Looking into ultra-processed food and their ingredients

How do you choose your food from a grocery store shelf?

Do you base choices on cost or quality?

Do you base them on taste or ease of preparation?

Choosing which foods to eat is much harder than it looks.

Let's take the juice aisle, for example.

Strolling down the aisle full of many different types of juices is a feast for the eyes. Not only the juices themselves are brilliant jewel tones, but the labels are also engineered to be eye-catching.

Has anyone else been in a hurry and grabbed the container that looked like your husband's favorite juice- and then when you got home, discovered that it was not, in fact, the right one?

The container I grabbed said '100%' in big letters with small print underneath, and I thought it was 100% juice. It actually said '100% vitamin C'- and contained very little juice while at the same time had quite a lot of added sugar.

Foods that are whole or have few added ingredients are not extremely obvious on the shelf among other foods. They seem to be hiding; obscured by the highly processed food pretending to be its healthy competitor. It takes real effort to weed out the truly low-processed products among the pretenders.

But is it that big of a problem?

Should anyone besides nervous new moms worry about ultra-processed foods or added ingredients?

A recent study suggests we all should.

A study titled “UltraProcessed Diets Cause Excess Calorie Intake and Weight Gain: An Inpatient Randomized Controlled Trial of Ad Libitum Food Intake” busted some myths that we’ve been living in about the relative safety and similarity of processed foods to whole foods.

Let’s start with their definition of an ultraprocessed food: “Formulations mostly of cheap industrial sources of dietary energy and nutrients plus additives, using a series of processes” (Hall et. al. 67).

So maybe juice labeled with that terminology would say “formulated with chemicals to reach 100% of your daily vitamin C requirements while containing a minimum of fresh from-thefruit product.”

If we saw that on a label, we certainly couldn’t mistake it for the real thing while grocery shopping in a hurry!

In the study, twenty adults of similar ages (31 years) and BMI scores (27) were admitted to the Metabolic Clinical Research Unit at the National Institute of Health’s Clinical Center.

They were divided into two groups of ten each. Those two groups were put on a different diet for two weeks, and at the end of the two weeks, the groups swapped diets and then followed the other diet for two weeks. Ten were male, and ten were female.

Throughout the weeks, they were tested using actigraphs, continuous glucose monitoring, dual-energy x-ray absorptiometry, magnetic resonance spectroscopy, respiratory chambers, and many other labbased methods.

One diet was ultraprocessed foods, and the other diet was unprocessed foods.

Each of the two diets were matched for calories, energy density, macronutrients, sugar, fiber, and sodium.

They differed, though, in proportions of total to added sugars, insoluble

to total fiber, saturated to total fat, and omega-6 to omega-3 fatty acids. In each difference, the ultra-processed diet came out unfavorable for instance, had 54% added sugar versus the unprocessed diet’s 1% added sugar.

During each meal, subjects were given 60 minutes to eat. They were given three meals daily, and had 24 hour access to bottled water and snacks according to their diet (ultra-processed or unprocessed).

Incredibly, subjects on the ultra-processed diet across the board gained weight- while on the unprocessed diet, they lost weight. On the ultra-processed diet, participants also increased body fat mass, whereas body fat decreased during the unprocessed diet.

Same number of calories, same numbers of nutrients… but something made them gain weight and add fat while eating ultra-processed foods.

Though they are thinking that ultra-processed foods, which according to the authors are the majority of calories consumed in America, may somehow cause people to eat more than they want. The authors even suggested that these types of foods disrupt gut-brain signaling so we can’t tell when we are full (and therefore stop eating) and stated that ultra-processed foods “have been suggested to be engineered with supernormal appetitive properties” (68). Whoa.

We know that ultra-processed foods (we’re looking at you, Twinkies) are bad for us. They’re high in fat, sugar, and salt.

But because of that, they taste good, and even their soft texture may encourage us to eat more.

So why do we eat things we can’t pronounce?

Because they’re quick or easy to prepare. The authors of the study called this property “ready-to-eat or readyto-heat.”

Ultra-processed foods are also less expensive. In a week’s worth of unprocessed meals, the total cost was $151, versus the $106 of a week’s worth of ultra-processed meals. Unfortunately, saving money on daily meals by using ultraprocessed ingredients has led to an across-theboard increase in obesity and type 2 diabetes, among other health concerns, according to the authors.

If there was ever a good time to read ingredient labels, it’s now. Unpronounceable ingredients on the label should disqualify the item from our grocery carts. We can save money other ways, perhaps by growing a garden in our backyards or even at the community gardens in town! A community garden plot costs $40 for adults (or $20 for a youth), and seeds are a fairly cheap investment. They were on sale for 10 cents recently at a big-box store- and saving seeds from your own produce is free.

Want to read the study yourself? It was published in Cell Metabolism, issue 30, pages 67-77. It’s also available online, if you search the title or a portion of the title.

Making and eating foods that aren’t halfway prepared for us is possible and even probable with busy parents. Longer prep time before meals means more opportunities to teach our children about patience, kindness, or even about the food itself.

No kids? A longer prep time is longer to unwind without the aid of a screen.

Once the meal is prepared and eaten, the meal without factory-added ingredients is better for the future of our health.

It’s a winning situation all around.