A Fancy Name for Junk Food - The Atlantic

Once again, Americans are in a panic over what we eat. More than two-thirds of those surveyed now regard the industrially produced, ultra-processed foods, or UPFs, that dominate the U.S. food supply as addictive, according to a study published earlier this month in the American Journal of Public Health. That’s just the start of it. Most respondents said that UPFs are a major source of type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and obesity. At least one-third blame these foods for causing cancer, ADHD, depression, and anxiety. And nearly half—corresponding to some 130 million American adults, if the survey’s findings can be extrapolated—believe that UPFs are simply “not what God intended for people to eat.”<br>For the past couple of years, concerns about the potential health effects of UPFs have been highlighted in the media, and at nearly every level of the public-health establishment. New restrictions on the sale of UPFs have been introduced or passed in blue- and red-state legislatures alike. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has said repeatedly that UPFs are “poisoning” Americans. And the World Health Organization is planning to put out global guidance on the problem.<br>To some extent, this is nothing more than a rebranding of an old idea, that the foods being sold at convenience stores or fast-food restaurants are anything but good for us. These products, at least some of which are almost assuredly detrimental to our health, have gone by several different names. For those of us old enough to remember the 20th century, we didn’t use to call them “ultra-processed” foods, but simply “processed” foods or “junk” foods. Now an ultra- prefix has been added to the same fuzzy category. Ultra-processed in the world of nutrition circa 2026 is, first and foremost, just the latest synonym for unhealthy.<br>Any more specific meaning, though, has been elusive. The U.S. government, for all of its UPF-related rhetoric, hasn’t even resolved the most basic matter of semantics: “A definition for ultra-processed foods is really hard,” one FDA official said in April, to explain why the project of creating one had already taken many months and could still be far from done. So many of the foods we eat are processed in so many different ways. Where do we even begin?<br>To the staunchest anti-UPF crusaders, though, ultra-processing may also represent an outgrowth of a deeper problem. The nutritional epidemiologists and other scholars who have led this push in public health are out to challenge an entire system of beliefs, propagated by nutritionists for a century or more, about what makes a food unhealthy in the first place. When they swap in ultra-processed for junk, they are shifting the focus from the nutrient content of a processed food—whatever fats, salt, carbs, and sugary sweeteners it might contain—to how it’s made, where it’s made, and even why it’s made.<br>Going by this logic, even basic intuitions about what is good or bad to eat may be twisted into strange new shapes. Keebler’s Soft Batch cookies might be labeled harmful on account of their industrial ingredients—preservatives, emulsifiers, and hydrogenated oils—although your grandma’s home-baked snickerdoodles could be equally sugar-rich and considered benign. Store-bought whole-grain rye bread, with preservatives added to prolong its shelf life, could be viewed as toxic, but home-baked white bread is thought of as just a wholesome treat.<br>The war on UPFs, if its advocates are to be taken seriously, has many such confusing implications. At best, these complicate the conversation over how we should address the chronic-disease crisis on a national scale: What, exactly, should we eat and why? At worst, they suggest we’re stepping backwards and away from any hope of progress in the science of nutrition.<br>In the grand tradition of ideological revolutions, the turn against UPFs began with a manifesto—or rather two of them. The journalist Michael Pollan wrote the first. His 2008 best seller, In Defense of Food, blames the rise of margarine, low-fat cookies, and other healthy-seeming packaged foods on a scientific ideology called “nutritionism.” This refers dismissively to just about everything that nutrition researchers had been doing for the past century—that is, assuming that a food’s value is determined by the sum of its nutrients, and that eating healthy means optimizing for that value. Any truly healthy diet would reject this way of thinking, Pollan argues, and instead rely on how people have been eating for generations. Eat real food, the book implores, not “foodlike substances.”<br>That idea has now been taken up in earnest by the U.S. government as the touchstone of its dietary guidance. But Pollan’s argument would also feed into the second manifesto, which was the call for scientific revolution. Two years after In Defense of Food, the Brazilian epidemiologist Carlos Monteiro laid this out in an academic paper arguing...