
Over several decades, there has been increasing discussion of the role of ultra-processed foods in our health. Globally, surging levels of diabetes, hypertension, obesity, and other chronic illnesses. Developing scientific levels of proof of the connection between the increasing consumption of industrial foods and these illnesses has not been easy.1 Today, various analyses claim that between 50% and 69% of the calories in the American diet come from ultra-processed industrial foods. This is a non-trivial component.
Why Are Ultra-Processed Foods?
Michael Polan, author of The Botany of Desire and other books, is the source of the famous guideline to eating: “Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.” Another guide to identifying industrial foods is the length of the list of ingredients and the presence of unpronounceable chemicals.Or, from the NYTimes podcast referenced above, “So ultraprocessed foods are this giant category of products that include kind of anything edible that’s industrially produced; things that you can’t make in your own kitchen if you tried, because you wouldn’t be able to get the ingredients and you don’t have the machinery necessary to make that product.”
Look for sugar, identified by 56 different terms on ingredient labels, fats, and salt in various combinations.
Food Rationing in UK Provides a Natural Experiment
The February 2025 Scientific American contains this article: “Sweet Surprise—WWII sugar rationing boosted kids’ health decades later.” Between the end of WWII and 1953, sugar, among other foods, was rationed throughout the United Kingdom. During that period, some 60,000 babies were born. The study looked at this population, who experienced sugar intakes close to what is today the recommended level during the first three years of life, a developmentally important phase.
Infants conceived in the years before sugar rationing ended had a 35 percent lower risk of diabetes and a 20 percent lower risk of hypertension in their 50s and 60s compared with those conceived after, the team reported in Science. For ration-era kids who ultimately did develop these conditions, onset was four and two years later, respectively. The longer a person lived under rationing, the greater the benefit they saw—but the strongest effects came while in utero and past the first six months of life, when babies begin eating solid foods.2
It’s nice to have such a robust sample size to provide more proof that industrial foods are dangerous. This further demonstrates the downstream costs imposed on us by an industry that makes short-term profits without worrying about longer-term costs to the rest of us. This is very similar to the petrochemical industry, the plastics industry, fast-fashion clothing, and many other industries that profit while polluting and otherwise harming us.
Footnotes
- See the discussion towards the end of this NYTimes podcast, “A Turning Point for Ultraprocessed Food,” about the difficulties of establishing scientific levels of proof of a connection.
- https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/wwii-sugar-rationing-gave-kids-a-lifelong-health-boost/
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