Big Junk Food’s Campaign to Get You Eating Doritos and Oreos for Dinner
Meanwhile, the multibillion-dollar industry is telling the anti-processed foods movement to chill out.
If you’ve been paying even a little attention to health news recently, you’ve likely seen the words “ultra-processed foods” in headlines, blamed for everything from depression to diabetes to early death. Last year the book Ultra-Processed People, a tour through the effects of a factory-bred diet by BBC broadcaster Chris van Tulleken, was widely lauded in reviews by virtually every mainstream news outlet. On a panel in the early fall, renowned food scholar, molecular biologist and author Marion Nestle said the number of studies connecting ultra-processed foods to negative health outcomes had passed the 1,600 mark.
The term, as critics love to point out, is not universally defined, and not all processed foods are equally bad for you. Still, it describes about three-quarters of the American food supply. While it refers broadly to any food made mostly of industrial ingredients that themselves are already highly processed (think pea protein isolate or methylcellulose), some like to define it as foods made with ingredients you wouldn’t find in a home kitchen. I tend to subscribe to a theory articulated by Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart in 1964 about obscenity: “I know it when I see it.”