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.’”
Spoken like someone who doesn’t understand neuroscience.
Please, explain to me how Cheerios are addictive and need to be banned.
That’s kind of loaded. Banned is a strong word but, Cheetos specifically were not only engineered to be addictive, but Frito-Lay isn’t even shy about admitting that.most of the snacks you find in the middle aisles are. Soda included.
They said Cheerios, not Cheetos. Tbf tho some of the flavored Cheerios are kind of addictive.
They sure did. I just really wanted to talk about Cheetos I guess. Because I definitely read it as Cheetos.
No, Cheerios. The heart-healthy cereal that people give to infants. That’s an “ultra-processed food”, because the phrase is bullshit.
Real quick, define heart healthy. Tell me what the Cheerios people actually mean when they say that.
That phrase actually is bullshit. It’s marketing wank designed to illicit an emotional response from worrisome mothers and evidently specific dudes on the Internet.
And while there’s no firm definition of a UPF, there is an actual general understanding of what that term means. No one is going to look at a bag of lettuce and call it ultra processed. In the same stroke, you can’t look at a bag of Chex mix and tell at a glance what they’re made out of. About half the ingredients on the bag are synthetic. The rest have been reduced to their component atoms and reassembled in a way that’s still technically edible.
And brother, if you think we’re not giving UPFs to babies you’ve got a very rude awaking coming to you. Almost all of the foods marketed towards infants and toddlers are UPF. That’s actually a big problem and a likely contributor to the ongoing obesity problem we have.
As it happens the product you’re seeing babies eat isn’t generally Cheerios, it’s something made of rice that dissolves faster to prevent choking. What’s the marketing for it anyway. And the fact that you and most people without kids can’t tell the difference at a glance says something about the food we’re feeding to kids.
For your edification, choking hazards for children are a real thing, because we’ve failed as a society to teach our children how to chew. Because we’ve been feeding them processed crap from a spoon. If you give a baby a bit of food too big for them to swallow, they’ll pick it up and gnaw or gum at it for a while. Unless you put it in their mouth for them, in which case they’ll instinctively try to swallow it and you’ll have a problem on your hands.
Learn about how the human body processes carbohydrates. Then learn about what a truly “normal” amount of carbohydrates for a human to consume on a daily, weekly, annual basis is. Finally, compare that amount of “normal” carbs to the amount in a single bowl of Cheerios. Subtract the dietary fiber involved if you need precision. But the basic comparison is so obviously skewed that the dietary fiber part of the calculation is barely more than a rounding error.
Cheerios don’t need “banning” for any of the reasons we prohibit or control the sale of truly hazardous or life-threatening materials. Nobody said that is what is needed. Overconsumption of carb-heavy foods like Cheerios are bad for our health on a time scale measured in years or decades. Drinking drano is bad for your health on a time scale measured in seconds. Don’t get it twisted. Nobody’s treating eating cheerios like drinking drano. Insinuating such a thing is happening is simply incorrect and not a valid argument.
Humans need to eat more green things and eat less carbs. We need companies that serve human needs to truly serve the real human needs, not lie about the exploitable bugs in human cognition, pretend they’re “needs”, and try to say there’s nothing wrong with encouraging people to over-consume to the point of morbid obesity just to pump the shareholders’ stocks a few cents higher.
That’s the basic message. Humanity is more important than profit margins.
Yeah, and no one is saying that either.
We all agree people need to eat healthier. Targeting “ultra-processed foods” is a stupid way to accomplish that. It would backfire completely, and cause more problems than it would solve.
Then let’s hear your genius, sure-fire, guaranteed-to-work idea that’s been built on high-quality research and rigorous data collection methodology.
You clearly don’t know how ridiculously stupid the entire food labeling regulations process is. All because CEOs refuse to do reasonable, rational things that are better for human beings than their stock price.
The problem here isn’t the regulations. The problem is the failure to recognize that every regulation is written in somebody’s blood. So, how many people is the “right” number of people who need to die of preventable causes before we conclusively say “maximizing addictive properties in food” is no longer a business practice we’re willing to accept as a nation? Do 100 people need to die? Thousands? Do you need to see millions of dead bodies piled up end-over-end like cord wood before you recognize that, gosh golly gee, maybe we should listen to scientific opinions over corporatist scumbag opinions?
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.