Ultra-processed foods (UPFs) have more in common with cigarettes than with fruit or vegetables, and require far tighter regulation, according to a new report.
UPFs and cigarettes are engineered to encourage addiction and consumption, researchers from three US universities said, pointing to the parallels in widespread health harms that link both.
UPFs, which are widely available worldwide, are food products that have been industrially manufactured, often using emulsifiers or artificial colouring and flavours. The category includes soft drinks and packaged snacks such as crisps and biscuits.
There are similarities in the production processes of UPFs and cigarettes, and in manufacturers’ efforts to optimise the “doses” of products and how quickly they act on reward pathways in the body, according to the paper from researchers at Harvard, the University of Michigan and Duke University.
One of the authors, Prof Ashley Gearhardt of the University of Michigan, a clinical psychologist specialising in addiction, said her patients made the same links: “They would say, ‘I feel addicted to this stuff, I crave it – I used to smoke cigarettes [and] now I have the same habit but it’s with soda and doughnuts. I know it’s killing me; I want to quit, but I can’t.’”
There are places that don’t have easy access to fresh food. You want people to die of preventable causes? Let’s ban the bread they make their fucking sandwiches with, because other people are shortsighted and privileged enough to think that the only reason anyone doesn’t choose whole-grain, small-batch, artisinal bread is because white bread is “ultra-processed”, so it must be addictive.
By the same token, banning Cheerios would be a great way to make sure a bunch of kids are malnourished.
Apply a little reading comprehension to this extremely scientific article and see how they’re dancing around the fact that “ultra-processed” isn’t synonymous with “unhealthy”. Phrases like “includes soft drinks and packaged snacks such as crisps and biscuits” are clearly manipulative language meant to gloss over the fact that the category includes those things but is not limited to them.
Anyway, here are some better ideas: a four day work week and expanding work-from-home so that people actually have time to make healthy choices. Or how about better funding for school lunches, with an emphasis on variety so that kids can be exposed to more foods, giving them the tools to make healthier choices later in life.
There are so many ways we could try to improve this situation, and blanket bans is by a wide margin the most idiotic.
When asked what their solutions are, responder… <checks notes> got defensive and lashed out at a straw man instead of just answering the question. Then makes vague hand-waving gestures at irrelevant tangents.
So far, I’m hearing nothing that’s better than the one I offered - let the food scientists sort this out. They actually know what they’re talking about.
This is the problem with current discourse. When the only acceptable-to-you solution requires massive structural changes to the fundamental building blocks of society, you aren’t living in the real world. Realistic solutions start from where we are and take incremental steps. If you can’t come up with a better way to define this problem to the point that you resort to irrationality and fairy tales, that’s a you problem.
Nobody said bans were correct. But just because they aren’t right doesn’t make your ludicrous opinions any better. Yes, we’d all love shorter work weeks. Let’s see you come up with a realistic plan to actually implement that in your own lifetime. In this geopolitical climate. Good fucking luck, space cadet.