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Ultra-Processed Foods Are Killing Us All
Again. According to the headlines. Sigh.
When I was a child, we were always warned about the dangers of junk food. While there was no specific definition of what “junk” meant, we all knew the general idea — high fat, salt, and sugar foods that you were only meant to eat at birthday parties or steal very occasionally from dad’s stash. That the stash moved regularly was a sign of how inventive my brother and I became at accessing hidden places that we could not easily reach or open.
But these days, there’s a new, scientific term: ultra processed foods. Rather than the generic idea of “junk”, we’ve got a reasonably specific classification system which determines how “processed” a food is. This has then been linked to any number of health outcomes, from heart disease and cancer to, more recently, all-cause mortality.
Yes, according to recent research my childhood forays into the chocolate cupboard were not just cheeky, they were shortening my lifespan by a measurable amount.
Except, the issue is far more complex than that. We’ve known for decades that eating too many high-fat/salt/sugar foods is bad for you, but the reality is that this evidence doesn’t add much to our understanding of what to eat. Let’s look at the data.
