4 replies to this topic

[GMO]

Really interesting we don't seem to have a category for health and diet on here. One for us to think about?

 

Anyway. This was published yesterday. And, honestly? I'm frustrated.

 

From Tobacco to Ultraprocessed Food: How Industry Engineering Fuels the Epidemic of Preventable Disease - GEARHARDT - The Milbank Quarterly - Wiley Online Library

 

Why am I frustrated?

 

Things like this:

 

"Ultraprocessed foods (UPFs) are engineered to heighten reward and accelerate delivery of reinforcing ingredients, driving compulsive consumption and disrupting appetite regulation. This is a growing challenge for health policy."

 

"Both the tobacco and food industries have long employed a strategy known as “health washing,” in which products are reformulated and marketed in ways that create the illusion of reduced harm while preserving their core addictive properties."

 

There is WAY more. Try reading it without steam coming out of your ears at some point.

 

But my frustration is this. I do not argue that the food industry has not supported health in consumers (hence my post on HACCP and health) BUT I do not for one second believe there has ever been intent. I am yet to stumble across the lab of malevolent food scientists rubbing their hands with glee at the fact they've made people ill. I actually see a lot of food scientists reducing sugar, salt, fat, calories etc to follow legislation. If the legislation doesn't go far enough then isn't that the fault of legislators? Then governments change legislation (like the sugar tax in the UK) which has driven increases in non nutritive sweeteners. Manufacturers follow suit, then criticism for it in this paper.

 

And I'm so tired about reading on UPFs. I'm yet to read any causal relationship that goes beyond known science, e.g. high fat foods, high in sugars, simple carbs and salt. They're going to be bad for you. Haven't we been saying that for decades? Hasn't the only change to consumers' diets been through stealth?

 

As I said on my other post, if we got rid of a lot of processed food, in general, obviously we'd be the healthier for it. But we are also not set up for that as a society anymore. Few people want to spend the time to cook from scratch or actually don't have that time to spend. I'd lose no sleep if Pop Tarts were no longer available but I'm surprised at the institutions which published the above when people like us are mostly spending our lives busting a gut to get formulation changes through. God it would have been an easier life if I'd not had to do the 1-2 changes a year on every product I've ever worked on to make it a tweak healthier with every change in process, packaging etc which went along with it.

 

So these are the authors:

 

Ashley Gearhardt Clinical Science Area Chair; Professor of Psychology - Food and Addiction, Science and Treatment. University of Michigan.

Kelly Brownell is the Robert L. Flowers Professor Emeritus of Public Policy. Duke.

Allan M. Brandt, Professor of the History of Science. Harvard.

 

Not necessary for one of them to be a strict food science professor but it appears none are. Is that a problem? I'm unsure. But perhaps it does make the writers unaware of how much the retailers and government determine what is in our food in comparison to the manufacturers.

 

Seems long on hyperbole and short on any blame for anyone else but manufacturers.

[Tony-C]

Hi GMO,

 

‘What do you think of this UPF publication?’ - Not a lot

 

Too much sugar, salt and additives but evidence that ‘UPF’ is as bad as tobacco? they are having a giraffe.

 

I stopped at hedonic manipulation, although perhaps this Cadburys advert/product fits the bill?

 

Kind regards,

 

Tony

[GMO]

What I found frustrating is that those institutions are well respected. It's not as though there are not colleagues in food science who are funded by food manufacturing working in neighbouring buildings that they could not have talked to. What's more it's such a muddle. Some of what they say is valid but they're attributing root causes for it and intent where I can see no work has been done to establish the veracity of their claims.

 

So far, as it deserves, it seems to have received little attention from dietetics colleagues. I suppose it's interesting it was published in the "Milbank Quarterly" for interdisciplinary work on health not a specific dietetics journal. 

I am yet to become a "Hedonic Manipulation Manager" but I look forward to searching for those job opportunities on Linkedin.

[SHQuality]

I'm sorry, I can't take publications like that seriously at all.

 

Food is a basic human need and not everyone has the time, skills, space and energy to grow their food in a vegetable garden and cook it from scratch every day. Food manufacturers make food taste good to gain and retain customers. That is simply good business practice.

There is no malicious cabal trying to get people addicted or fattened up. Consumers still have the freedom to choose to cook themselves or to eat in sensible portion sizes.

 

Besides, anyone who tries to vilify the use of additives clearly doesn't know what they are talking about.

[jfrey123]

It's all shades of truth and perspective.  Science has played a role in making foods unhealthy to an extent to raise profitability.

 

We know as a fact that the Sugar Research Foundation flat out bribed Harvard scientists to downplay the physical harm of sugar for heart health by shifting the blame to saturated fats.  The 1967 study erroneously shifted official policy in the US and led to low fat/high sugar processed foods being marketed as "healthy" because they were low fat.

50 Years Ago, Sugar Industry Quietly Paid Scientists To Point Blame At Fat : The Two-Way : NPR

(I still remember an episode of Seinfeld mocked this when I was a kid: they all started eating every day at a "low fat yogurt" place and were all shocked they gained 10lbs in a week)

 

 

When we think about whether scientists sit and try to calculate how to make food addictive, they absolutely do:

Bliss point (food) - Wikipedia - Psychophysicist Howard Moskowitzhired by various corporations to optimize salt, sugar, and fat ratios to trigger a jolt of endorphins.

 

Study shows food from tobacco-owned brands more 'hyperpalatable' than competitors' food | KU News - This study goes short of declaring "intent" as if it was some sort of evil cabal, but it demonstrates when tobacco corporations own a food brand, they go out of their way to engineer the products to be "hyperpalatable".

 

What Makes Ultraprocessed Foods Addictive? | Scientific American - The debate as to whether UPFs are actually addictive seems to be closing (at least for now): consensus is being reached that UPFs are legitimately addictive, with Yale publishing a peer reviewed tool to help track and trend the withdrawal symptoms in adults and children when they stop eating them (Yale Food Addiction Scale – Food and Addiction Science & Treatment Lab).  This demonstrates the idea of "people can just choose to eat healthier", something I've decried for well over a decade, is not an easy claim to make when there are physical withdrawal symptoms akin to tobacco, drug use, or alcohol dependency.

 

 

All that said, it is up to people to make healthy choices.  But if we're going to label things we know are unhealthy, at what point do we slap a Surgeon General's warning on a box of Twinkies?  At what point are we going to insist companies have to use actual ingredients instead of a science experiment from a lab to replicate a shelf-stable replica of something?  Just saying that a cream filling should be made at least mostly from actual cream...

Edited by jfrey123, Today, 06:48 PM.