Why We Should Recognize Our Food Industry as Our New Tobacco Industry

This year, I had a summer read that particularly caught my interest and left me thinking ever since. I talk about Chris van Tulleken's book "Ultra-Processed People." In a mix of anecdotes about the eating behavior of his little daughters, a personal experiment in which he puts himself on an ultra-processed-foods-only diet, and supported by tremendous studies, he argues that the food industry prioritizes its sales at the cost of global health. While companies have the right to increase their revenues, the food industry accepts as a necessary evil several health issues their products cause for consumers, burdening the health system and ultimately lowering the quality of life for millions of people. The problem with this is that consumers can hardly protect themselves from these sales-increasing strategies, not only based on psychological marketing but playing with the needs and systems of our bodies. What people need is regulatory protection, limiting ways of production that result in products harming the basic and intuitive functions of our bodies. However, as so often, the necessary policies also lag behind in this area.

The Realization: Almost everything is ultra-processed, and it affects our bodies

Would you like a little treat? Maybe some ice cream from the local ice cream shop! A somewhat healthy snack? What about the high-end protein bar with lots of protein and almost no sugar? Perhaps something a little more nutritious than this? Let's go to the store and buy some bread for a sandwich! Do you prefer the fiber option? Maybe the fresh, ready-to-eat salad you only must mix the dressing in!

They might sound like more or less healthy options, but all these products count to or at least contain ultra-processed foods. Ultra-processed foods are basically all produced in the same way. First, every food's main ingredients (carbs, proteins, and fats) are broken into chemical components: starch is extracted from potatoes or grains, proteins from milk, meats or veggies, and fats from the oil palm, seeds, or even carbon. In the second step, these fundamental molecules are mixed together again, and with the correct number of preservatives, emulators, and flavors, they form our "ice cream," "bread," or "salad dressing." As you can imagine, on a biochemical level, these products don't resemble anything the product that you get when you mix heavy cream with chocolate and cool it down (real ice cream), when you mix ground grains with water and yeast and put it in an oven (real bread), or when you mix some yogurt with oil, vinegar, salt, pepper, and herbs (real salad dressing). Why is it problematic if the ultra-processed option also tastes alright and has healthy values in the nutrition table?

We eat the ultra-processed bread. Its flavoring and its meticulously sophisticated texture fool our mouth. It tastes like bread. And it feels like bread. So, our body starts the biochemical processes needed to digest real bread, including the ground grains, the yeast, and the seeds. But by the time the ultra-processed bread reaches our stomach, most digestion is already done. Our stomachs do not need to pull apart the chemical "building blocks" of bread because the industry already did this for us in the first step of production. Our bodies get confused by the nutrition they think to detect while we chew and the mismatch to the expected composition of nutrients arriving in our stomachs. We still feel hungry after our meals, even though they have enough calories to satisfy us. We have an appetite and continuously feel like eating because our bodies crave proper nutrients and want to digest real food properly. Our stomachs want to be used properly.

Additionally, preservatives, emulators, and sweeteners distort our microbiome, the natural mix of bacteria everyone has in their gut. Once the individual microbiome is out of balance, it can lead to severe and chronic health issues. It causes allergies, intolerances, and gut disease, obviously, but it also triggers mental problems like depression or anxiety. Thus, ultra-processed food has a direct effect on our well-being.

The Invalid Argument: "But I don't have a problem with eating XYZ."

On the population's average, the statistics are evident: all over the world, in industrialized countries, diet-related health issues, including diabetes and obesity, are on the rise. We observe this rise, even though education about a good diet is improving and more and more people know how to eat healthy. Sure, these health issues cannot be attributed to diet only but mostly have multiple reasons, including a less active lifestyle. But what about the numerous people who do their sport regularly, who maybe even have physically demanding jobs, avoid high-calorie fast food, and live according to a healthy diet but still struggle to reach and maintain a healthy weight? I am sure that everyone knows at least one person with this problem. While I cannot generalize all these cases, the reason can often be found in the apparently healthy food we eat. Apparently, because the nutrition labels look alright. However, most of our diet is no actual food but ultra-processed molecules that make our minds and bodies believe we have nutritious food.*

Some of you might be bored now and ask yourself why this is relevant. "I eat these things every day, and I don't have any health issues," some of you might think. Maybe you are lucky to have a resilient body that needs much more disruption to get out of balance. Or perhaps your body is strong enough so far to keep the show running. But maybe this will change. Maybe a COVID infection, a very stressful period in your life, or another health disruption will be the tipping point that will cause also your perfectly coordinated system to distort. Even if this should never be the case for you (don't get me wrong, I really hope for your lifelong health), our health policies should never be oriented on those who don't have health issues. In such a case, ignoring regulation in food production is like seeing a very healthy, 80-year-old chain smoker and deciding to abandon every kind of tobacco regulation because, well, this man is smoking every day and doing absolutely fine!

Instead of judging people with diet-related health issues, we may see them as individuals with a more sensitive body, reacting more harshly and extremely to drastic changes in our global diet. Some authors call these affected people the "canaries in the mines." Just like the little birds reacted very sensitively to a sudden oxygen drop in the mines, some people's bodies respond very sensitively to changes in our food processing and diet. Therefore, we should not judge them but interpret this general and globally detectable development for millions of individuals as a highly alarming warning signal. It should compel us to regulate the food industry and thus protect public health vigorously.

The Involvement: Lobbying and Conflict of Interest

What would you say if I told you that the head of Marlboro was attending the drafting session of a new Tobacco law in Brussels and DC? You probably would be shocked and ask yourself how somebody with apparent interests can influence the law-making process with a very opposing interest. Somehow, though, this is the case for the food industry, and it is not even a secret. Openly accessible, sometimes even widely celebrated, federal and local governments join programs and cooperations with the food industry, with Coca-Cola, Nestle, Mondelez, you name it. With the pretext of offering better food options at schools, these companies get directly involved in food and health policies. I do not say that everything these companies want is to raise their sales with a new generation of potential customers, disregarding the consequences for these young people's health. What I say, though, is that I see an extreme conflict of interest. It is the kind of conflict that politics usually judge and avoid in every other sector that is connected to individuals' health and public health policies, including the pharma sector, tobacco, and alcohol. It is about time that we apply the same standards to the food industry, an industry making billions of dollars with our consumption while causing rising costs to our healthcare systems.

The food industry needs better regulation, not driven by the industry's self-regulation or government cooperation with the food companies but by independent laws based on independent research focusing on better health outcomes.

If you want to learn more about this topic, its biological background, political complexity, and economic factors, you should read van Tulleken's book. He provides more details than I can here, underlines the arguments with numerous studies, and refers to experts in this field.

Source: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/07/24/1189276187/an-ultra-processed-diet-made-this-doctor-sick-now-hes-studying-why Jonny Storey

*If you want to understand how the processing of products affects our bodies, there is a very insightful experiment that has already been performed several times in diverse settings. Participants are fed precisely the same amount of fruit as a meal with one difference: While the first group gets the fruit served in pieces on a plate, the second group is served a smoothie from the same amount of fruit, and the last group receives juice extracted from the same amount of fruit. Thus, the number of calories that each group gets is equal. However, the experiment proves how our bodies react differently to the different processing of food. While the juice group experienced an enormous peak in their blood sugar level, followed by a sudden drop, the whole fruit group demonstrated a much more stable rise and fall in blood sugar; the smoothie group was somewhere in between. Also, the whole fruit group felt more satisfied and saturated for significantly longer than the juice group. This difference can be explained by the digestion process in our stomach and gut. The processing of a whole fruit takes substantially longer. The stomach and gut have to tackle all these fibers and decompose the components of fruit into tiny bits before they can actually extract the nutrients, including the carbs and sugars. When we drink our fruit as a smoothie or a juice, large parts of this processing have already happened outside our bodies and leave our stomach and gut unengaged. At the same time, sugars and carbs are extracted way faster, leading to unstable blood sugar and causing a chain reaction in our hormonal production, which is a reaction to this fast in-and decline.

The same thing is true for bread that was already decomposed into its nutritional parts before we even took a bite, for the protein bar that is composed of individual nutrients that are glued back together, and even for the apparently healthy granola that consists of processed grains that were broken down industrially and then tied back together with sugars and emulsifiers. Even when we feel the first moment of satisfaction caused by the sudden absorption of nutrition, this kind of "food" leaves us dissatisfied and hungry shortly after.