Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.
Hippocrates (ca. 460 – 370 BC)
Der Mensch ist was er isst. (We are what we eat).
Ludwig Feuerbach (1804 – 1872)
The health of our gut microbiome is dependent on the foods we eat. The more whole, organic foods we eat, the healthier and more diverse our gut becomes.
Zach Bush MD
Industrial food systems have reduced food to a commodity, to ’stuff‘ which can then be reconstituted in the lab. In the process, both the planet’s health and our health have been nearly destroyed.
Vandana Shiva, Environmental Activist
The house in which we grew up was a house of traditional home cooking. Throughout the first eighteen years of my life, every meal was eaten, or in the case of school lunches, prepared, at home. We never dined out. Affordability and the fact that we were ten children may have played a role, but I believe it was simply the family ethos that never considered an option other than home cooking. In hindsight, this now appears to have been a great blessing.
By my twelfth year, I could prepare the entire array of meals which made up the family repertoire, passed down through generations. Cooking, baking, jam-making, and other forms of food preparation were part and parcel of our way of life. The ability to cook and my love of cooking, as a form of creative expression, continue to enrich my life to this day.
Granted, there was a lot of meat, poultry, and dairy in our diet, a reflection of the norms of any agricultural society, as Ireland had been for many centuries. Some of our food came from our garden, most was supplied through local retail businesses from family farms, where widespread use of herbicides, insecticides, fungicides, and synthetic fertilisers had not yet become the norm. We ate potatoes every day.
On leaving home to go to college, I adopted the practice of buying food that was organically grown and dropped most meat from my diet. These were intuitive developments, furthered shortly afterwards by my move to Germany, where the organic and vegetarian food movements were already gaining momentum. My cuisine also began to become international.
Having arrived in Germany, my love of gardening evolved. This resulted in three decades of experience in establishing and cultivating several large organic kitchen gardens, which provided fresh produce throughout the year.
In the meantime, I have also developed an interest in the connection between the gut brain (the microbiome) and our general physical, mental, and spiritual welfare as human beings, and have adopted a regular physical fitness regime, incorporating exercise into my daily life. My diet, too, has evolved, over stages, to the point that it now comprises non-animal ingredients only.
On trips to the US from the eighties onwards, I was taken aback by the absence of home cooking, as I knew it, in the typical American household. I did not imagine at the time that Europe was to go the same route a decade or two later.
Throughout the world today, food production, processing, marketing, and consumption habits increasingly result in widespread environmental and personal health degradation. This week, I would like to focus on the role of Ultra-Processed Foods, or UPFs for short, in this trend.
First up, UPF is a misnomer. The ultra processing degrades the final product to an edible substance, which does not earn the moniker `food´.
The Nova classification system, proposed by researchers at the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil in 2009, is a framework for grouping edible substances based on the extent and purpose of food processing applied to them. It categorizes foods into four groups: unprocessed or minimally processed foods, processed culinary ingredients, processed foods, and ultra-processed foods (UPF).
When we look at various levels of food processing, we can see that processing is not inherently bad. Refining grain into flour and baking bread are both examples of processing. Oats need to be rolled for the purpose of making porridge. Peanut butter results from processing the legumes into a paste, and olives are cold pressed to extract the oil. When they are grown organically and processed without excess heat or additives, they are more or less the original produce, simply in a different form.
Ultra-processed food (UPF), however, is defined as an industrially formulated edible substance derived from natural food or synthesized from other organic compounds. The resulting products are designed to be highly profitable, convenient, and hyperpalatable, often through additives such as preservatives, colourings, and flavourings.
The most widely consumed ultra-processed foods include the following: bread, baby food, fizzy drinks, packaged snacks, ice-cream, biscuits, sweets and chocolate, cakes and pastries, ready-to-eat meals, sausages and burgers, packaged pies and pizzas, chicken nuggets, breakfast cereal and cereal bars, fruit drinks, milk drinks, flavoured yoghurts, and so-called diet products.
Research into the makeup and effects of ultra-processed foods is evolving rapidly. Epidemiological data suggest that consumption of ultra-processed foods is associated with higher risks of a range of diseases, including obesity, Type II diabetes, cardiovascular issues, and various types of cancer. In fact, Dr Zach Bush draws a direct corelation between the poor state of the microbiome of the average US citizen and the comparatively high rates of mortality in the US due to the Coronavirus.
Additionally, growing bodies of data point to the relationship between food addiction and the consumption of Ultra-Processed Food, especially among young people, suggesting that the problem lies not only in the nutritional content but in the ultra-processing itself. Researchers are exploring the addictive nature of UPFs, comparing them to street drugs, and highlighting links to increased risks of obesity, physical and mental inertness, and metabolic disorders.
Since my grocery shopping reflects the home-cooking culture in which I grew up, and I cook my meals every day from natural ingredients, UPFs are unlikely to be found in my kitchen. This is the way I like it to be. On the rare occasions when dining out (or when on the road), I make the extra effort to ensure securing wholesome, natural meals.
Ultra-processing has become the norm since food preparation was moved from the family larder and kitchen to the science laboratory, a shift which began in earnest soon after World War II. It coincided with the shift of focus of the global chemical corporations from providing products for chemical warfare to supporting the emerging Agro-Industrial Complex. Some would argue that this is simply another variation of warfare.
Ironically, Ireland, once a model of traditional organic food production, is now one of the leading nations in this dietary arms race, in which nutritional science is being shaped by neural marketing. Today, the majority of people in western economies consume well over half of their calories from UPF substances.
The appeal of UPFs is easy to see. This `instant food´ is much `cheaper´ to produce and keeps much longer, which is an advantage to producers, wholesalers, distributers, retailers, and consumers.
The processing itself is creating health problems in consumers. Growing evidence shows that it is not just the number of calories in food that matters, but the ability of our bodies to absorb, assimilate, and digest those calories, that just getting the right collection of vitamins, minerals, and trace elements is not enough.
Evolution is a slow process. Our bodies have evolved over thousands of generations to extract and digest proteins, calories, and vitamins from organic food in a certain way; ultra-processing interferes with that. It’s not necessarily that we’re eating too many calories (which we are) and engaging in insufficient regular exercise (also true), it’s that those calories, now synthesised, are coming in a way that our bodies cannot effectively assimilate. This is the advent of the Super-Size-Me Effect.
Ultra-processed food is designed to make us eat more, faster. It is the dream product of industrial food production, where corporations vie for profit by creating addictive, low-cost, and convenient products. Neural marketing uses the latest advances in neuroscientific research to study which ingredients promote the greatest physiological craving and the greatest consumption, leading to an increase in the `total addressable market´ and subsequent revenues. As this is the sole role of marketing, potential health hazards are never taken into consideration, until government intervention forces the issue, as we saw last century with respect to the tobacco industry.
Despite the focus on weight-related problems, UPF is implicated in various health issues even in individuals who don’t become overweight, including inflammatory bowel disease, Alzheimer’s, and dementia.
The conventional defence of corporations such as Nestlé is to blame individuals for obesity, and to ignore the complex interaction between genetics and the modern food ecosystem, while washing their hands, in public, of the cynical application of neural marketing.
Nestlé, one of the corporations at the forefront of the global UPF push, recently posted 2023 sales figures of $103 billion. This s figure exceeds the annual budget of most countries throughout the world. It equates to over $11 million per hour, every hour of every day. Net annual profits amounted to $12.4 billion.
Researchers are now also beginning to challenge popular beliefs about sugar and carbohydrates being the primary culprits for weight gain, pointing to the role of insulin and questioning the effectiveness of low-carb diets. This is leading to suggestions that the process-specific cocktail of ingredients are also key drivers of obesity.
Before we become overwhelmed by the global scope of this challenge, it is good to remember that any business model will fold as soon as enough customers migrate to alternatives. A 5% swing could be enough. It all starts with our personal choices.
Collectively, we need to reverse-engineer the evolution towards ultra-processed substances by returning to selecting fresh, non-GMO (God, Move Over!), local, organically grown, natural or minimally processed foodstuffs which are then prepared as fresh meals each day. Most importantly, we need to remove all GMO and UPF products from our shopping baskets!
Addiction to UPF substances, along the lines of street drugs, which contribute to obesity and diseases, needs to be highlighted and addressed. In general, and specifically in recovery approaches, the importance of a UPF-free diet should be emphasised, embraced, and supported.
I am fortunate to be able to afford organically grown whole foods and to make the time to cook them. Far too many people have come to rely on cheap, convenient UPFs. Corporations, in turn, rely on their workers eating these convenient foods. The inexorable logic of all industrial food is to replace community, culture, and humanity with functionality and ever higher profits. This includes reducing the time required for preparing and eating meals. It is sold to us as `convenience´.
Raising awareness is key, especially among young parents, children, and public representatives. The real individual and social costs of UPFs need to be recognised and feasible alternatives provided. We each need to take responsibility in the ways we can. By doing so, we can vanquish this juggernaut of destruction.
