Alice Callahan
Appearances
The Daily
A Turning Point for Ultraprocessed Foods
And they told the study participants that they could consume as much or as little as they wanted of these foods that were placed in front of them. So what happened? What did the study end up finding?
The Daily
A Turning Point for Ultraprocessed Foods
Well, I think I should say first, too, that Kevin Hall went into this study thinking that they would find no difference in how much people consumed or whether or not they gained weight during their time at the NIH. Because the diets were so carefully matched for nutrition, he thought that was the thing that really mattered.
The Daily
A Turning Point for Ultraprocessed Foods
And there wasn't really anything to this ultra-processed concept affecting people's food consumption or health. But what he found shocked him and shocked, I think, a lot of people. He found that while people were on the ultra-processed diet, they gained two pounds in two weeks. And they ate 500 more calories per day than they did when they were on the unprocessed diet without even realizing it.
The Daily
A Turning Point for Ultraprocessed Foods
Like they had no idea that they had consumed more food. So it's a short-term study. You don't know if that amount of sort of overconsumption of calories and weight gain might continue if the study went longer than that. But in that short amount of time, you see this really striking difference in how people responded to these very different types of meals.
The Daily
A Turning Point for Ultraprocessed Foods
It was very clear that people ate more calories than they needed when they were served these ultra-processed meals.
The Daily
A Turning Point for Ultraprocessed Foods
And one of the things that we've seen in just the last few years in this field is a real change in the way we talk about food. When I was in graduate school, we were learning all about carbs and fats and protein and vitamins and minerals and how we break these nutrients down and use them in our bodies. Nobody at that time was talking about how foods were processed.
The Daily
A Turning Point for Ultraprocessed Foods
We don't. Kevin Hall is currently conducting a second trial to try to tease that out. And he's testing a few different ideas. One goes back to that hyperpalatability concept. So maybe it's the fact that these foods are more likely to have these pairs of nutrients that light up our brains in rewarding ways and want us to come back healthy. and consume more.
The Daily
A Turning Point for Ultraprocessed Foods
Another is that ultra-processed foods tend to sort of like pack more calories in per bite. And so you might just subconsciously consume more of them because they kind of take up less space in your gut than an unprocessed food. If you can make ultra-processed foods that aren't hyper-palatable and don't pack as many calories in per bite, then people do seem to consume less of them.
The Daily
A Turning Point for Ultraprocessed Foods
So that's giving us some hints as to what is going on.
The Daily
A Turning Point for Ultraprocessed Foods
Yeah, that certainly seems to be the case. And there's another thing about ultra processed foods that I think scientists worry about, and many of us worry about too, is that they contain all of these ingredients that we can't pronounce. And, you know, it turns out many of them, we don't have a great grasp on how they affect our bodies.
The Daily
A Turning Point for Ultraprocessed Foods
You know, we have like some small studies that show, for example, that Artificial food dyes maybe affect children's behavior. Artificial sweeteners maybe change our microbiomes. You know, some of these other ingredients maybe increase inflammation levels in our bodies. This is really emerging science, but it kind of adds to the sort of accumulated concerns about these industrially made foods.
The Daily
A Turning Point for Ultraprocessed Foods
That's another great question. I mean, nutrition science has been chronically kind of notoriously underfunded by the government. So a lot of nutrition research actually ends up being sponsored by food companies and industry groups themselves. You can imagine that this has not been top of the list for food companies to investigate these effects.
The Daily
A Turning Point for Ultraprocessed Foods
In the United States, about 5% of the National Institutes of Health budget goes towards nutrition research. And I think there's a growing recognition that we may need to invest more in understanding this issue if we're going to wrap our heads around what the problem is with these foods and what we could do about it.
The Daily
A Turning Point for Ultraprocessed Foods
Well, I think scientists will always say we need more research, but we're seeing countries around the world who are saying we know enough to start taking action and we can't really afford to just let things continue as they are.
The Daily
A Turning Point for Ultraprocessed Foods
So we're seeing countries, for example, putting prominent warning labels on ultra processed foods or at least certain ultra processed foods, like big stop signs that clearly say on the front of the package, this is not a healthy choice. We're seeing countries limit marketing of ultra-processed foods to children. We're seeing them get ultra-processed foods out of school meals.
The Daily
A Turning Point for Ultraprocessed Foods
And now just in the last few years, we're seeing a lot of attention on how food processing might affect our health and especially this category of ultra-processed foods.
The Daily
A Turning Point for Ultraprocessed Foods
But here in the United States, when I talked to experts about these types of policies a couple years ago, they said it seems unlikely that a lot of those policies would really take off in the United States because we have a very strong food lobby. But things are really shifting, I think, in this conversation. We saw it during the presidential campaign. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
The Daily
A Turning Point for Ultraprocessed Foods
campaigned pretty heavily for himself and then for Trump on this idea of making America healthy again. And he talked a lot about... ultra processed foods and the effects that they're having on children's health. And I think you saw that resonate with a lot of people. And politicians on both sides of the aisle are taking an interest in this.
The Daily
A Turning Point for Ultraprocessed Foods
There was a hearing in the Senate last week where there were no senators who defended big food. It was kind of like, yeah, ultra processed foods are a problem and we need to change something in this country.
The Daily
A Turning Point for Ultraprocessed Foods
Yeah, I think it's really tough. And we are, again, talking about 70% of the food supply. And A lot of these foods, I, as a parent, do rely on. Things like breakfast cereal, honey nut Cheerios, my kids eat occasionally. But here's what I would say. We're still learning a lot.
The Daily
A Turning Point for Ultraprocessed Foods
And one of the things we really don't know is whether or not all of these foods in this huge category of ultra-processed foods are bad for us. Like just because they're industrially produced, are they unhealthy? Probably not. And we're talking about a category that includes everything from soda to whole wheat bread.
The Daily
A Turning Point for Ultraprocessed Foods
So the way I think about them is I'm looking at sort of degrees of ultra processing. Like if it's a whole wheat bread, that the only thing that makes it ultra processed is the inclusion of like one ingredient. food additive that I don't recognize. I'm less concerned about that.
The Daily
A Turning Point for Ultraprocessed Foods
I think try to sort out the sort of worst offenders, which are sugary drinks, ultra-processed meats like hot dogs and chicken nuggets, and then foods that obviously don't provide us with very much nutrition and are difficult to stop eating. Those are my kind of red flags for the ultra-processed foods I'm going to try to avoid.
The Daily
A Turning Point for Ultraprocessed Foods
So ultra-processed foods are this giant category of products that include kind of anything edible that's industrially produced, things that you can't make in your own kitchen if you tried because you wouldn't be able to get the ingredients and you don't have like the machinery necessary to make that product.
The Daily
A Turning Point for Ultraprocessed Foods
Yeah, I think that's quite possible. I'm seeing more and more addiction scientists who traditionally have studied substances like tobacco and alcohol now turning their attention to foods and trying to really understand the potentially addictive nature of foods. But it's a bit harder with food, right?
The Daily
A Turning Point for Ultraprocessed Foods
Because we don't need cigarettes and we can isolate from cigarettes the addictive substance, which is nicotine. Yeah. Food is different, right? Like we all need to eat and ultra-processed foods are convenient and feed many of us with like the calories that we need every day.
The Daily
A Turning Point for Ultraprocessed Foods
So proving that there's an addictive nature to some foods is a bit more challenging, but there are a lot of scientists now who have taken an interest in that and are working on it. So I think we may be moving in that direction. And there is a growing sense that, you know, this helps us make sense of the problem that we're facing, this rise in obesity.
The Daily
A Turning Point for Ultraprocessed Foods
For a long time, it's been talked about as a personal failing, like people are not exercising enough and they're eating too much. And, you know, if we're talking about living in an environment where we're surrounded by foods that...
The Daily
A Turning Point for Ultraprocessed Foods
are difficult to stop eating because they've been engineered that way, it sort of changes the way you think about the problem and opens the door, I think, for more solutions. Like if we could change the environment so that it's not so saturated with foods that are hard to stop eating, then we may have a chance of turning the tide on obesity. alice thank you thank you sabrina we'll be right back
The Daily
A Turning Point for Ultraprocessed Foods
Yeah, that's definitely ultra-processed. You knew that.
The Daily
A Turning Point for Ultraprocessed Foods
Yeah. So that unfortunately is also ultra processed.
The Daily
A Turning Point for Ultraprocessed Foods
Yeah. So that's one thing about this category is that it's so huge and it includes lots of foods that we may think of and sort of know are not very good for us, like soda and hot dogs and chips and cookies, but also these foods like flavored yogurts, which like you can have an unprocessed or a non-ultra-processed yogurt if it just has the milk and the bacteria starter culture in it.
The Daily
A Turning Point for Ultraprocessed Foods
A plain yogurt would not be ultra-processed. But once you add the flavorings and the various ingredients that give it that creamy texture, it becomes ultra-processed. A packaged big brand whole wheat bread would also be ultra-processed probably because it has a few ingredients in it like emulsifiers that are important for the texture.
The Daily
A Turning Point for Ultraprocessed Foods
Yeah, so here in the U.S., about 70% of our food supply would be classified as ultra-processed. 70%, 7-0. That's right, yeah.
The Daily
A Turning Point for Ultraprocessed Foods
So that's a great question. I think Part of the answer is a business story. There's also a science part of it as well. I think the reason why these foods have come to dominate the marketplace is that they're made to be really convenient. They're shelf stable. They're pretty inexpensive.
The Daily
A Turning Point for Ultraprocessed Foods
We saw them starting to enter the scene early 1900s, really take off post-World War II.
The Daily
A Turning Point for Ultraprocessed Foods
A lot of them allow us to create meals in just a few minutes. And so they've been very useful for people, right? And by the late 1980s... Ego wobbles from Kellogg's. Ultra-processed foods were already about 60% of our food supply. Well, already by the 80s, they were 60%.
The Daily
A Turning Point for Ultraprocessed Foods
A lot of us can look back and say like, yeah, these foods were around at that time.
The Daily
A Turning Point for Ultraprocessed Foods
But something about the foods also changed in the 1980s and 90s. And this is something that we're just starting to understand. What happened was that tobacco companies, R.J. Reynolds, Philip Morris, bought up a lot of food companies. And they maybe did that because regulators were cracking down on the tobacco industry and they were diversifying their holdings a little bit.
The Daily
A Turning Point for Ultraprocessed Foods
But yeah, they started buying companies like Nabisco and Kraft. And scientists have found that when they look at the food brands that were owned by tobacco companies, the foods that were coming out of those companies looked really different from the other brands that were made by other companies. In what way?
The Daily
A Turning Point for Ultraprocessed Foods
So the tobacco-owned products were much more likely to be something that scientists call hyperpalatable products.
The Daily
A Turning Point for Ultraprocessed Foods
So this is a term that was defined by addiction scientists to describe a food that has high levels of at least two nutrients. It's either high fat and high salt or high carbohydrate and high salt or high fat and high sugar. So these pairs of nutrients, you wouldn't normally find a food in nature or like an unprocessed food that is high in nutrients. two of those nutrients at the same time.
The Daily
A Turning Point for Ultraprocessed Foods
And scientists think that when we eat a food that's hyperpalatable, it just makes it harder for us to stop eating it. We want it more and, you know, we reach back into the package of Oreos for another cookie. And not all ultra processed foods are hyper palatable. These are kind of like two different terms, but they overlap a lot.
The Daily
A Turning Point for Ultraprocessed Foods
And what you see in the 1980s and 1990s is that more and more of these ultra processed foods were also hyper palatable. And that seemed to be driven by the tobacco companies. They were maybe a little bit ahead of the other companies in cracking that hyper palatability code. But by the 2010s, basically, all of the food companies kind of get on board and bring their products up to speed.
The Daily
A Turning Point for Ultraprocessed Foods
Yeah, there do seem to be some parallels there. And they take off not just in the U.S., but, you know, all around the world.
The Daily
A Turning Point for Ultraprocessed Foods
And meanwhile, obesity rates are also rising. So in the U.S., for example, our childhood obesity rates have tripled since the 1970s. Tripled. Right. So it's become a huge problem. And we see this same thing happening in countries all around the world, although we may be a leader in this regard.
The Daily
A Turning Point for Ultraprocessed Foods
And so this is where we turn from a story about the business of food to a story about health and science because scientists are alarmed. They're scrambling to figure out why people around the world are gaining weight. Is it that we're not getting enough exercise or is it our nutrition? Are we consuming too many carbohydrates or too much fat or not enough protein?
The Daily
A Turning Point for Ultraprocessed Foods
But there's this one scientist who, in Brazil named Carlos Monteiro, who starts to look at this question a little bit differently. In his country, he notices that people are consuming less traditional foods like rice and beans and more foods like instant noodles and sausages. And so in 2009, he is the one who actually coins this term, ultra-processed food.
The Daily
A Turning Point for Ultraprocessed Foods
Alice Callahan, welcome to the show. Thank you. It's so good to be here, Sabrina.
The Daily
A Turning Point for Ultraprocessed Foods
And he creates a system to sort foods from unprocessed to ultra-processed. And so in creating this definition, Carlos Montero and his colleagues are now able to quantify how much of the food system is coming from these foods and how has it changed over time. And that allows them to study whether or not it's linked to obesity.
The Daily
A Turning Point for Ultraprocessed Foods
And they find, indeed, in Brazil, as ultra-processed food consumption goes up, so does obesity increase. Other scientists around the world are like, oh, wow, this is an interesting way of looking at diet and health.
The Daily
A Turning Point for Ultraprocessed Foods
And they start to see the same link between ultra-processed foods and obesity, as well as other chronic conditions like type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease, some types of cancer. And so this appears to be kind of a major breakthrough in our understanding of diet and health.
The Daily
A Turning Point for Ultraprocessed Foods
But proving that ultra-processed food is causing those health conditions turns out to be a lot trickier than you might imagine.
The Daily
A Turning Point for Ultraprocessed Foods
Well, this is like the eternal challenge of studying nutrition and health, right? You can observe a large number of people. You can look at how they eat and you can look at what health conditions they develop or whether, you know, they develop obesity. But proving that it's the food that causes those conditions is really challenging, right?
The Daily
A Turning Point for Ultraprocessed Foods
I do have a PhD in nutrition. That's right. So I started out in academia. I thought that I would be a nutrition scientist.
The Daily
A Turning Point for Ultraprocessed Foods
That's exactly right. Diet is really complicated. And then food is just like one of the things that can affect our health, right?
The Daily
A Turning Point for Ultraprocessed Foods
And you can imagine that people who rely more on ultra-processed foods might also be the same people that are getting less sleep and maybe exercising less or they're under more stress or they're experiencing more poverty or discrimination or less access to healthcare, all of these other factors, right? might contribute to someone's health over the long term.
The Daily
A Turning Point for Ultraprocessed Foods
So, for that, you really need a different kind of study. You need a clinical trial. In a perfect world, you can imagine if you took a large group of people and you randomly divided them into two groups and had one group consuming a diet twice, full of ultra-processed foods and another group consuming a diet full of unprocessed foods.
The Daily
A Turning Point for Ultraprocessed Foods
And you would keep them all living in the same conditions and track them for years and see who develops obesity, who develops type 2 diabetes. That kind of study is obviously really hard to do over the sort of decades that it takes to develop a chronic health condition.
The Daily
A Turning Point for Ultraprocessed Foods
But pretty soon after, I actually decided to transition to science writing because I really wanted to be in a position where I could read the science, talk to the scientists, and then be able to turn around and kind of interpret it for everyday people who are trying to figure out what to eat.
The Daily
A Turning Point for Ultraprocessed Foods
That's exactly right. What you can do, though, is a trial kind of like that, but for a much shorter amount of time. And so there was this small study conducted by a researcher named Kevin Hall. And what he did was recruit 20 adults to come and live at the National Institutes of Health for a month. Okay.
The Daily
A Turning Point for Ultraprocessed Foods
And each of those study subjects during their month-long stay at the NIH spent two weeks consuming a diet that was made up of unprocessed foods and two weeks consuming a diet made up of ultra-processed foods.
The Daily
A Turning Point for Ultraprocessed Foods
These diets, they were actually very carefully designed by research dietitians so that they were matched in the number of calories on the plate, the amount of carbohydrates, the amount of fat, the amount of sugar, the amount of sodium. So they really wanted to try to isolate this ultra processed factor from the actual nutrition provided in these meals.