Ultra-Processed Foods

25:45The 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. Soft drinks are not ready to heat. I know, it's such a weird... The order that they're doing it in is weird. The people who are doing this defining are not writers. I'll say that. 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 ultra processed foods, which are bad. Yeah. This is like, I think what they spent 10 years kind of trying to figure out, because obviously everything is processed.

26:22And there's stuff like cheese, which is produced in like a very processing kind of process. God damn it. But they don't want to call that bad for you. because that's kind of traditional or kind of virtuous, I guess. So that's in like group three. Yeah, it just feels like so clearly such a line drawing exercise around like how do I keep in the things I like and cut out the things I don't. There's also the one that really stuck out to me the first time I saw this was in group three, which again is good, you have freshly made bread. And then in group four, which is bad, you have commercially produced bread.

26:58Yeah. Again, these are not nutritional 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. Well, also group four talks about like high fructose corn syrup, but group two includes honey and maple syrup. Yeah, exactly. So what is the metabolic difference? Right. It feels like they're trying to have like a hundred sort of like 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.

27:39Here's the evidence for that. Here's why honey is different than high fructose corn syrup. It isn't. Also, Aubrey. What? No one even like in academia can can fucking agree on what the four groups are. I have seen honey in all four groups. Good. Yes. No one can decide. This is when I turn into that like Elmo in front of flame. I was like, yes! Yes! There's also, I mean, maybe this is me being annoying, but like I also kind of object to like cakes and cookies being an ultra processed because like, yeah, some cakes and cookies are ultra processed, but some cakes and cookies you bake at home with like five ingredients.

28:19And surely the whole point of a fucking processing scale is to organize foods according to how processed they are, like the processes by which they are made. You just have like 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? You could also argue that like, while they've got like cookies in group four, that if you're talking about macarons, those are made with ground up almonds instead of wheat flour.

28:53So 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. I could yell that on the internet for saying this the other day. But like, there's also the thing of like ultra processed foods are characterized by the addition of multiple ingredients. And then they list like maldodextrin and all this kind of stuff. But am I losing my mind, Aubrey? Ingredients are not the same as processing. Like if I make bread with like water, flour, yeast, and cyanide, that's not bad because it's processed.

29:25Like 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 whole the 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 it really mimics the kind of way that i feel myself behaving when i'm looking for like shampoo or something and the container will say like no parabens and no phthalates and i'm like i don't know what those things are, but it seems good, but they don't have them.

30:01And 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. So, okay. So that was the sort of 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 sort of drifted into diet research. He was the guy that wrote the Biggest Loser study, the study that found that like their metabolisms were still hella slow, like years after they were on The Biggest Loser.

30:42He, in 2015, meets Carlos Montero at a conference. and Montero 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 ultra process thing. I'm going to design a study to disprove this concept. And then he like accidentally ends up proving the concept. I feel like what you're ramping up for is like what I was ramping up for when I was like Richard Simmons says he got a book deal by sitting next to someone on a plane. I don't have concrete evidence to be like, no, that definitely didn't happen.

31:20But I'm going to go out on a limb and be like, but really didn't happen. So the way that he does this is he gets a grant from the NIH to basically take 20 people and like lock them in a room, not really, but like metaphorically and monitor their diets. And so what he does is he gives them for two weeks, a unprocessed diet. So like completely whole foods. And then for the next two weeks, he gives them a ultra processed diet. And he switches this to like 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.

31:55They'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. 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. Yes. It gets you much more limited in scope kind of data or you can go sort of larger scale, more longitudinal, but that's usually dependent on self reports and people sort of like adhering based on the honor code.

32:31Yes. So much of what I've heard about processed foods is about long term health effects. Aubrey, are you saying you can't measure the long-term effect of lifestyle on health in two weeks with 20 people? I, Aubrey, I don't know. Mike, I'm not a scientist. Have you co-hosted this show before? I don't know. I don't know, baby. I don't know. Let me just make you read the description of the results. This is from a New Yorker article by Drew Kular. When participants were on the ultra-processed diet, they ate 500 calories more per day and put on an average of two pounds. They ate meals faster. Their bodies secreted more insulin.

33:11Their blood contained more glucose. When participants were on the minimally processed diet, they lost about two pounds. Researchers observed a rise in levels of an appetite-suppressing hormone and a decline in one that makes us feel hungry. So this is very decisive. It's like people who ate ultra processed 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 1 ,200 times. Yeah. And I don't know, this feels sort of like the glycemic index all over again, which is like a teeny tiny group of people have a specific response to a food or group of foods.

33:57And that then somehow becomes like conventional wisdom in really short order. This study is so much worse than just the fact that it was two weeks. So the whole kind of point of a study like this is to hold everything else constant and only look at the effect of quote unquote processing. But then if you read the fucking text of the study, that was not remotely true. The ultra processed diet had twice the energy density of the unprocessed diet. It had twice the saturated fat and it had 1.5 times more sugar. So these are not equivalent diets at the most basic level. And this is like in the fucking study.

34:35You're like one group had a green salad and the other one had a like a value meal from Wendy's. And the ones who had a value meal from Wendy's gained weight. Would you believe it? Aubrey, Aubrey, Aubrey. Oh no. Is it going to be a fucking biggie size frosty? Is that what we're about to talk about? 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. Go-gurt. I am about to send you. Pudding packs. We're going gonna do day two dinner 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 so it's like a nice dinner of like i guess essentially like a stir fry yeah sauteed vegetables sauteed beef it looks nice right sure and then we have day two processed what what are you just the visual okay the visual is so fucking funny it is two whole chicken salad sandwiches for dinner white bread dinner a cup that appears to be an entire can of canned peaches in heavy syrup.

35:56In heavy syrup. You get two Keebler shortbread cookies and four Fig Newtons. And then you get five crystal lights with fiber added. Even in my darkest days of like 80s, 90s, low fat fucking dieting, I did not get through five crystal lights in one day. 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 the fiber constant, there's no fiber in ultra-processed foods. It's like one of the things that makes them ultra-processed foods. So the only way to get participants fiber was to basically give them sodas every day with like fiber supplements in them.

36:40So these are diet lemonade, but oftentimes it's just like juice or like a little smoothie or milkshake, something like that. But like there are drinks with every meal for the ultra-processed people. There are no drinks for the unprocessed meal. Every once in a while they get a milk or something, but like they're not getting like diet sodas or anything. So that's a huge difference between the two diets. If you were sitting down to make yourself a meal, the chances that you – that like most people would make two whole sandwiches and eat an entire can of peach – Like it just is – it's not representative of like how people eat.

37:17Well, 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 ultra-processed comes with like cookies or shortbread or like some sort of like pudding. There are no desserts with any of the unprocessed meals. The other like really striking thing about this is that they're not the same meal. They're completely different. If you want to do a one-to-one on your ultra-processed, you get the, like, I don't know, Stouffer's version of, like, beef and broccoli.

37:54Exactly. Okay, let's go head-to-head with similar dishes. This is the thing. It's like what they're actually fucking doing. They're calling this a test of, like, are ultra-processed foods worse for you? But it's literally, it's like you give one group of people salads. It's like 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, ultra-processed foods are bad for you. Right, you gave them six cookies with every meal. Yeah. What? I actually think there's like 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, right?

38:28If it's a frozen pizza from the grocery outlet, 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, right? It doesn't have to be bad. So why didn't you fucking test that hypothesis? Can we look at their final meal? the like the the goodbye meal the farewell um is that it sorry i have so many i have so many files called supplementary material i have no doubt oh there it is day seven dinner it was only seven days i thought it was 14 i think they must have repeated oh they repeated yeah yeah yeah okay the ultra processed menu for day seven dinner is it looks so bad also again there's fucking two desserts is made for a child yeah it really is all of them are it is two pb and j's that are packed to the gills yeah they really are like overflowing two cups of two percent milk with fiber added wolf horrible and then you get a snack pack of chocolate pudding graham crackers baked cheetos that's the way you disappoint everyone they're the color of like glow sticks at a rave.

39:42They're the collar of delicious. I hate Cheetos, dude. Oh my God. I love dude. Anything with powdered cheese, anything with powdered cheese. I love it so much. There's these long sections of these articles where they're like, people can't stop eating Doritos. And I'm like, really? Day seven dinner, unprocessed menu. What you're seeing is a pretty sizable bowl of pasta. It looks like a salad with a side salad. It does look like a salad. This is my nightmare, Aubrey. This is it. This is where I flip over the table. Also with a side salad of green leaf lettuce, baby carrots, and broccoli. Can't have too much salad, apparently.

40:25God, it's raw broccoli, too. Wow, I wonder why people ate 500 fewer calories. Wow. We give them the most boring food imaginable. They're not listing the giant bowl of grapes, you gluttons. I guess that's the dessert. It seems visually like there's an implication here. Like 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. But also if the title of the study was like, people eat more cookies than grapes. I'd be like, yeah. I don't know that this says anything about processed versus unprocessed foods. These are different foods.

41:03But listen, if you sort of scrape off this top layer of like sort of window dressing kind of stuff around like 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. Yeah. And how poor people eat. Okay, so that was the experimental study. That was the attempt to prove that ultra-processed food is bad for you, like in a lab. We then, of course, get a huge wave of observational studies.

41:43You can look up on like Google Scholar. There are dozens of studies that measure ultra-processed foods versus non-ultra-processed foods. And like they all basically find the same thing. It's like higher rates of cancer, higher rates of cardiovascular disease. Like it's all the stuff that you would expect. this is sort of the second way that you can measure the effect of food on health is like you take these these big studies of like 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 like kind of as good as it gets although people are so bad at estimating what they're eating and like especially the amounts right If you go to a restaurant and you have like pad thai, can you say how many ounces you ate?

42:31So there's that sort of 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 ultra processed 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, cake is ultra processed. So this person is, yes, eating ultra processed 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 ultra processed food. They're just having these food categories.

43:05So again, fucking cake. Cake can either be ultra processed or not ultra processed. It depends on the fucking cake. Well, and also, again, like I wonder about like how are they coding things like tofu? Exactly. We've seen now multiple ways that processed and ultra processed foods are categorized. And we've already sort of explored that like reasonable minds can differ, right? That like two people could in good faith put the same thing in like any of the four different categories or two of the four categories or whatever, right? And they do. Some of the studies do actually attempt to control for that.

43:42They'll have blinded, like 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 like different classifications. So like we mentioned honey before shows up in all different categories. I also noticed alcohol. some studies just like remove it all together they're like we're not looking at alcohol consumption some studies will put it as like not ultra processed some studies will put it as ultra processed i also found one that put wine and beer as not ultra processed but like vodka as ultra processed mike it's a potatoes it's a carbs the same study also put it was bread was not ultra processed but pretzels were ultra processed when you put it in a shape that's processing, Mike.

44:39The other one that really bugs me is like hamburgers are always in the ultra processed category. But like, 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. Do you think there may be counting on like buns and American cheese and ketchup and all of that kind of stuff? Well, that's the thing is like technically, yeah, you could put it in there. But you again, it could be ultra processed or it could not be like everything fucking else, like the cookies and the cakes and the pizza, like pizza is always in ultra processed as well.

45:10But like, it kind of matters for your whole thesis, whether it's like frozen pizza, or like homemade artisanal, whatever, quote, unquote, nice pizza. Has anyone hazarded a guess at what the mechanism is here? Yeah, this is this is something that you find in like the critical literature, is that they're like, we're actually like, as a research field, we're actually missing a crucial component. And we're kind of 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.

45:44I'm going to try to go through them very quickly. I know you were talking a big game about we're going to record for two hours. I know. I'll tell you what, I'm looking at that ticker. We're at one hour 54. How's it coming? Well, we're getting, we're on page 40 of 91. Another problem with these studies is they don't distinguish between different types of ultra processed food. oftentimes it's just this weird binary distinction between like ultra-processed food and everything else. So all three of the first three categories are just like good and ultra-processed is bad. But there's a couple of studies that actually look at different categories of ultra-processed food.

46:17They're like, okay, breakfast cereal, candy bars, various other things. In this study that looked at 10 categories of ultra-processed 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. But even within those, right? Like if we're talking about breakfast cereals, my guess is that grape nuts is going to have a different health effect than like Lucky Charms. All of this stuff breaks down once you try to get granular.

46:51Yeah, that's kind of 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 poppy and olipop and all of the like probiotic sodas thinking that that's a different thing so and the 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 ultra processed foods to people who eat the most ultra processed foods and it's like a really wide gap like some people are eating like 60 ultra processed foods and some people are like 7%.

47:24When you compare the least versus the most, you do get these like 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 like the death risk actually goes down sometimes if you eat more ultra processed foods. You heard it here first, team. A real effect should have a dose response. Like a little bit of ultra processed 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 ultra-processed foods.

47:57But then once they adjusted it for the dose response, they only found a 5 % difference. Whoa! Some people, if you eat a little bit of ultra-processed foods, you're actually less likely to get cancer. That's something that never comes up. I mean, I don't think this is causal, right? And also it's based on these fucking food frequency questionnaires, so who knows? But it's like to the extent that we 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 ultra processed foods, you should start eating some because those people actually have a lower risk of dying.

48:28Well, this is sort of like for seniors, it can be more beneficial on a number of health fronts to be in the overweight category versus the quote unquote healthy weight category, right? But you're not seeing that as like health guidance for folks because like this, we already have some sort of cultural conclusions drawn. right ultra processed foods or cheetos and candy bars and those are bad for you and you shouldn't eat them this is maybe more damning than i mean it to be but like it feels like it's sort of masquerading as science this is what i mean with this like is this a scientific term or is this just like a thing people say yeah because i don't really mind if people say processed food but if we're gonna have a scientific term we should have clear consistency about what is in that category and what is not in that category.

49:15You don't read biology papers that like can't agree on what a mammal is. Like, yes, there's some edge cases, like there's platypuses, 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. I would argue that honey is processed by bees. It's flowers processed by bees. If it's animal processed, then it's fine. I mean, I guess milk is processed by cows. Maybe we're on to something, Aubrey. Let's publish. So this brings us to the massive mainstreaming of this term in 2023 when a guy named Chris Van Tiliken comes out with a book called Ultra Processed People.

49:54Why do we all eat stuff that isn't food and why can't we stop? As soon as it came out, we got so many episode requests. So many episode requests. So Chris Van Tiliken is a professor at my alma mater, UCL. Do you know what UCL stands for? university college of london it's the worst name of a university in the whole fucking world university college guys that's really funny uh yesterday i had lunch at food restaurant listen i went to a school called portland state oh portland's not a state do they know correct do they know correct i know oh no also you went to brown why are you pretending you went to i went to two years of portland state and two years of brown no i do know this i just like reminding listeners that you went to Brown because you hate it.

50:44Any excuse. Now you're going to leave all this shit in too. So the thing is, we're not going to go super duper into this book, mostly because like I already have a podcast that does that. And I'm like, I can't just like do fucking books all the time. The book, honestly, I've read worse from like British TV presenters. As I was going, I would sort of double check things. And like most factually, like 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 ultra processed food just does not hold up to like 300 pages of discourse.

51:22I think throughout the book, you keep getting this sense that like the ultra processed concept is not really helping us understand anything. So he has a whole section about climate change that like the way that we're eating is like really bad for the climate, which is absolutely true. And then he says like, well, ultra processed foods are driving climate impacts. And I was like, are they though? I went to their various NGOs have like rankings of like foods that are the worst for the climate. And so the top 10 foods that have the worst climate impacts are beef, lamb, cheese, cow's milk, kind of like dairy products generally, chocolate, coffee, shrimp, palm oil, pork, and chicken.

52:00Oh, shrimp. And Chris Ventiligin like admits this. He's like, well, you know, these aren't necessarily ultra processed foods, but they're part of like this ultra processed food system. And he sort of tries to like make that work. But it's like if you if you want to reduce your climate impacts, you wouldn't stop eating ultra processed food. You would stop eating meat like meat is like catastrophically bad for the climate, especially cows. Anything involving cows is really bad. 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 like fine dining landscape.

52:37This is the thing is he's constantly straddling ultra processed and unprocessed because you can eat a steak, which is unprocessed, but that's terrible for the planet. Even worse if it's like wagyu from Japan. Yeah, like flown in, frozen. It just is like I don't like over and over again in the book. You're like, this is interesting as like 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 ultra processed food is addictive. So I'm going to send this to you. Nicole Avena is an associate professor at Mount Sinai in New York and a visiting professor at Princeton.

53:16Her research focuses on food addiction and obesity. She told me how ultra processed foods, especially products with particular combinations of salt, fat, sugar and protein, can drive our ancient evolved systems for wanting. Quote, some ultra-processed foods may activate the brain reward system in a way that is similar to what happens when people use drugs like 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, hyper-palatable food, ultra processed 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.

54:07Is this just pleasure? Yeah this is. Are you just experiencing pleasure? I read a really good paper on this called Food Addiction A Valid Concept where like it was basically a debate like here's the case for food addiction as a real thing and here's the case against food addiction is a real thing. And like, again, there's a colloquial definition of food addiction where people say like, I'm addicted to chocolate. Like the authors are actually very like 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 like brain science.

54:43And we don't actually have good data on that for food. 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. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It also turns into like scrutinizing other people's eating and eating habits through the lens that works for you. Right. Right. I don't think that it's like totally unproblematic how people talk about it colloquially, but agreed that like the research should have a higher threshold than that. 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 like you can see different parts of your brain light up as you do that.

55:26And 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. Like this, this is the same part of your brain that lights up when like you see your best friend. We talked about this with like the idea of quote unquote sugar addiction in our sugar episode, right? That like, yeah dude you get that when you eat like a chocolate bar but you also get it when you pet your dog it's also very different person to person like which part of your brain lights up it's not as easy to say it's like oh the cocaine part like you're touching the cocaine part of your brain it's just like that's like the happy part and it's very different for people it's not really it's not like a mature enough science to say that this exists and then the other kind of category of evidence for food addiction is rat studies.

56:09Oh, your favorite. You can't really do rat studies on ultra processed foods because rat, like they feed rats like little pellets of like specific formulations, right? Of like it's 40 % carbohydrates and 20 % protein. So like that's basically as processed as it comes. You're making like a slurry and then drying it into pellets and feeding it to rats. So all rat food is like equally processed, like as processed as it can possibly be. There is something, there are 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. And then they measure like what they do.

56:45And like, there's some evidence, but also most of the rat study work is on sugar addiction. And sugar addiction, as we talked about, is like very disputed in the literature. And it's just like not clear that it exists. Hang on, I got to go on Etsy and find a, like a potter to make me a cookie jar with a label that just says sweet fat I know I love these little studies sweet fat Joe at a very basic level it's sort of indicative this sort of stuff but it's it's very we're we're very far from like kind of proving that food is addictive and we're also very far from proving that ultra processed food is specifically addictive It is sort of feels like a frustrating thing when we do cover concepts like these that like 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, you know, sort of gets metabolized by people.

57:44It 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 like, what food are you most, quote unquote, addicted to? Like, what are the foods that you feel out of control around? And the number one answer. Beans. My bean shell. I'm clawing at my bean shell all the time. 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 rock. Listen, get back at me when you see me at 2am in the kitchen, just chomping down on dried beans.

58:25But the, the top five foods that people feel addicted to are chocolate, ice cream, French fries, pizza, and cookies. Sure. Most of these are not ultra processed. Like another thing that really bugs me about this ultra processed food research is that it always includes fucking chocolate. And like any, you pick up any, almost any like milk chocolate, basic milk chocolate bar at the store. And it has like five ingredients. Like I looked at Girodeli. It's unsweetened chocolate, cane sugar, cocoa butter, vanilla extract, and soy lecithin. And the only sort of frankenfood ingredient in there is soy lecithin.

59:00Like are there health effects of soy lecithin? 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, et cetera. Those foods aren't addictive the way that chocolate is, right? 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 like, well, chocolate is an ultra processed food because it's high in sugar and high in fat.

59:33If it's ultra processed because it's high in sugar and high in fat, then ultra processed isn't doing anything for us. Right. I mean, like if you're going to take aim at like stabilizers and emulsifiers, uh-oh, green juice. Right. Because if you don't put something in the green juice, it separates and then you end up with like yellow liquid and green silt in a bottle on the shelf and nobody's buying that shit. Right. Like another emulsifier is when you put a little bit of mustard in your vinaigrette. Right. Right. You can sort of give all of these things more sort of 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.

1:00:13I feel like there's this systematic lack of precision because I'm actually open to the idea that like there's stuff in food that is harming us. Sure. And like, I don't love the fact that there's like weird fucking like hormones and the beef and shit. Like, I don't love the artificialness of our food supply. However, like I would much rather that conversation be led by actual scientists who know like the dosages that are shown to be harmful and the ways in which it is harmful. Like 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.

1:00:47It's in everything. Is that bad for us? Well, and again, we're throwing all of this stuff in the same bucket, right? 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 sort of giant bucket labeled ultra processed foods. Yeah, I think, I mean, this also sort of brings us back to his own problems 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 ultra processed food is any food with any ingredient that like you wouldn't find in a standard home kitchen.

1:01:26It 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 like you're not a chemist. Well, and also some of them are like the chemical names for shit you already know. The gimmick of the book is he's doing a supersize me thing where he's like for 30 days, I'm going to only eat ultra processed food. And of course he like gains a bunch of weight and he feels worse. And he says his like MRI is different, whatever. Well, yeah, he's eating two PB &Js and a half a pack of graham crackers for every meal.

1:01:53Again, it's just very hard to separate this from like the actual contents of the food. But so he has this section. As my diet went on, I became obsessed with what is and isn't ultra processed food. So did everyone around me. Friends started sending me ingredients lists. Does fruit concentrate means this is ultra processed food? Yes, it does, by the way. To reiterate, that means one ingredient. If it has one ingredient, it it's ultra processed and also like fruit concentrate is just like boiled down fruit juice yeah you could also get fruit juice and boil it down yourself and make like a barbecue sauce or like i just like what sugar is i met b wilson at a food festival at which we spoke on a panel together she's a food journalist and author who has written about ultra processed food she asked whether i would classify baked beans as ultra processed food she didn't think that they were.

1:02:50Canned 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, quote, 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. So these are these are back to back paragraphs, by the way. It's like if it has fruit concentrate in it. One ingredient means it's ultra processed. But then as soon as we get to baked beans, he's like, well, a lot of people like them. And most of it's, you know, beans and water.

1:03:27Sorry. Is this a scientific concept or not? Hang on. I'm looking it up. Dude, Michael, would you like to know the ingredients to Heinz baked beans? Oh, I have it. That's like the next thing in my notes. but read it read it read it water white beans tomato puree sugar salt calcium chloride mustard onion powder paprika extract spices and garlic powder now sir they're fucking ultra processed by your own definition you can't just say oh well they're like a big part of like the british diet and it's important culturally and it's mostly beans sorry what are we doing here it's if it's this qualitative where just anything can sort of jump from this category to the other category, then this is not a useful category for scientific research.

1:04:16Well, and if you're talking about like ingredients that you don't have in your kitchen, calcium chloride, if you're right, like tomato puree, like, I don't know, guys, I don't know. What is tomato paste if not a fruit concentrate? This is like really, this is not the end of the book, but this is like, to me, the culmination of like 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 ultra-processed food. So he's like, okay, I can't just like cheat and like eat fucking cookies all the time. So like I need to look for some ultra-processed food that isn't so bad.

1:04:47He 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 like wheat, pasta sauce. It doesn't count as ultra-processed in his own definition. But then he looks, he goes to Aldi, which is like the much cheaper grocery store. And that one has a bunch of like additives and emulsifiers and stuff. And he's like, OK. So then he calls a member of Carlos Monteiro's team to kind of ask about this. Like, well, is lasagna then kind of ultra processed and not ultra processed at the same time?

1:05:23So here's sort of the answer. Some products are not technically ultra processed food, she explained. but they use the same plastics, the same marketing and development processes, and they're made by the same companies as ultra-processed 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 lasagna is not ultra-processed food if you apply the technical classification, quote, but these foods are like a fantasy.

1:06:05They are not homemade foods. There is a very consistent, like, 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 ultra processed because like they're not homemade people should be making it at home again is this a scientific concept or not because like 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 also just like you really could say hey some frozen foods are actually not ultra processed yeah 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 like i have made plenty of bad food yes my housemate and i when i was in my 20s decided that we were gonna make cheese sticks at home and instead of using breadcrumbs we used flaming hot cheetos 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 like mozzarella cheese has like a bunch of fat and protein in it that are like generally pretty good for you like you know what i mean like there's like a bunch of stuff well i make the only thing i like ever like bake at home because i'm really bad at baking is banana bread because it's like any dumbass can make banana bread banana bread is extremely bad for you it's really good but it's a fucking cake it's not like delicious at one point in the book he actually says like well if something is like made with love and then it doesn't count as an older processed food.

1:07:49I'm just like, dude, please have a fucking definition and stick with the definition, man. 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 fucking junk food. Yeah, it's not my favorite term. But it is more honest than being like, actually, there are these like extremely concrete health effects that are like widespread for like every preservative that is ever used in foods, or every ingredient that you can't pronounce. What a deeply weird bar. Yeah, I can't pronounce shit. People know. It's like all of our inbox is me not being able to pronounce stuff.

1:08:28Let's hope there's not a denouement in your food. Bjork is technically ultra processed food at this point. I now have no conclusion, Aubrey, because all I had was the junk food thing. We already talked about the junk food thing. Oh, sorry, sorry, sorry. So now I have no closing thoughts. Wait, can I tell you a conclusion? Oh, yeah. What is yours? You were talking about Pringles earlier, and I remembered that there was a specific name for the shape of Pringles. Saddle? Saddlebags? No, Michael. It's the universe. It's called a hyperbolic paraboloid. Wait, what? It's mathematically known as a hyperbolic paraboloid.

1:09:01Put that on the fucking label so then nobody will ever buy them again. 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 ultra processed. Yeah. I mean, this is the thing is I feel the need to reiterate that like both of us are like relatively careful about how we eat. And like, I really do go out of my way to like try to eat healthy. And part of that is like avoiding like, 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 want to eat it.

1:09:36I don't know how like scientific that is. I think if people have food rules like this and they're kind of arbitrary or like kind of weird, like fine. I don't really police other people. Obviously, diet related disease is like is real and is like something that we need to address. But also we need to have scientific concepts if we're going to have like scientific approaches to issues. We're still so deeply in the process of discovery about this stuff. Yeah, totally. Yeah. 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?

1:10:10I just wish that we were able to have a cultural conversation about the cultural stuff and a science conversation about the science stuff. I think it's just worth being honest with ourselves that most of our sort of like hard and fast thinking about what is and is not okay to eat comes much more from like a set of assumptions and sort of a mismatch of like life influences. And also if it's working for you, then keep doing it and I'm not going to tell you not to. We're not here to tell you what to eat or what not to eat. I am here to tell you not to eat hyperbolic paraboloids. I'm here to tell you to eat them.

1:10:47Only hyperbolic paraboloids. Get the pizza flavored ones.

1:11:13Thank you.