A recent expert committee declined to take a strong position against ultraprocessed foods due to a lack of conclusive scientific evidence. While studies link these foods to various health issues like diabetes and heart disease, some argue they can be beneficial for people with food intolerances or have a lower environmental impact.
The category of ultraprocessed foods is so broad it borders on useless. Diet is a bigger contributor globally to early death than smoking. In America, nearly half the adult population has Type 2 diabetes or pre-diabetes. If you have been following recent headlines, it may seem like there’s a single culprit: ultraprocessed foods .
These industrially produced foods with weird, hard-to-pronounce ingredients that you can’t find in your kitchen have been linked to Type 2 diabetes, depression, heart attacks and Alzheimer’s disease. They are “driving the obesity epidemic,”It may come as a surprise, then, that an expert committee of scientists advising on the federal government’s dietary guidelines (the set of recommendations, released every five years, that shapes nutrition education and school lunches, among other things) recently declined to take a strong position against ultraprocessed foods. The experts felt that there wasn’t enough reliable science to draw accurate conclusions. Processing can also create products suitable for people with food intolerances or ones that have a lower environmental footprint. (Full disclosure:for food companies that I feel make beneficial products, including Beyond Meat, which makes ultraprocessed meat alternatives that I believe are The most famous study on ultraprocessed foods was a randomized trial conducted by the National Institutes of Health, which compared an unprocessed diet, high in fresh fruits and vegetables, to a diet made up of ultraprocessed foods, but matched the amount of salt, sugar and fiber in the diets. The findings: People consumed about 500 calories more per day and gained more weight on the ultraprocessed diet. If it wasn’t the salt, sugar or fiber, what caused people to eat more? It probably came down to energy density — how many calories are packed into each gram of food. In the N.I.
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