The new science on what ultra-processed food does to the brain

https://www.wsj.com/health/wellness/ultra-processed-food-brain-health-7a3f9827

by fortran77 • 2 years ago

106 112 2 years ago

anyone got an unpaywalled link? I put this through the webarchive and was surprised to find it still paywalled.

jyunwai• 2 years ago

Though these aren't direct accessible links to the WSJ's report, the following non-paywalled articles provide coverage about the same research paper (which itself can be directly read at https://www.bmj.com/content/384/bmj-2023-077310 ):

* The Conversation (takes a stronger focus on the paper's methodology): https://theconversation.com/ultra-processed-foods-largest-ev...

* Medical News Today (also takes a more technical perspective, though includes more emotionally charged words in the opening): https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/ultra-processed-fo...

* The Guardian (general news coverage) https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/feb/28/ultra-proces...

terrycody• 2 years ago

Yes, I tried archive.is and 12ft, all failed. I have to say, I never success with 12ft even 1 time, what a shit website.

Anyone got a more advanced trick on WSJ link?

CSMastermind• 2 years ago

I will say if you have the disposable income then paying for the Wall St Journal is worth it imo. It's one of the few news sources that I trust for generally reliable information that, as long as you avoid the opinion sections, tends to be uniquely unbiased.

erictd• 2 years ago

Pasting the title text into a search engine often leads me to an MSN version of the story… https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/other/the-new-science-on-wh...

NoPicklez6• 2 years ago

I'd recommend people interested to listen to the Huberman lab podcast on "How Sugar & Processed Foods Impact Your Health". So in with an open mind, it's a good episode.

The podcast mentions of a food classification system in the US called the NOVA system, which classifies foods in supermarkets based on the degree to which they have been processed based on the above scale.

numinoid• 2 years ago

The guest is an absolute clown and charlatan.

NoPicklez6• 2 years ago

He is a bit overzealous in certain ways and does dramatise some of the findings

zackangelo• 2 years ago

He's referring to Robert Lustig, in case anyone else was curious.

carabiner• 2 years ago

Is AG1 not ultra processed?

NoPicklez6• 2 years ago

It would be considered ultra processed.

Important to note that whilst the podcast brings different opinions on different matters. It doesn't necessarily mean that Andrew or the podcast endorses those opinions.

chihuahua• 2 years ago

Podcast sponsors are blessed, and exempt from the normal rules.

stakhanov7• 2 years ago

The reason it doesn't fall into this category is not because it's not ultra-processed, but because it's not food, and no one is claiming that it's food either. Presumably the idea here is more about how many calories you ingest, and what proportion of those calories comes from what level of processing. AG1 is not going to be a significant proportion of anyone's caloric intake.

cypherg2• 2 years ago

Huberman lost all credibility with the science and medical community years ago, lol

tracerbulletx2• 2 years ago

The entire definition of "processed" as some kind of general category seems really dumb. Processed how? Which process? Any trend in the data could be explained by any one of a number of common "processes" but making this a general category is just a way to cast aspersions on all kinds of unrelated things.

undersuit• 2 years ago

What are processed and ultra-processed foods?
Unprocessed or minimally processed foods are whole foods in which the vitamins and nutrients are still intact. The food is in its natural (or nearly natural) state. These foods may be minimally altered by removal of inedible parts, drying, crushing, roasting, boiling, freezing, or pasteurization, to make them suitable to store and safe to consume. Unprocessed or minimally processed foods would include carrots, apples, raw chicken, melon, and raw, unsalted nuts.
Processing changes a food from its natural state. Processed foods are essentially made by adding salt, oil, sugar, or other substances. Examples include canned fish or canned vegetables, fruits in syrup, and freshly made breads. Most processed foods have two or three ingredients.
Some foods are highly processed or ultra-processed. They most likely have many added ingredients such as sugar, salt, fat, and artificial colors or preservatives. Ultra-processed foods are made mostly from substances extracted from foods, such as fats, starches, added sugars, and hydrogenated fats. They may also contain additives like artificial colors and flavors or stabilizers. Examples of these foods are frozen meals, soft drinks, hot dogs and cold cuts, fast food, packaged cookies, cakes, and salty snacks.

https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/what-are-ultra-processed...

tareqak2• 2 years ago

One example of an ultra-processed food that was a surprise to me is imitation crab [0][1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_stick

[1] https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/imitation-crab

datavirtue3• 2 years ago

He knows what they mean. It's the age old programmer forum response where everyone knows what the OP meant when they were asking but some pedant with a neurological problem hijacks the thread. Ignore him.

tracerbulletx2• 2 years ago

I'm saying grouping all of those things together is dumb and meaningless. As a taxonomical choice. "this food was processed" is not a useful category for analysis.

pgsandstrom• 2 years ago

I think it helps to look at it from another perspective: We are seeing a trend of certain health problems that are related to what we eat. We notice that a certain type of food is the root cause. Our currenty categorization of foods isn't helpful in finding the issue. The best label we have found for this type of food is "ultra-processed".

Danjoe4• 2 years ago

Just because the categorization can be ambiguous, doesn't mean it isn't useful. A donut is clearly more processed than juice, while juice is clearly more processed than an apple.

stuzenz• 2 years ago

On the same topic, I have been finding this book an entertaining and informative read - published in 2023.

- https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/62586003

The author of the above book has a good talk on the same topic here

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5QOTBreQaIk

The book itself is well referenced with footnotes and an appendix with extra research papers etc.

dayjaby• 2 years ago

Informative enough that you don't quote a single sentence and just put a link?

Engineering-MD• 2 years ago

I also enjoyed ultra processed people. I found the book waffled a bit and some bits were a bit shoe horned in. There is also a tendency towards exaggeration for dramatic effect. The strongest arguments I found were that we have evolved with our food over millions of years and eating is such a core role of any biological organism. Introducing all these edible synthetic products would understandably have unintentional consequences. The other good one is an economic argument: all the food companies want you to consume more, so there is an incentive to make you over eat these products.

julianeon• 2 years ago

There is one question I have when seeing articles about these types of studies.

I understand that ultra-processed foods often lead to being overweight or obese, and I can see how a whole host of problems can flow from that, from that condition of the body.

My question is: as a normal weight person, would these downsides still apply?

It does seem, skimming these articles, that the answer is 'yes' - ultra processed foods being associated with cancers and with a 22% higher chance of death from any cause, for example.

I'd be interested in more on those points, but this is helpful to know.

sooheon4• 2 years ago

Why wouldn’t it? Weight is a lagging indicator, and it’s only one phenotype out of the countless ways your body is affected by what you eat.

whatshisface• 2 years ago

Many of them, like the glycemic load, can damage your body directly without being mediated through the many dangers of excessive fat tissue.

nikkwong• 2 years ago

People can (and very readily do) develop metabolic diseases from consuming a poor diet at a normal weight. People develop insulin resistance and become diabetes quite commonly in this circumstance, but they can also develop liver, cardiovascular, and kidney disease. Basically, all of the potentially fatal diseases of excess that you would best avoid.

dylan604• 2 years ago

This really seem like a weird way to look at it. It's pretty clear that it's not good for you, yet it reads as if you're looking for a loop hole. That's like saying you know heroin can cause problems for a specific segment of the population, yet you're wanting to risk it anyways.

Edit: to be less accusational

Supermancho• 2 years ago

yet you're looking for a loop hole.

Claiming a poster has a secret intent, is not constructive.

xboxnolifes2• 2 years ago

If a study claimed that eating unlimited tacos every day was bad, as it found detrimental effects to 50% of the population, yes, I would be interested in knowing if being in the other 50% meant it wasn't bad you for.

If processed foods(, or alcohol, or meat, or carbs, or whatever) have 25% increased negative outcomes for overweight people, but only 2% increased negative outcomes for non-overweight people, that significantly changes the calculus.

I don't understand how you don't understand why you'd want to know that. It's practically equivalent to avoiding peanuts because other people have peanut allergies.

mise_en_place• 2 years ago

The weight is irrelevant, the studies have shown that when comparing an ultra processed diet to a non processed diet, the cohort that ate the ultra processed ended up gaining a statistically significant amount of weight. What's unknown is how UPFs affect metabolic health.

Effectively they're predigested food molecules that are reconstituted. It would seem the very act of digestion has an important role to play in the regulation of hunger, circadian rhythm, and metabolism.

NoPicklez6• 2 years ago

Whilst the focus is often on "obese" people, it is highly apparent that even "normal weight" people can be abnormally unhealthy internally.

Normal weight people can still get disease, cancers, poor liver function, obesity, insulin resistance, hypertension.

Furthermore, ultra processed foods can contribute to mental illness and generally feeling like crap

datavirtue3• 2 years ago

The lower the water content, the more dangerous and unhealthy it is. My rule after tracking health studies and fitness information for more than a decade. The old boring advice is golden. Fresh fruits, and more importantly, vegetables. Tapering off rapidly toward complex carbs and grains after a substantial portion of legumes. The more you grind fruit and grains the more they turn into sugar. No one wants to hear the truth: HoHos and pork shoulder will ruin your retirement years.

verticalscaler• 2 years ago

No one wants to hear the truth: HoHos and pork shoulder will ruin your retirement years.

I think it is well understood by interested people that indulging in cream-filled chocolate snack cakes will lead to bad outcomes.

But what is your beef with pork shoulders?

ragazzina• 2 years ago

Maybe they refer to the practice of simmering pork shoulders for hours in Coke/soda.

giantg2• 2 years ago

I generally agre, but pork shoulder shouldn't be that bad for you. If you're barbecuing it, a lot of the fat should cook out. If you eat an otherwise healthy diet and dont over do this, it should be fine.

An interesting thing that I've noticed, is that pork fats seem to vary in their solidifying temperature. If I get pork from the supermarket, the fat resolidifies at room temperature rather quickly. If I get pork from a local farm, it can take all night to resolidify at room temperature. I'm thinking the quality of the pork feed may be affecting the health properties of the fat (higher saturated fat tends to equal higher solidity). Obviously it's still bad if one overeats it, but maybe we could get some health benefits from looking at the quality of the fats through things like animal feeds and living condidtions.

katzenversteher2• 2 years ago

I don't think it's just the water content, it's also the surface area. Most processing we do (crushing, milling, blending, juicing, extruding, popping etc.) increases the surface area of the food and therefore make it faster digestible by our body.

Not sure if we have any processing that makes food less digestible and decreases surface area but it would be interesting to compare this kind of processing with the other.

paddim8• 2 years ago

Fresh

No, frozen and dried stuff are fine. I don't get the obsession with freshness when talking about healthy food.

walterbell7• 2 years ago

https://github.com/Barabasi-Lab/GroceryDB

we introduce GroceryDB, a database with over 50,000 food items sold by Walmart, Target, and Wholefoods, unveiling the degree of processing characterizing each food. GroceryDB indicates that 73% of the US food supply is ultra-processed, and on average ultra-processed foods are 52% cheaper than minimally-processed alternatives. We find that the nutritional choices of the consumers, translated as the degree of food processing, strongly depend on the food categories and grocery stores. We show that there is no single nutrient or ingredient "bio-marker" for ultra-processed food, allowing us to quantify the individual contribution of over 1,000 ingredients to ultra-processing. GroceryDB and the associated https://www.TrueFood.tech website make this information available, aiming to simultaneously empower consumers to make healthy food choices, and aid policy makers to reform the food supply.

Machine Learning Prediction of Food Processing (2021), https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.05.22.21257615

GroceryDB: Prevalence of Processed Food in Grocery Stores (2022), https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.04.23.22274217

windowshopping3• 2 years ago

This site makes no sense to me.

I looked up "plain hummus" and it has a score of 70? https://www.truefood.tech/product/wf_cedars-mediterranean-fo...

But the ingredient list shows almost zero additives. The same goes for a lot of other hummuses, but then some of them have a score of 1 despite having ingredient lists that are not discernably different. https://www.truefood.tech/product/wf_just-hummus-original-hu...

Idk. Maybe I'm missing something here.

The website goes on to say:

In this example the Organic Plain Yogurt is at the 4th percentile among all yogurts, meaning if we have 100 different yogurts on a shelf then 95 of them are more processed than the Organic Plain Yogurt.

So, the 70 just means only 30% of all hummus are more processed than this one? But, does that really tell me anything about how processed the hummus is objectively? What if all hummus is extremely highly processed, how would this site indicate that? A 1 could still be highly processed in a category that is generally ultra-processed. :/

walterbell7• 2 years ago

I looked up "plain hummus" and it has a score of 70? But the ingredient list shows almost zero additives.

Almost zero != zero. Your cited hummus with a score of 70 includes the additive "guar gum". Other hummus vendors with a score of 1 do not include that additive, so the simple numerical score succeeds in flagging the product for manual human review.

Washington Post (2022) article lists guar gum as an ultra-processed additive, https://archive.is/LG1V1

  Many ultra-processed foods are made in industrial machines that subject grains, corn and other raw ingredients to extremely high pressures and temperatures. This can destroy micronutrients and create new compounds that can be harmful, including carcinogens, said Carlos A. Monteiro, an expert on ultra-processed foods and a professor of nutrition and public health at the School of Public Health at the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil.

  “These foods contain many chemical compounds that are not nutrients,” he added.

  Ultra-processed foods often contain an array of additives whose effects on our health we don’t yet fully understand, said Mozaffarian. “It’s not just the salt and sugar, which are the obvious ones, but the artificial sweeteners, artificial colors, emulsifiers, stabilizers, guar gum and xanthan gum,” he said. “We don’t know that they’re innocuous.”

InSteady• 2 years ago

The hummus with score of 1 has only 28 calories per 100g vs 214 calories per 100g for the "ultra processed." Almost no fat (0.9g) in a food comprised mostly of chickpeas and tahini, both of which are high fat foods. There has to be an error here.

Guar gum is definitely an ultra-processed ingredient from what I can tell. It goes through multiple stages of industrial processing, and is used in everything from food products to cosmetics to hydraulic fracking.

It is also associated with esophageal and gastro-intestinal swelling, including to the point of causing obstruction. It is high in galactose and mannose, and subtly alters composition of the microbiome. People with GI disorders are very often advised to avoid it (note that although partially hydrolyzed guar gum was previously recommended for IBS to increase motility, in more recent years experts are increasingly saying to avoid it). It is categorized as "generally recognize safe" food additive in the US and EU.

1vuio0pswjnm7• 2 years ago

https://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?d=5174899409093&w=VSv5J3DY26...

octopusRex• 2 years ago

https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/hsph-in-the-news/ultra-pro...

mharig• 2 years ago

A few years ago I read a blog post about that topic with a lot of refs to scientific papers. The blogger preferred the term "coffee shop food" over "(highly/ultra) processed food". It includes the packaging in plastic. I don't know if newer research has ruled out the wrappage as a cause, or if the plastic lobby manipulated to focus the ingredients.

The blog pointed to the very high effect size the experiments revealed (mostly mouse/rat model), and the impossibility to track it down to specific (groups of) substances. Unfortunately i cannot find the blog post.

To me it smells like microplastics might play a role.

cypherg2• 2 years ago

They've still never actually defined what an "ultra-processed food" even is.

Is it ketchup? Is it protein powder? Is it infant formula? Is it plant-based meat? Is it banana bread?

Is it based on the number of ingredients? Is it based on a preparation method?

This is the core problem with just about every article or study on UPFs

fragmede• 2 years ago

There’s always going to be a grey area in the middle, but actual spam in a can, and totally prepared microwave dinners are clearly in that category.

Kirby642• 2 years ago

The gray area is the problem. There's tons and tons of food that is likely healthy, but would meet the "ultra-processed" definition due to including certain ingredients. If those get lumped into the pile, then what is the study actually even measuring? Nothing useful in my view. If you want to make a case that a specific ingredient is harmful by itself (e.g., preservative X added to a food, all else equal, is bad) then I think that's a much stronger argument.

Right now all these studies seem to use broad strokes on the definition of ultra processed that make me think that it would be impossible to accurately remove confounding variables from the study.

NoPicklez6• 2 years ago

It has been defined many times and it's not a core problem.

https://world.openfoodfacts.org/nova https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova_classification

There doesn't need to be one formal globally recognised definition if you understand the intent of the meaning of the word.

Ketchup, protein powder, infant formula, plant-based meat and banana bread are all considered highly processed. Banana Bread less so if you decided to make it at home using raw ingredients.

The new science on what ultra-processed food does to the brain

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