Posts Tagged ‘ultra-processed food’
October 23, 2024 — God bless the people who put their time into the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee. It fits the textbook definition of a thankless task. Years of work go into producing a scientifically sound set of recommendations for a new edition of dietary guidelines to emerge sometime next year. But no matter what those recommendations are, people […]
October 7, 2024 — Public discourse about nutrition and health seems to go through waves of fear. There was the fear of fat that began in the 1980s. In the early 2000s, that wave subsided and the fear of sugar and carbs swept us all up with a fever to count carbs and especially, grams of added sugars. Though […]
September 29, 2024 — Evidence is mounting linking ultra-processed foods (UPF) to risk of chronic disease. Typically, UPF are foods that are energy-dense, high in fat, sugar, and salt, low in fibre, and with a long shelf life. Examples include biscuits, chips, candy, instant noodles, mass-produced bread, sweetened breakfast cereals, ready-to-eat meals, and reconstituted meats. Dietary recommendations encourage people […]
September 14, 2024 — For reasons that escape us, it has become fashionable to preach that food is medicine. So food marketers are looking for snippets of research they can use to persuade people to buy their latest formulations of food-like and ultra-processed products, Standing in unflinching opposition are food policy advocates who (though they favor the food-is-medicine catchphrase) […]
August 2, 2024 — Why? This is the question that children learn to ask and repeat – sometimes maddeningly. But it is a key question for scientists who earnestly want to explain the oft-cited link between ultra-processed foods and poor health. Is it a futile quest? Or a noble scientific endeavor? News reports offer starkly contrasting views this week. […]
July 16, 2024 — Looking for some naturally fast food? Minimally processed, but exquisitely prepared? Delicious, but not hyper-palatable? The U.S. Food and Drug Administration would like to help. According to Stat News, the agency is looking hard for ways to regulate ultra-processed food. It leaves us wondering if ultra-processed food can cause people to lose their minds. It […]
July 1, 2024 — Two presentations of research about ultra-processed foods (UPFs) and health at Nutrition 2024 offer associations and puzzles that should make us think twice about sweeping generalizations on this subject. Increased Death On one hand, Erikka Loftfield presented data from the NIH-AARP Diet and Health Study in which she found an association of consuming ultra-processed foods […]
June 11, 2024 — Keeping up with virtues and vices in food just keeps getting harder. Planetary health is a virtue to pursue, but ultra-processed food is a vice, and plant-based foods are virtuous unless they are ultra-processed. Then perhaps they become virtuous vices. So confusing. A series of publications this week adds to the confusion. In the American […]
May 31, 2024 — It’s difficult to make predictions – especially about the future. Nonetheless, it’s not hard to see that the new 2025 edition of dietary guidelines will disappoint ultra-processed hardliners. The rhetoric from that sector sounds increasingly like something from a highly polarized presidential campaign. We pity the nutrition scientists and clinicians who have the hard job […]
May 27, 2024 — The top dishes for this Memorial Day in the U.S. are hamburgers, hot dogs, barbecue ribs, grilled chicken, corn on the cob, coleslaw, and potato salad. Homemade, none of it (except maybe the hot dogs) belongs to the current boogeyman category of ultra-processed food. Nor does it qualify as the bedrock of a healthy diet. […]