed food—often isn’t very satisfying? Mark Schatzker goes there:

For inspiration, he travels to Italy to determine why people there have a healthier relation to food—and a lower obesity rate (under 8% in the north). There’s no simple explanation, but he approvingly quotes a chef in Bologna who says: “It comes down to the difference between feeding and eating. . . . Italians don’t want just to feed themselves, they want to eat. . . . They want an experience.”

Mark Schatzker also has a more out-there theory:

In Mr. Schatzker’s telling, dietary deceptions are not the only reason for Americans’ girth. In the 1940s, he notes, the U.S. government began mandating that enriched flour be fortified with B vitamins. The policy continues today, resulting in Americans ingesting niacin and thiamin at levels that are well beyond what’s needed. Mr. Schatzker describes these vitamins as essential to calories being transformed into fuel, but he cautions that their excessive consumption results in the body metabolizing a higher share of calories. “With great obesity,” writes Mr. Schatzker, “comes great B vitamin intake.”

This sounds as if it assumes a simple calories-in/calories-out model. If more B vitamin intake means more calories are absorbed, that might be more satiating and then people would adjust the amount they ate. On the other hand, enriched flour is high in easily-digested starches that are quickly broken down by the body into sugar, and many baked products have sugar added to boot. Sugar causes an insulin spike that can mess up the appetite. So enriched flour could easily mess us up, but I’m doubtful that it is the vitamin enrichment that is messing us up.

I have inveighed against processed food before. See:

I attack sugar in these posts among many others:

For organized links to other posts on diet and health, see: