Is ALL cooking "ultra-processed" food?

This video is sponsored by Squarespace. What even is an ultrarocessed food? Like, when I cook, I apply any number of processes to my food. Does that mean all of my homemade meals are processed? Does that mean I'm going to die? Well, the answer to the latter question is yes, because the same night awaits us all. And the former question also gets a yes, but also not quite. The way that we categorize foods as processed or unprocessed is a great example of how a category can be almost totally useless on the individual level, but on the aggregate level, yeah, you can learn a lot from it. In that sense, I will now compare ultrarocessed foods to the body mass index. For example, BMI is a simple ratio of height to weight. According to my BMI, I am right at the beginning of the obese category, which if you're watching this on home video, you know to be silly. I'm carrying some body fat, but I'm also heavy for my weight because I lift a lot and I eat a lot of protein. Muscle and fat are meaningfully different kinds of tissue. And when you're trying to assess the body of an individual human in front of you, you can look at them and make a judgment about their body composition. You don't need to rely on a crude metric like BMI. But when you're trying to assess the health of like a whole population of hundreds of thousands of people, you kind of do need to rely on a crude indicator. You can't afford to do a DEXA scan on every person in your gigantic population level study group to fully understand their body composition. And furthermore, we know from prior research that when people have a high BMI, it's usually not mostly because of muscle. It's usually mostly because of atyposity, fatness. So a categorization that is basically useless on the individual level becomes kind of good enough at the population level. If a 100,000 people have a BMI over 30, you really can be reasonably assured that's mostly because of high adaposity and not high muscularity. Though meaningful differences occur between different demographic groups for which researchers are increasingly accounting. Because we're going to be talking about uh fatness a lot in this little essay, I think it's important to say upfront that scientists have historically gotten a lot wrong about fatness. They used to treat fatness like a disease. Now, it's more common for them to see fatness as one of many symptoms of the broader metabolic syndrome. Fatness is one of many indicators of a potentially unhealthy diet. But again, at the individual level, tons more nuance becomes clear. Anyway, ultrarocessed food. Yes, a home-cooked meal may indeed be processed according to the prevailing system that we have for categorizing these things, which is called the NOVA classifications. But there are fine degrees of detail there that such a broad system of like three or four categories cannot account for because it's not made to be applied to individual plates of food. It's a system that helps us to understand food at the level of hundreds of thousands of plates. Right? So what are the NOVA classifications and where did they come from? The answer is really straightforward. It's this one epidemiologist in Sao Paulo, Carlos Austo Montero, a Brazilian boomer, he had a front row seat growing up to personally observe a pretty massive change in the human species. He grew up poor to middle income in a country that was growing up poor to middle income. And where it was once the case that poor people were skinny and rich people were fat, he watched this transition happen around him where things kind of flipped. Poor people started carrying a lot more body fat while rich people increasingly got themselves all sculpted and lean. What could explain this? Dr. Montero thought. Well, most obviously, advances in agriculture and global trade made food cheap such that poor people could afford more food. And most people, if given the opportunity, will eat more calories than they need because that is what we're evolved to do so that we can survive the winter. But that doesn't explain why the rich people in Brazil got skinnier, or at least they didn't get fatter at the rate that the poor people were getting fatter. So this is why Dr. Montero started studying the kinds of food that different classes of people ate. Whereas rich people could afford to pay someone to prepare them fresh food from scratch or they could afford the time to do it themselves, poor people were increasingly relying on these new prepackaged shelf stable foods entering the Brazilian market. Prepackaged ready to eat foods are associated with a whole lot of health problems. A ready to eat website, however, is awesome. And that's essentially what you get with Squarespace, sponsor of this video. 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When you're ready to make your site live, think of your old buddy Goose. Save 10% with my code, Reggusia. Thank you, Squarespace. Anyway, ultrarocessed food. If you want to study what people eat and how it affects their bodies at the population level, you have to divide things into big crude categories that are somewhat arbitrary. There is no clear bright line between processed and unprocessed foods. It's a spectrum. But to study this stuff, you have to draw lines through chunks of the spectrum. And here is how Dr. Montero drew those lines. Nova 1, minimally processed foods. These are the edible parts of organisms. To turn a citrus tree into this food and orange, a farmer processed the tree by leaving the inedible wood and bark and leaves and stuff behind at the orchard, thus isolating just the fruing body. they washed it, maybe they waxed it, and I will process it further by removing the fibrous peel before I actually eat it. Or maybe I'll remove even more of the fiber by like juicing it. All of these steps have the effect of refining the food, concentrating the digestible calories and other nutrients that were present in that original citrus tree. If I'd eaten the equivalent weight of the whole tree, I would get way fewer calories out of it because the tree is mostly cellulose and humans can't digest cellulose. So, we process it down to just the part that contains a ton of sugar, which I can digest. This orange is a kind of processed food, but very minimally so, and so it's in nova group one. Group two is called processed culinary ingredients and it's things like extra virgin olive oil. They picked the olives off a tree, they smashed them, and this is what came out. We have robbed the olive of all of its healthy fiber. It is now nearly 100% fat. And most people in the developed world eat too much fat these days. But it's not a food. It's an ingredient. Not many people drink olive oil straight and thus we're very unlikely to consume like way too much of it. So that's why it's only in group two. Group three is processed foods. And you could think of these as like combinations of group one and group two foods. Most of the food that we prepare in the kitchen could reasonably fall into this category. You take a piece of meat or a plant part from group one. You combine it with refined ingredients from group two like oil and salt and you apply heat to it maybe and there that's processed food. Does that mean that a home-cooked meal is nutritionally equivalent to whatever delicious monstrosity is over in this bag? Maybe. Get open there. But probably not. Which is why in 2010, Dr. Montero and colleagues added a new classification to the NOVA system, ultrarocessed foods. And I'm just going to read to you directly from the English translation of their 2010 paper. Quote, "The industrial processing of ultrarocessed foods is designed to create durable, accessible, convenient, attractive, ready to eat or ready to heat products. Most of them are often termed fast foods or convenience foods. They are formulated to reduce microbial deterioration, to be transportable for long distances, and to be extremely palatable, and often to be habit forming. Typically, they're designed to be consumed anywhere. In fast food establishments, at home, in place of prepared dishes and meals, while watching television, at desks, or elsewhere at work, in the street, and while driving. End quote. Is this hitting you a little too close to home? It's hitting me a little too close to home. Indeed, ultrarocessed foods now account for a majority of the calories consumed here in the United States. and in similar highly developed economies. They're not as big in the developing world, but they're getting bigger every day. And now in Brazil, it's about half the calories everybody is eating is ultrarocessed foods. And study after study shows a very strong correlation between ultrarocessed foods and metabolic syndrome, heart disease, stroke, all of that stuff. The trillion dollar question though is why is the food itself more dangerous? That's definitely the interpretation being promulgated by the likes of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., our new top public health official here in the US. And indeed, lots of studies have identified particular risks associated with particular ingredients used to make ultrarocessed foods ultra tasty, ultra convenient, and ultra cheap. If you believe that the ingredients themselves are the problem, then the logical solution is to just get them out of the food supply and the problem is fixed. Unfortunately, that so far hasn't worked. On the macro level, no intervention like that has ever been shown to stem the rising tide of metabolic syndrome. Why not? Because the food itself isn't the only thing that matters. It's also the eating context for which the food is suited. And this is something that Monto and colleagues were trying to tell us in the way that they defined ultrarocessed food. They could have said, you know, foods that contain more than 10% seed oil, well, those are ultrarocessed. But they didn't define it that way or anything like that way because it's not just about the ingredients. It might not even be primarily about the ingredients. It's about the uses for which these foods are designed. Montero at all said that ultrarocessed foods are the ones that usually come in like hermetically sealed bags, foods that you can buy anywhere for almost no money because they have unlimited shelf life and they don't need to be refrigerated. And they specifically mentioned that ultrarocessed foods are the ones that have been designed by brilliant people in lab coats to be as insanely delicious as possible to the widest group of consumers. Just as some ingredients may be directly responsible for metabolic syndrome and other health problems, some foods may simply be far more conducive to general overeating, which we know to be directly responsible for metabolic syndrome, overeating. Indeed, you would have to eat a lot of ultrarocessed foods in order to survive on them and them alone because they tend to contain far less protein and vitamins and minerals relative to the carbs and fats because they're made to be tasty and cheap, not to be good for you. There's a reason to think that an excess of omega6 fatty acids as found in seed oils is directly bad for your health. But if you believe that's the problem, then replacing seed oils with other refined fats should make everybody a whole lot healthier. And it just doesn't. In study after study where you actually compare otherwise identical diets. In practice, when people cut out seed oils, they end up eating way less processed foods because that's pretty much the only way to avoid seed oils is to cut out processed foods and you end up eating a whole lot healthier. The bigger problem is probably that ultrarocessed foods are way too tasty and available for our own good and seed oils just happen to be the best kind of fat to use in these treats because you know they're they're cheap and they're flavorless. But if you tried to make the same treat with another kind of fat, you'd still end up with a really unhealthy product. Because to make it shelf stable, you would need to provide most of the moisture in the recipe with some kind of fat as opposed to water. And most of us eat way too much fat. Maybe switching out seed oils would make the food a little more expensive and that might help us all to eat a little bit less of it. But in that case, the better public policy might just be to like tax the foods more and make them more expensive or to regulate them in some other way to make them less available. That might be the more effective intervention as opposed to just swapping out the seed oil for another kind of fat that's going to have its own health hazards like saturated fats from animals. Or the more effective intervention might be to subsidize or to regulate the cost of the new generation of hormone-based appetite suppressants that is proving to be incredibly effective and safe. I don't know. This is why these distinctions really matter. We will make the wrong choices if we fail to understand exactly why and how our food is bad for us. We really like our food and we really don't want to eat much differently. Therefore, we want to believe that if we can just cut out a few like toxic ingredients, well, then we can just go on eating snack cake garbage while watching YouTube videos in parking lots. I want to believe that's true. Unfortunately, it probably just isn't true. But this is why we need more good research to inform public policy on what is the biggest public health crisis facing the developed world. Unfortunately, the research is getting worse in large measure due to the growing influence of RFK Jr. and his allies. Here is a recent study out of the US where scientists fed people uh milkshakes and measured the dopamine levels in their brains. what they were trying to see if like a super sweet, fatty, tasty food stimulated the brain in the same way that addictive drugs stimulate the brain. And in this one experiment at least, the answer was no. Milkshakes did not seem to elevate brain dopamine at anywhere near the levels of say opioid drugs. That doesn't mean that processed food isn't addictive. It may well be addictive, but this study does not support that conclusion. this one study. When it came time for these scientists to present their findings to the public, co-author Kevin Hall at the National Institute of Health says that he was censored by his new bosses at NIH. Because RFK Jr. wants the public to believe that ultrarocessed foods are addictive, and this study indicates it may not be as simple as that. Dr. Hall resigned in protest. If we want to make smart decisions, we have to deal with the evidence as it is and not just as we want it to be. Not just as we want it to be to support the conclusions that we've already made in our minds. That is something all of us are guilty of. You and me, we all cherrypick facts to support the conclusion that we want to be true. I'm sure I've done that in this video despite my best efforts not to. And this was a problem in science long before RFK showed up. But under the new US administration, the problem is rapidly getting worse, not better. Among other sources linked in the description, you will find a new article from the journal Nature, written for a general audience, super easy to read, where they try to summarize all of the ways in which the second Trump administration has defunded or otherwise injured public science in recent months. I would encourage you to read it. Things have gotten a whole lot worse since we last talked about this. Honestly, far worse than I predicted. This article, I think, also does a good job of exploring why they're cutting science, what their reasons are, and I think the article does a good job of taking those reasons seriously. Last time we talked about this, I encouraged any uh Trump voters in my audience to call their members of Congress, urged them to support funding for science, and I will now do so again in part because it seems to be working at least a little. Last month, the administration had planned to cut funding for the women's health initiative, which is a gigantic study of post-menopausal women that the NIH has been doing since 1991. Hundreds of thousands of women. The study has many welldocumented flaws, but it's huge and it's been going on for 34 years. And that kind of longitude, as they say, that kind of length of length of a study is gold in the world of health research. Many of the food health studies that I've shown you over the years were performed with data from the Women's Health Initiative, like the research on Teflon and Forever Chemicals that we've talked about. That data came from the Women's Health Initiative. You can't just shut down a study like that and start up a new one and expect to get the same scientific value out of it. The value comes from studying the same people in the same way for a very long time. It would be so unbelievably foolish to throw all that away now. And now the Trump administration says they will not do it. As of this recording at least, the Women's Health Initiative is back on. They've backed off. It's happening. So, if you ride with science, keep making your voice heard. There is reason to think it'll work, at least a little. Thanks for letting me work a little. This is a new thing. This is a a relatively short video that I'm doing in the style of how I used to do like hour-long podcasts. I think this might be a good format to add to the mix around here. Make good choices and I'll talk to you next time.