Ultra-Processed Foods

Everyone agrees that processed foods are bad for you. When it comes to defining what they actually are, however, there is considerably less agreement. 

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Links!

• Nutrition and health. The issue is not food, nor nutrients, so much as processing
• Ultra-Processed Foods: Definitions and Policy Issues
• Examining the Nova Food Classification System and the Healthfulness of Ultra-Processed Foods
• A new classification of foods based on the extent and purpose of their processing
• Ultra-processed diets cause excess calorie intake and weight gain
• Why Is the American Diet So Deadly?
• Ultra-processed foods and mortality
• Association of ultra-processed food intake with risk of inflammatory bowel disease: prospective cohort study
• Academic and doctor Chris van Tulleken: ‘Ultra-processed products are food that lies to us’
• Food addiction: a valid concept?
• The study of food addiction using animal models of binge eating
• Obesity and the brain: how convincing is the addiction model?
• Ultra-processed foods and cardiovascular disease: analysis of three large US prospective cohorts
• Sugar addiction: the state of the science
• The Plastic Chemicals Hiding in Your Food
• Premature Mortality Attributable to Ultraprocessed Food Consumption in 8 Countries
• Ultra-processed food intake and animal-based food intake 

Thanks to Doctor Dreamchip for our lovely theme song!

Transcript

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[Maintenance Phase theme]

Michael: What do you have? I have one too even though it's not my turn. But what is yours? 

Aubrey: Wait, I want to know what yours is. 

Michael: No, no, no, no. I want to see what you do with it first. 

Aubrey: Hi, everybody, and welcome to Maintenance Phase, the podcast that's finding new and exciting ways to stigmatize the foods you love. 

Michael: Oh, that's good. That's very direct.

Aubrey: On brand, the other thing that I thought about as an opening is asking you what your favorite ultraprocessed food is. Mine is smoked salmon. 

Michael: Oh, Nutella. No, mine was going to be-- welcome to Maintenance Phase, the podcast that is finally going to tell the story of yellows 1 through 4. [Aubrey laughs] I'm Michael Hobbs. 

Aubrey: I'm Aubrey Gordon. If you would like to support the show, you can do that at patreon.com/maintenancephase or you can subscribe to premium episodes on Apple Podcasts. It's the same content. 

Michael: Same content. 

Aubrey: Michael. 

Michael: Aubrey.

Aubrey: We're talking about ultraprocessed foods. And this is a thing that people are 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. 

Michael: Well, okay, so the bad news is we have to start with the same tedious caveat that we start every episode with. This is my test of, can I do research without going down a bunch of unnecessary rabbit holes and then cutting hours of footage out of the show? The one thing we are going to talk about is the definition of processed food. 

Aubrey: Oh, my God, I can't wait. 

Michael: 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. When you are going about your business, you constantly hear people say, “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.” 

Aubrey: 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 ultraprocessed foods.

Michael: Exactly. 

Aubrey: We know them when we see them. 

Michael: Right. You kind of know that a Twinkie is like an ultraprocessed food. You know that Wonder Bread is an ultraprocessed food. And I want to say that, as a colloquial matter, I don't really police this stuff. If I'm with somebody and they say, “Oh, I'm trying to cut back on processed foods.” I'm not like, “How are you defining that? 

Aubrey: The research disagrees with you.

Michael: Yeah. If you are a person who's trying to avoid processed foods? Like, you know what that means,  there's all kinds of arbitrary concepts in our lives that we still manage to live by, and I think this is totally fine. The question that we're trying to confront on the show 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 “Processed foods from food stamps.” And so, it's fine to have a colloquial understanding of a term that is a little murky or a little 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, ultraprocessed foods is associated with a 5% higher risk of cardiovascular disease,” we need to have a clear understanding of what this term means.

Aubrey: I also think there is a way that processed food has come to act as a stand in for what folks maybe previously would have referred to as, “junk food.” 

Michael: God damn it, Aubrey. This is in my conclusion. This is in the conclusion of my notes. 

Aubrey: Ah shit. I am so sorry. [Michael laughs] There's an understanding that it might be uncouth or judgmental to refer to some foods as “junk foods” and processed sounds like more technical or more descriptive or something to people. 

Michael: Fine, Aubrey. I'll scroll down to the part of my notes where I have information about this. 

Aubrey: I was thinking about this episode last night, and I was looking at my beloved bean shelf. Do my beans count as ultraprocessed? What about, I have a jar of barley. Is that ultraprocessed? The closer you get to trying to find a line, the murkier it gets. It's very impressionist. It makes sense from a distance. And then you get up close and you're like, “No.” 

Michael: 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, “food I don't like.” You're like, “Okay, everybody's going to define it differently.” Whereas processed food feels objective. 

Aubrey: Yeah. 

Michael: But it turns out to be just as arbitrary. [laughs] It just sounds less arbitrary. 

Aubrey: There is something that is genuinely helpful about people just owning up to their judgments and biases because then you actually can have a conversation about it-

Michael: Exactly. 

Aubrey: -versus someone who goes, “Oh, it's not junk food, it's ultraprocessed foods” where they just keep seeking a new refuge from any conversation about how they actually feel. 

Michael: So, the first thing to know about the term “processed food” is that it's been around much longer than I knew. So, I went on that Google Ngram thing, that is 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 the New York Times, 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.” [laughs] 

Aubrey: Wait, wait, Mike, hang on. 

Michael: Are you doing a rat soundboard right now? Are you getting some sound?

Aubrey: No. I am not. I don’t. I am not doing this. Oh, God. [Michael laughs] I'm trying to find my fucking Zoom window to turn on the camera. 

Michael: Oh, wow. When is this from? 

Aubrey: This appears to be from the 50s. I found this in 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.” 

Michael: Dude, bring back this graphic design. 

Aubrey: It looks dope, huh? 

Michael: It's so wordy. It's like all these words and then people at a prom or something because they ate bread. 

Aubrey: Also, now I want a rat soundboard, sorry. 

Michael: 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, [Aubrey laughs] I'm like, is that something we were raising a lot in the 1970s. 

Aubrey: Sorry, are we coming back to this one a bunch?

Michael: It's like a first date question.

Aubrey: Fascinating. 

Michael: Where are you from? Do you have any siblings? Can rats live on bread? 

Aubrey: If a tree falls in the woods, [Michael laughs] no one's around to hear it. Does it make a sound? Can rats live on bread?

Michael: So, this is a study where they fed rats ordinary white bread and of course, refined flour. 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. Yeah, but what's interesting to me is, in this article, from the very beginning of this term, nobody could really define what processing is because one way to think about it's 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 more processing.

Aubrey: Yeah 100%. Yeah.

Michael: This is just a different kind of processing. So, it's like everyone uses the term processed just to mean “Food I don't like, food that I think is bad.”

Aubrey: Right. Absolutely. There are very few definitions of processed foods in terms of the colloquial usage that would include like olive oil.

Michael: This does actually get to the biggest problem with the term and the biggest problem with efforts to define it. So, the term becomes much more popular in the early 2000s, especially with the rise of Michael Pollan. I went back to the omnivore’s dilemma for this. And he refers to processed foods many times, but he doesn't refer to ultraprocessed foods. The term “ultraprocessed” is coined in 2009 by a Brazilian researcher named Carlos Monteiro, who had been doing fieldwork 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. 

As the Brazilian economy is developing, there's more of these commercial foods being produced and traditional diets are starting to give way to sodas and Twinkies and all the stuff we associate with ultraprocessed foods. So, in 2009, he puts out the first use of this term in academia, ultraprocessed 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.

Aubrey: It is now generally acknowledged that the current pandemic of obesity and related chronic diseases has as one of its important causes increased consumptions of convenience and preprepared foods. However, the issue of food processing is largely ignored or minimized in education and information about food. nutrition and health and in public health policies. 

Michael: So, this is happening in the context of this shifting understanding of food. The original understanding of “unhealthy food” was food that was high in saturated fats. 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. 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, that's really one dimensional. We need a three-dimensional understanding. And that comes from understanding the way that the food is made, basically. 

Aubrey: God, the whole time you're talking about this, I'm just thinking about other foods that are ultraprocessed, [Michael laughs] protein powder. Protein powder that's ultraprocessed. 

Michael: We're getting there, we're getting there, we're getting there. 

Aubrey: Athletic Greens. 

Michael: You read two more paragraphs, Aubrey, and then we'll get to the fun part, which is us trying to define what ultraprocessed food is.

Aubrey: Dunking on Huel. 

Michael: Yeah, exactly. 

[laughter]

Aubrey: Fuck you, Moondust.

Michael: So, I'm sending you these paragraphs about where he lays out, like, what is the problem with ultraprocessed foods? 

Aubrey: 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 ultraprocessed foods different from traditional dishes and meals is that they are inalterable. They come ready to eat or heat. Diets that include a lot of ultraprocessed foods are intrinsically, nutritionally unbalanced and intrinsically harmful to health. 

Well, now, hang on. [Michael laughs]

Michael:  Are you going to mention exactly what I was about to say? 

Aubrey: Like, you can say this, but we just talked about enriched flour and enriched cereals, right? That like, growing up, yes, absolutely breakfast cereal was everywhere, but all of that breakfast cereal was like very prominently labeled as being enriched with vitamin A, vitamin C, vitamin B. 

Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. 

Aubrey: I don't know that you can argue necessarily that it's intrinsically, nutritionally unbalanced. Again, Athletic Greens is an ultraprocessed food that advertises itself as being nutritionally balanced. 

Michael: There's also this core problem that you find in 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 process by which the foods are made.” And then it's like, “Okay, why are ultraprocessed 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. 

Aubrey: Oh my God, Mike, are we going to end up doing the reporting version of that Breyers commercial from the 90s where they made a little kid try to read the ingredients on a bucket of ice cream. 

Michael: Oh, that was a Breyers commercial. I actually looked up the ingredients of Breyers for this episode. 

Aubrey: Yeah, because they were like, “Look at Breyers.” And the kid is “Milk, cream, sugar.”

Michael: Guar gum. That kid could pronounce guar gum. 

Aubrey: [laughs] It just really feels like that's where we're headed. 

Michael: We finally get to the meat of this paper and just such fucking mic bait. The attempt to actually operationally define what ultraprocessed food is. So, he proposes in 2009, this classification that has three groups. Every single person who writes about ultraprocessed food has the same paragraph where they're like, “Well, all food is processed.” 

Aubrey: Yeah. 

Michael: Slicing up an apple is processing it, but it has no nutritional content whatsoever. But also, Pringles, making a slurry of potato and then shaping it into 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 1 food.” 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, precooking, drying, skimming, bottling and packaging. 

Aubrey: Skimmed milk process. 

Michael: This is the problem. He's saying these are forms of processing, but they don't count. It's not about whether foods are processed. It's about the intensity of the processing. 

Aubrey: Yeah, it just feels goofy to be like, “The dried beans are not processed, but you put them in a can and then they are.” 

Michael: So that is group one. These are foods that are like “They're processed, yeah.” But they're not ultraprocessed. So, they're good. 

Aubrey: We're going to look the other way. 

Michael: Yeah, they're fine, right? 

Aubrey: Yeah. 

Michael: Group 2 is substances extracted from whole foods. So, this is anything refining flour. 

Aubrey: Oh, is that my olive oil? 

Michael: 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 the bad processing. You're basically making ingredients out of whole foods. So, he says, “Traditionally, there 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 rural poor populations in Brazil.” What he's really trying to do with this classification is separate traditional food practices from modern food practices. This is a critique of the modern food system.

And so, what he's doing with group one and two is like, “Well, yeah, if you look at a poor family in rural Brazil, they might be using some flour, they're probably using some oil. When they sauté vegetables, they're using spices.” Technically, that's processing, but that's not the processing that is going to be harmful to health. These are traditional practices. But then he contrasts this with group 3, which is ultraprocessed foods. So, we're finally getting to the definition of ultraprocessed foods. So, here is this. 

Aubrey: These are made up of Group 2 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. 

Michael: That's the kind of you know it when you see it thing. 

Aubrey: Meat products such as nuggets, hot dogs, burgers and sausages made from processed or extruded remnants of meat can also be classified as ultraprocessed foods. Boy, if anyone ever describes anything I'm eating as extruded remnants of meat. [laughs] 

Michael: I mean, that's what they are.

Aubrey: It's true and I don't want to hear it. [laughs] 

Michael: I know, don't think about it. 

Aubrey: Ultraprocessed foods are basically confections of Group 2 ingredients, typically combined with sophisticated use of additives to make them edible, palatable and habit forming. They have no real resemblance to Group 1 foods, although they may be shaped, labeled and marketed so as to seem wholesome and “fresh.” Unlike the ingredients Included in Group 2, ultraprocessed 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.

Michael: The core definition is that ultraprocessed 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. Something like Nutella, which is 13% hazelnuts. And effectively everything else is just oil and sugar.

Aubrey: But Michael, that's not typically consumed with or as part of minimally processed foods, dishes and meals [Michael laughs] which means “I'm sorry, you never have dipped a banana into Nutella.” 

Michael: You know, earlier he said, “The problem with ultraprocessed foods is that they're very high in sugar, they're high in fat, they're very calorie dense.” But then he includes things in ultraprocessed here that are not particularly high in sugar or fat or energy dense, like all breads. You're including tortillas. This also excludes a lot of foods. This definition does not include potato chips because, I looked at Lay's potato chips, like Lay's original potato chips have three ingredients. 

Aubrey: Yeah, yeah, yeah. 

Michael: Potatoes, oil and salt. And lots of French fries also are just three ingredients. Right. It's potatoes, oil, and salt. That's the canonical food 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.

Aubrey: Yeah. 

Michael: You're saying ultraprocessed foods are bad for you. But then you have this definition of ultraprocessed 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 unprocessed category, like a Crème Brûlée would count as like, unprocessed even though it's extremely calorie dense, it's still mostly cream, right?

Aubrey: Yeah. And just so very similar ingredients wise to ice cream. 

Michael: Ice cream always makes the list of ultraprocessed foods. But I looked this up Häagen-Dazs ice cream has five ingredients. It's like cream, sugar, vanilla. There's nothing you can't pronounce in there. 

Aubrey: As a person who occasionally makes ice cream, there's not much to it. 

Michael: 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 ultraprocessed foods is that they're profit maximizing. They're produced by large corporations. They're these international commodities. 

Aubrey: Yes, more vibes. [laughs]

Michael: Exactly. So, he says “Ultraprocessed products are typically branded, distributed internationally and globally, heavily advertised and marketed, and very profitable. But the problem with this is that fucking fruits and vegetables and food that is good for you is also very profitable and [laughs] also produced by fucking international global corporations.” If you go to the grocery store and get strawberries, they're going to be from fucking Driscoll’s. Driscoll's is a massive corporation. 

Aubrey: 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 ride the coattails of this makes sense to you, right? Yeah, you know that corporations are bad, so they're probably also bad for your health. 

Michael: We found this in the Michael Pollan book too, that people keep presenting these dietary choices as somehow 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. You cannot escape from this by buying virtuous food. I think this is a huge mistake in the way that people frame this stuff. 

Aubrey: And if you can, then the escape is only an escape that is available to people who can afford it. 

Michael: Exactly. 

Aubrey: 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 regulate healthier products.

Michael: So, as we just covered this-- this definition is not all that useful. I think this paper is like actually quite bad, like shockingly bad considering it like began this entire field, it just obvious contradictions. You know that I love a petty, academic paper, Aubrey. I love like peer reviewed, hmm, interesting. 

Aubrey: You and I both love the Big Brother house aspects-

Michael: Exactly. 

Aubrey: -of academia. Absolutely. 

Michael: 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 ultraprocessed foods seven times. 

Aubrey: Yeah, that tracks. 

Michael: And there's this article called Ultraprocessed 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. 

Aubrey: Oh, it's our WeightWatchers episode. 

Michael: Yes. 

Aubrey: Here are the 17 different diets at WeightWatchers. [laughs] 

Michael: So, in 2010, the definition of ultraprocessed 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. 

Aubrey: I like that they keep throwing in highly palatable, which is just like, if it tastes good.

Michael: It's good. 

Aubrey: It's one of these. 

Michael: 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 like these are often ready to eat. But do you know what else is ready to eat? A fucking apple.

Aubrey: Totally. And some of that is a grilled chicken breast that's cut up and thrown in a package at the grocery store and then you pick up. So, to refer to a food like that while conjuring an image of just like a heap of like Hostess Cupcakes and Cheetos. 

Michael: Right. 

Aubrey: Feels misleading in a way that really verges on deliberate here. 

Michael: There's also the thing, it says 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 again, we're just throwing in these concepts that are not actually related to nutrition.

Aubrey: At least let's just be honest about what we're grappling with.

Michael: Exactly. 

Aubrey: You already know which foods it is. It's the foods you already don't trust. 

Michael: Right, exactly.

Aubrey: And you already know who eats those foods and its people who probably make less money than you do. 

Michael: We then in 2012 get another update where ultraprocessed foods are defined as. These are formulated mostly or entirely from ingredients and typically contain no whole foods. So, this is yet another message that you see in this world even in like academic articles. It's like they're not even food. They're edible food-like substances. 

Aubrey: Right. This is the Frankenfoods kind of stuff. 

Michael: Yeah, I'm sorry, but like a Dorito is mostly corn. I'm sorry. 

Aubrey: 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.” 

Michael: So, okay, so we finally- This is the whole episode, Aubrey [laughs]

Aubrey: Just walking through definitions.

Michael: Technical definitions.

Aubrey: Walking through definitions. 

Michael: These efforts go on for like a decade to 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 the current definitions and some examples. 

Aubrey: Group 1 is unprocessed or minimally processed foods, naturally occurring foods with no added salt, sugar, oils or fats. Group 2 is processed culinary ingredients. Group 3 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. And that is the definition of ultraprocessed foods. “Industrially created food products created with the addition of multiple ingredients that may include some group 2 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.”

Michael: They're industrially created food products created with the addition of multiple ingredients to enhance taste and/or convenience. 

Aubrey: 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. 

Michael: Soft drinks are not ready to heat. 

Aubrey: I know, it's such a weird. 

Michael: The order that they're doing it in is weird. 

Aubrey: The people who are doing the is defining are not writers. I'll say that. 

Michael: 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 ultraprocessed foods which are bad. 

Aubrey: Yeah. 

Michael: This is like I think what they spent 10 years trying to figure out because obviously everything is processed and there's stuff cheese which is produced in a very processing kind of process. God damn it. [Aubrey laughs] But they don't want to call that bad for you because that's traditional or virtuous, I guess. So that's in group 3. 

Aubrey: Yeah. It just feels like so clearly such a line drawing exercise around, how do I keep in the things I like and cut out the things I don't?

Michael: There's also the one that really stuck out to me the first time I saw this was in group 3, which again is good. You have freshly made bread. And then in group 4, which is bad, you have commercially produced bread. Again, these are not nutritional content 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.

Aubrey: Well, also, group 4 talks about high fructose corn syrup, but group 2 includes honey and maple syrup.

Michael: Yeah, exactly. 

Aubrey: So, what is the metabolic difference? It feels like they're trying to have a hundred 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. 

Michael: Also, Aubrey. 

Aubrey: What? 

Michael: No one even in academia can fucking agree on what the four groups are. I have seen honey in all four groups. 

Aubrey: Good. Yes. Love it.

Michael: No one can decide. 

Aubrey: This is when I turn into that, [Michael laughs] like, Elmo in front of flames. Like, yes. 

Michael: There's also, I mean, maybe this is me being annoying, but I also object to cakes and cookies being an ultraprocessed because some cakes and cookies are ultraprocessed, but some cakes and cookies, you bake at home with five ingredients. And surely the whole point of a fucking processing scale is to organize foods according to how processed they are. The processes by which they are made. You just have 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 in fat and sugar scale? 

Aubrey: You could also argue that, while they've got cookies in group 4, 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.

Michael: I could yell that on the Internet for saying this the other day, but there's also the thing of ultraprocessed foods that are characterized by the addition of multiple ingredients and then they list maltodextrin, all this kind of stuff. But am I losing my mind, Aubrey? Ingredients are not the same as processing. If I make bread with water, flour, yeast, and cyanide, that's not bad because it's processed. 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 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.” 

Aubrey: It really mimics the way that I feel myself behaving when I'm looking for shampoo or something. And the container will say, “No parabens and no phthalates.” And I'm like, “I don't know what those things are, but it seems good-

Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Aubrey: -that 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. 

Michael: So, okay, so that was the 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 drifted into diet research. He was the guy that wrote The Biggest Loser study, the study that found that their metabolisms were still hella slow, like, years after they were on The Biggest Loser. He, in 2015, meets Carlos Monteiro 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 ultraprocess thing. I'm going to design a study to disprove this concept.” And then he accidentally ends up proving the concept. 

Aubrey: I feel like what you're ramping up for is what I was ramping up for when I was like. Richard Simmons says he got a book deal by sitting next to someone. 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.

Michael: So, the way that he does this is he gets a grant from the NIH to basically take 20 people and lock them in a room, not really, but metaphorically and monitor their diets. And so, what he does is he gives them for two weeks an unprocessed diet. So, completely whole foods. And then for the next two weeks he gives them an ultraprocessed diet and he switches this. So, 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. 

Aubrey: 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, it gets you much more limited in scope kind of data. Or you can go larger scale, more longitudinal, but that's usually dependent on self-reports and people sort of like adhering based on the honor code.

Michael: Yes. 

Aubrey: So, much of what I've heard about processed foods is about long-term health effects. 

Michael: Aubrey, are you saying you can't measure the long-term effect of lifestyle on health in two weeks with 20 people? Aubrey, I don't know.

Aubrey: [laughs] Mike, I'm not a scientist. 

Michael: Have you cohosted this show? 

Aubrey: I don't know. I don't know. Maybe. I don't know. 

Michael: Let me just make you read the description of the results. This is from a New Yorker article by Dhruv Khullar. 

Aubrey: When participants were on the ultraprocessed diet, they ate 500 calories more per day and put on an average of 2 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 2 pounds. Researchers observed a rise in levels of an appetite suppressing hormone and a decline in one that makes us feel hungry. 

Michael: So, this is very decisive. It's people who ate ultraprocessed 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.

Aubrey: Yeah. And I don't know, this feels like the glycemic index all over again, which is 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.

Michael: This study is so much worse than just the fact that it was two weeks. So, the whole point of a study like this is to hold everything else constant and only look at the effect of “processing.” But then if you read the fucking text of the study, that was not remotely true. The ultraprocessed diet had twice the energy density of the unprocessed diet. It had twice the saturated fat and it had 1.5x more sugar. So, these are not equivalent diets at the most basic level. And this is like in the fucking study. 

Aubrey: 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? 

Michael: Aubrey, Aubrey, Aubrey. 

Aubrey: Oh no. Is it going to be a fucking biggie sized frosty? Is that what we're about to talk about? 

Michael: 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. 

Aubrey: Go-Gurt. [laughs] 

Michael: I am about to send you--[crosstalk]

Aubrey: Pudding packs. 

Michael: We're going to do day two dinner.

Aubrey: 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.

Michael: So, it's like a nice dinner of like, I guess essentially like a stir fry. Sauteed vegetables, sauteed beef. It looks nice, right? 

Aubrey: Sure. 

Michael: And then we have day two processed. 

Aubrey: What? [laughs] What are you talking? 

Michael: Just the visual. Just the visual is so fucking funny. 

Aubrey: It is two whole chicken salad sandwiches-

Michael: For dinner.

Aubrey: -on white bread.

Michael: Dinner. 

Aubrey: A cup that appears to be an entire can of canned peaches in heavy syrup.

Michael: Heavy syrup.

Aubrey: You get two Keebler shortbread cookies and four Fig Newtons. And then you get five Crystal Lights with fiber added. [Michael laughs] Even in my darkest days of 80s, 90s low-fat fucking dieting, I did not get through five Crystal Lights in one day.

Michael: 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 a fiber content, there's no fiber in ultraprocessed foods. It's like one of the things that makes them ultraprocessed 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 there are drinks with every meal for the ultraprocessed people. There are no drinks for the unprocessed meal. Every once in a while they get milk or something, but like they're not getting diet sodas or anything. So that's a huge difference between the two diets. 

Aubrey: If you were sitting down to make yourself a meal, the chances that like most people would make two whole sandwiches and eat an entire can of peaches. It just not representative of like how people eat.

Michael: 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 ultraprocessed comes with cookies or shortbread or like some sort of like pudding. There are no desserts with any of the unprocessed meals. Yeah, the other like really striking thing about this is that they're not the same meal. They're completely different. 

Aubrey: If you want to do a one to one on your ultraprocessed, you get the like, I don't know, Stouffer's version of like beef and broccoli. 

Michael: Exactly. 

Aubrey: Okay, let's go head-to-head with similar dishes. 

Michael: This is the thing is like what they're actually fucking doing. They're calling this a test of are ultraprocessed foods worse for you? But it's literally, it's like you give one group of people salads, it's a lot of salads. You give another group of people fucking cookies and they're like, “Oh my God, the people ate more cookies.” Therefore, ultraprocessed foods are bad for you. 

Aubrey: Right. You gave them six cookies with every meal, what? [laughs]

Michael: I actually think there's a huge missed opportunity here because something people always talk about in this field is that like, well, pizza isn't necessarily bad for you. If it's a frozen pizza from the grocery outlet, but 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. It doesn't have to be bad. So, why didn't you fucking test that hypothesis? 

Aubrey: Can we look at their final meal? 

Michael: The goodbye meal.

Aubrey: The farewell? 

Michael: Is that it? Sorry, I have so many files called supplementary material.

Aubrey: [Michael laughs] I have no doubt. 

Michael: There it is.

Aubrey: Day seven dinner. It was only seven days. I thought it was 14. 

Michael: I think they must have repeated. 

Aubrey: Oh, they repeated. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. The ultraprocessed menu for day seven dinner is-- [crosstalk] 

Michael: Is so bad. Also, again, there's fucking two desserts.

Aubrey: Made for a child. 

Michael: Yeah, it really is. All of them are. 

Aubrey: It is two PB&Js is that are packed to the gills.

Michael: Yeah, they really are overflowing. 

Aubrey: Two cups of 2% milk with fiber added. Woof. 

Michael: Horrible. 

Aubrey: And then you get a snack pack of chocolate pudding, Graham Crackers, baked Cheetos. That's the way you disappoint everyone. 

Michael: They're the color of glow sticks at a rave. 

Aubrey: They're the color of delicious. 

Michael: [laughs] I hate Cheetos. Dude. Cheetos looks so gross. 

Aubrey: Oh my God. I love. Dude, anything with powdered cheese. Anything with powdered cheese. I love it so much. 

Michael: There's these long sections of these articles where they're like, “People can't stop eating Doritos.” And I'm like, “Really?”

Aubrey: Day seven dinner, unprocessed menu. What you're seeing is a pretty sizable bowl of pasta. 

Michael: It looks like a salad with a side salad. [laughs]

Aubrey: It does look like a salad. 

Michael: This is my nightmare, Aubrey. This is it. [laughs] This is where I flip over the table. 

Aubrey: Also, with a side salad of green leaf lettuce, baby carrots, and broccoli. Can't have too much salad, apparently. God, it's raw broccoli too, woof.

Michael: I wonder why people ate 500 fewer calories. Wow. [laughs] We gave them the most boring food imaginable.

Aubrey: They're not listing the giant bowl of grapes, you gluttons. 

Michael: I guess that's the dessert. 

Aubrey: 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.” 

Michael: But also, if the title of this stuff was like, people eat more cookies than grapes, I'd be like, yeah, [laughs] I don't know that this says anything about processed versus unprocessed foods. These are different foods. 

Aubrey: But listen, if you scrape off this top layer of window dressing kind of stuff around, 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.

Michael: Okay. So that was the experimental study, that was the attempt to prove that ultraprocessed food is bad for you in a lab. We then of course get a huge wave of observational studies. You can look up on Google Scholar. There are dozens of studies that measure ultraprocessed foods vs non-ultraprocessed foods. And they all basically find the same thing. It's like higher rates of cancer, higher rates of cardiovascular disease. It's all the stuff that you would expect. This is the second way that you can measure the effect of food on health is like you take these big studies of 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 as good as it gets. Although people are so bad at estimating what they're eating and especially the amounts. If you go to a restaurant and you have Pad Thai, can you say how many ounces you ate? So, there's that 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 ultraprocessed 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, sake is ultraprocessed.” So, this person is, yes, eating ultraprocessed 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 ultraprocessed food. They're just having these food categories. So, again, fucking cake. Cake can either be ultraprocessed or not ultraprocessed. It depends on the fucking cake. 

Aubrey: Well, and also again, I wonder about how are they coating things like tofu? 

Michael: Exactly. 

Aubrey: We've seen now multiple ways that processed and ultraprocessed foods are categorized. And we've already explored that reasonable minds can differ, right? That like two people could in good faith put the same thing in any of the four different categories or in two of the four categories or whatever, right? 

Michael: And some of the studies do actually attempt to control for that. They'll have blinded-- one researcher will do it and then another researcher will also do it like independently. And 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. But if you read studies, different studies have different classifications. So, we mentioned, honey before shows up in all different categories. I also notice alcohol. Some studies just remove it altogether. They're like, “We're not looking at alcohol consumption.” Some studies will put it as not ultraprocessed. Some studies will put it as ultraprocessed. I also found one that put wine and beer as not ultraprocessed, but vodka as ultraprocessed. 

Aubrey: Mike. It's the potatoes, it's the carbs. 

Michael: The same study also put it was bread was not ultraprocessed, but pretzels were ultraprocessed. [laughs]

Aubrey: When you put it in a shape, that's processing, Mike. 

Michael: The other one that really bugs me is like, hamburgers are always in the ultraprocessed category. But 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. 

Aubrey: Do you think they're maybe counting on buns and American cheese and ketchup and all of that kind of stuff? 

Michael: Well, that's the thing is, technically, yeah, you could put it in there, but again, it could be ultraprocessed or it could not be like, everything fucking else. Like the cookies and the cakes and the pizza. Like, pizza is always in ultraprocessed as well. But it matters for your whole thesis, whether it's frozen pizza or homemade, artisanal, whatever, “nice pizza.” 

Aubrey: Has anyone hazarded a guess at what the mechanism is here? 

Michael: Yeah, this is something that you find in the critical literature, as a research field, we're actually missing a crucial component and we're 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. Yeah, there's also, Aubrey, I wrote down like nine other problems with these studies. [Aubrey laughs] I'm going to try to go through them very quickly. 

Aubrey: I know you were talking a big game about we're going to record for two hours. 

Michael: I know. 

Aubrey: I'll tell you what, I'm looking at that ticker. We're at 1 hour 54. How's it coming? 

Michael: Well, we're on page 40 of 91. [Aubrey laughs] Another problem with these studies is they don't distinguish between different types of ultraprocessed food, oftentimes It's just this weird binary distinction between ultraprocessed food and everything else. So, all three of the first three categories are just like good and ultraprocessed is bad. But there's a couple studies that actually look at different categories of ultraprocessed food. They're like, okay, breakfast cereal, candy bars, various other things. In this study that looked at 10 categories of ultraprocessed 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.

Aubrey: But even within those. If we're talking about breakfast cereals, my guess is that Grape-Nuts is going to have a different health effect-

Michael: Totally.

Aubrey: -than like Lucky Charms. 

Michael: All of this stuff breaks down once you try to get granular. 

Aubrey: Yeah, that's what I'm thinking. And like, “Okay, so you've got the entire category of sodas.” I think there are probably a lot of people out there drinking like Poppi and Olipop and all of the like probiotic sodas, thinking that's a different thing. 

Michael: 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 ultraprocessed foods to people who eat the most ultraprocessed foods. And it's like a really wide gap. Some people are eating like 60% ultraprocessed foods and some people are eating 7%. When you compare the least versus the most, you do get these pretty large effects. However, there's some studies actually list the effect for each of the quintiles in between. And there's something weird that the death risk actually goes down sometimes if you eat more ultraprocessed foods. 

Aubrey: You heard it here first team. 

Michael: A real effect should have a dose response like a little bit of ultraprocessed 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 ultraprocessed foods. But then once they adjusted it for the dose response, they only found a 5% difference. 

Aubrey: Whoa. 

Michael: Some people, if you eat a little bit of ultraprocessed foods, you're actually less likely to get cancer. That's something that never comes up. I don't think this is causal. And also, it's based on these fucking food frequency questionnaires, so who knows. But it's like to the extent that we have 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, it's like, “Well, yeah, if you're not eating any ultraprocessed foods, you should start eating some” because those people actually have a lower risk of dying. 

Aubrey: Well, this is sort of for seniors it can be more beneficial on a number of health fronts to be in the overweight category versus the “healthy weight category.” But you're not seeing that as like health guidance for folks. Because this we already have some cultural conclusions drawn. Ultraprocessed foods are Cheetos and candy bars, and those are bad for you and you shouldn't eat them. This maybe more damning than I mean it to be, but it feels like it's masquerading as science. 

Michael: This is what I mean with this. Is this a scientific term or is this just like a thing people say? 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 can't agree on what a mammal is. Yes, there's some edge cases. Like, there's platypuses, [laughs] 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. 

Aubrey: I would argue that honey is processed by bees. [Michael laughs] It is flowers processed by bees.

Michael: If its animal processed, then it's fine. I guess milk is processed by cows. Maybe we're onto something, Aubrey. Let's publish. [Aubrey laughs] So, this brings us to the massive mainstreaming of this term in 2023, when a guy named Chris van Tulleken comes out with a book called Ultraprocessed People. Why do we all eat stuff that isn't food? And why can't we stop.

Aubrey: As soon as it came out, we got so many episode requests for it.

Michael: So, many episode requests. So, Chris van Tulleken is a professor at my alma mater, UCL. Do you know what UCL stands for? 

Aubrey: University College of London. 

Michael: It's the worst name of a university in the whole fucking world. University College? guys. 

Aubrey: That's really funny. 

Michael: Yesterday, I had lunch at Food Restaurant. 

Aubrey: Listen, I went to a school called Portland State. 

Michael: Oh, Portland's not a state, do they know that? 

Aubrey: Correct. 

Michael: Do they know that is not a state?

Aubrey: Correct. I know. Oh, no. 

Michael: Also, you went to Brown. Why are you forgetting pretending you went to [laughs] school. 

Aubrey: I went to two years of Portland State and two years of Brown.

Michael: [laughs] No, I do know this. I just like reminding listeners that you went to Brown because you hate it. [laughs]

Aubrey: I hate that fucking shit. [Michael laughs]

Michael: Any excuse.

Aubrey: Now you're going to leave- [crosstalk] 

Michael: School Brown, laughs] 

Aubrey:  all this shit into-- [crosstalk] 

Michael: The Brown [laughs] 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 like, do fucking books all the time. The book honestly, I've read worse from British TV presenters. As I was going, I would double check things, and most factually, 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 ultraprocessed food just does not hold up to 300 pages of discourse. I think throughout the book you keep getting this sense that, the ultraprocessed concept is not really helping us understand anything. So, he has a whole section about climate change that the way that we're eating is like, really bad for the climate, which is absolutely true. 

And then he says, “Well, ultraprocessed foods are driving climate impacts.” And I was like, “Are they though?” I went to the various NGOs have rankings of foods that are the worst for the climate. And so, the top 10 foods that have the worst climate impact are beef, lamb, cheese, cow's milk, dairy products generally, chocolate, coffee, shrimp, palm oil, pork and chicken. 

Aubrey: Oh, shrimp. 

Michael: And Chris van Tulleken admits this. He's like, “Well, these aren't necessarily ultraprocessed foods, but they're part of this ultraprocessed food system.” And he tries to make that work, but it's like, “If you want to reduce your climate impacts, you wouldn't stop eating ultraprocessed food. You would stop eating meat.” Meat is catastrophically bad for the climate, especially cows. Anything involving cows is really bad.

Aubrey: 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 fine dining landscape.

Michael: This is the thing is he's constantly straddling ultraprocessed and unprocessed because you can eat a steak, which is unprocessed, but that's terrible for the planet. 

Aubrey: Even worse if it's like Wagyu from Japan being shipped-- [crosstalk].

Michael: Like, flown in frozen. 

Aubrey: Yes.

Michael: It just is like, “I don't like, over and over again in the book, you're like, this is interesting as 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 ultraprocessed food is addictive. So, I'm going to send this to you. 

Aubrey: Nicole Avina 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 ultraprocessed foods, especially products with particular combinations of salt, fat, sugar and protein, can drive our ancient evolved systems for wanting. “Some ultraprocessed foods may activate the brain reward system in a way that is similar to what happens when people use drugs 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, hyperpalatable food, ultraprocessed, 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? 

Michael: Yeah, this is. 

Aubrey: Are you just experiencing pleasure? 

Michael: I read a really good paper on this called “Food addiction: a valid concept?” where it was basically a debate here's the case for food addiction as a real thing. And again, there's a colloquial definition of food addiction where people say, “I'm addicted to chocolate.” Like, the authors are actually very 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 brain science, and we don't actually have good data on that for food. 

Aubrey: 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.

Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. 

Aubrey: It also turns into scrutinizing other people's eating and eating habits through the lens that works for you, right?

Michael: Right.

Aubrey: I don't think that it's totally unproblematic how people talk about it colloquially, but agreed, that research should have a higher threshold than that. 

Michael: Yeah, exactly. And a lot of it basically is based on these functional MRI studies where like, they show you pictures of food or you eat food and 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.” This is the same part of your brain that lights up when, you see your best friend. 

Aubrey: We talked about this with, the idea of “sugar addiction” in our sugar episode, right? like, “Yeah, dude, you get that when you eat a chocolate bar, but you also get it when you pet your dog.”

Michael: It's also very different person to person, which part of your brain lights up. It's not as easy to say. It's like, “Oh, the cocaine part.” You're touching the cocaine part of your brain. That's like the happy part. And it's very different for people. It's not like a mature enough science to say that this exists. And then the other category of evidence for food addiction is rat studies. 

Aubrey: Oh, your favorite. 

Michael: You can't really do rat studies on ultraprocessed foods because they feed rats like little pellets of specific formulations, right? Of like, it's 40% carbohydrates and 20% protein. So, that's basically as processed as it comes. You're making a slurry and then drying it into pellets and feeding it to rats. So, all rat food is equally processed, as processed as it can possibly be. There is 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. [Aubrey laughs] And then they measure, like, “What they do.” And there's some evidence. But also, most of the rat study work is on sugar addiction. And sugar addiction, as we talked about is very disputed in the literature. And it's just like, not clear that it exists. 

Aubrey: Hang on, I got to go on Etsy and find a potter to make me a cookie jar with a label that just says sweet fat chow.

[laughter]

Michael: I know, I love these little things. 

Aubrey: Where's the sweet fat chow? 

Michael: At a very basic level, it's indicative, this stuff. But it's very-- we're very far from proving that food is addictive. And we're also very far from proving that ultraprocessed food is specifically addictive.

Aubrey: It feels like a frustrating thing when we do cover concepts like these that 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 gets metabolized by people.

Michael: 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, “What food are you most, “addicted to”? Like, what are the foods that you feel out of control around? And the number one answer-- [crosstalk]

Aubrey: Beans. 

[laughter]

Michael: My bean shelf. I'm clawing my bean shelf all the time. [Aubrey laughs] 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-- [crosstalk]

Aubrey: Listen, get back at me when you see me at 02:00 AM in the kitchen just chomping down on dry beans.

[laughter]

Michael: But the top five foods that people feel addicted to are chocolate, ice cream, French fries, pizza, and cookies. 

Aubrey: Sure, sure. 

Michael: Most of these are not ultraprocessed, another thing that really bugs me about this ultraprocessed food research is that it always includes chocolate. And you pick up any, almost any, like milk chocolate, basic milk chocolate bar at the store. And it has five ingredients. I looked at Ghirardelli, its unsweetened chocolate, cane sugar, cocoa butter, vanilla extract, and soy lecithin. And the only Frankenfood ingredient in there is soy lecithin.

Aubrey: Are there health effects of soy lecithin?

Michael: 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. 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, well, chocolate is an ultraprocessed food because it's high in sugar and high in fat.” If it's ultraprocessed because it's high in sugar and high in fat, then ultraprocessed isn't doing anything for us.

Aubrey: I mean, if you're going to take aim at stabilizers and emulsifiers, oh, green juice. Because if you don't put something in the green juice, it separates and then you end up with yellow liquid and green silt in a bottle on the shelf and nobody's buying that shit. Another emulsifier is when you put a little bit of mustard in your vinaigrette. 

Michael: Right, right. 

Aubrey: You can give all of these things more 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.

Michael: I feel like there's this systematic lack of precision because I'm actually open to the idea that there's stuff in food that is harming us. Sure. And I don't love the fact that there's weird fucking hormones in the beef and shit. I don't love the artificialness of our food supply. However, I would much rather that conversation be led by actual scientists who know the dosages that are shown to be harmful and the ways in which it is harmful. 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? 

Aubrey: Well, and again, we're throwing all of this stuff in the same bucket. 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. We're just shunting so many things into this giant bucket labeled ultraprocessed foods. 

Michael: Yeah. I think this also brings us back to his own problem 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 ultraprocessed food is any food with any ingredient that you wouldn't find in a standard home kitchen. 

Aubrey: Whoa, whoa. 

Michael: 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 you're not a chemist. 

Aubrey: Well, and also some of them are the chemical names for shit you already know. 

Michael: The gimmick of the book is he's doing a super-size me thing where he's like, “For 30 days, I'm going to only eat ultraprocessed food.” And of course, he gains a bunch of weight and he feels worse and he says his like MRI is different, whatever. 

Aubrey: Well, yeah, he's eating two PB&Js and a half a pack of Graham crackers for every meal. 

Michael: Again, it's just very hard to separate this from the actual contents of the food. But so, he has this section. 

Aubrey: As my diet went on, I became obsessed with what is and isn't ultraprocessed food. So, did everyone around me. Friends started sending me ingredients lists. Does fruit concentrate means this is ultraprocessed food? Yes, it does, by the way.

Michael: To reiterate, that means one ingredient. If it has one ingredient, it's ultraprocessed.

Aubrey: And also, fruit concentrate is just like boiled down fruit juice. 

Michael: Yeah.

Aubrey: You could also get fruit juice and boil it down yourself and make a barbecue sauce or what. I just like I don’t know-- [crosstalk] 

Michael: [crosstalk] what sugar is.

Aubrey: I met Bee Wilson at a food festival at which we spoke on a panel together. She's a food journalist and author who has written about ultraprocessed food. She asked whether I would classify baked beans as ultraprocessed 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 “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.

Michael: 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 ultraprocessed. But then as soon as we get to baked beans, he's like, “Well a lot of people like them.” And yeah, most of it is beans and water. Sorry, is this a scientific concept or not? 

Aubrey: Hang on, I'm looking it up, “Dude. Michael-

Michael: Aubrey.

Aubrey: -would you like to know the ingredients to Heinz Baked Beans?” 

Michael: Oh, I have it. That's like the next thing in my notes. [Aubrey laughs] But read it, read it, read it. 

Aubrey: Water, white beans, tomato puree, sugar, salt, calcium chloride, mustard, onion powder, paprika extract, spices and garlic powder.

Michael: Now sir, they're fucking ultraprocessed by your own definition. You can't just say, “Oh well they're a big part of the British diet and it's important culturally and eh, it's mostly beans.” Sorry, what are we doing here? If it's this qualitative where just anything can jump from this category to the other category, then this is not a useful category for scientific research. 

Aubrey: Well, and if you're talking about like ingredients that you don't have in your kitchen. Calcium chloride, if you're right, tomato puree, I don't know guys, I don't know what is tomato paste if not a fruit concentrate? 

Michael: This is really-- this is not the end of the book, but this is to me the culmination of 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 ultraprocessed food. So, he's like, “Okay, I can't just cheat and eat fucking cookies all the time.” So, I need to look for some ultraprocessed food that isn't so bad. 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 wheat. pasta sauce, it doesn't count as ultraprocessed in his own definition. 

But then he looks, he goes to Aldi, which is the much cheaper grocery store, and that one has a bunch of additives and emulsifiers and stuff. And he's like, “Okay.” So, then he calls a member of Carlos Monteiro's team to ask about this. Well, is lasagna then ultraprocessed and not ultraprocessed at the same time? So, here's the answer. 

Aubrey: Some products are not technically ultraprocessed food, she explained, but they use the same plastics, the same marketing and development processes, and they're made by the same companies as ultraprocessed 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 Lasagne is not ultraprocessed food if you apply the technical classification. “But these foods are like a fantasy, they are not homemade foods.” 

Michael: There is a very consistent 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 ultraprocessed because they're not homemade.” People should be making it at home. Again, is this a scientific concept or not? Because 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. 

Aubrey: Also, just like, you really could say, “Hey, some frozen foods are actually not ultraprocessed.”

Michael: Yeah.

Aubrey: You could actually add some nuance and this appears to be leaning away from that nuance and going, “No, no, it's frozen, it's still bad.” You didn't make it. It's still bad. Also, I have made plenty of bad food. 

Michael: Yes. 

Aubrey: My housemate and I, when I was in my 20s, decided that we were going to make cheese sticks at home. And instead of using breadcrumbs, we used Flamin Hot Cheetos. [Michael laughs] 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? Mozzarella cheese has a bunch of fat and protein in it that are generally pretty good for you. You know what I mean? There's a bunch of stuff. 

Michael: Well, I make, the only thing I ever bake at home. Because I'm really bad at baking. Is banana bread. Any dumbass can make banana bread. Banana bread's extremely bad for you. It's really good, but it's fucking cake.

Aubrey: It is so delicious. It is so delicious. 

Michael: At one point in the book, he actually says, “Well, if something is made with love, then it doesn't count as an ultraprocessed food.” I'm just like, “Dude, please have a fucking definition and stick with the definition, man.” 

Aubrey: 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. 

Michael: Just say fucking junk food, yes. 

Aubrey: It's not my favorite term, but it is more honest than being actually, there are these extremely concrete health effects that are widespread for every preservative that is ever used in foods or every ingredient that you can't pronounce what a deeply weird bar.

Michael: Yeah. I can't pronounce shit. People know. It's like all of our inbox is me not being able to pronounce stuff.

Aubrey: Let's hope there's not a denouement in your food. 

Michael: [unintelligible 01:08:32] is technically ultraprocessed food at this point. [Aubrey laughs] I now have no conclusion, Aubrey, because all I had was the junk food thing. We already talked about the junk food thing. 

Aubrey: Oh, sorry, sorry, sorry. 

Michael: So, now I have no closing thoughts. 

Aubrey: Wait, can I tell you a conclusion? 

Michael: Oh, yeah. What is yours? 

Aubrey: You were talking about Pringles earlier, and I remembered that there was a specific name for the shape of Pringles. 

Michael: Saddlebags.?

Aubrey:  No, Michael.

Michael: It's the universe. 

Aubrey: It's called a hyperbolic paraboloid. 

Michael: Wait, what? 

Aubrey: It's mathematically known as a hyperbolic paraboloid. 

Michael: Put that on the fucking labels and nobody will ever buy them again. 

Aubrey: 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 ultraprocessed.” 

Michael: Yeah. this is the thing is, I feel the need to reiterate that both of us are like relatively careful about how we eat. And I really do go out of my way to try to eat healthy. And part of that is avoiding 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 to want to eat it. I don't know how scientific that is. I think if people have food rules like this and they're arbitrary or weird, fine, I don't really police other people. Obviously diet related disease is real and is something that we need to address. But also, we need to have scientific concepts if we're going to have scientific approaches to issues. 

Aubrey: We're still so deeply in the process of discovery about this stuff. 

Michael: Yeah, totally, yeah. 

Aubrey: 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?

Michael: Right.

Aubrey: I just wish that we were able to have a cultural conversation about the cultural stuff and a science conversation about the science stuff. 

Michael: Yeah. 

Aubrey: I think it's just worth being honest with ourselves that most of our hard and fast thinking about what is and is not okay to eat comes much more from a set of assumptions and a mishmash of life influences. 

Michael: And also, if it's working for you, then keep doing it. And I'm not going to tell you not to. 

[music]

Aubrey: Do whatever you want, we're not here to tell you what to eat or what not to eat. 

Michael: I am here to tell you not to eat hyperbolic paraboloids. 

Aubrey: I'm here to tell you to eat them. 

Michael: [laughs] Only hyperbolic paraboloids. 

Aubrey: Get the pizza flavored ones. 

[laughter]

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