Ultra-processed Foods Considered a Risk Factor in U.S. Public Health Crisis

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This article originally appeared in Presence Marketing’s January 2022 Industry Newsletter

By Steve Hoffman

Ultra-processed foods – so named because they are often formulated to directly target the brain’s reward centers quickly and powerfully – are becoming enough of a concern among nutrition experts and policy makers that Newsweek featured it as the cover story of its Dec. 8, 2021, edition, entitled “Toxic Food.” Diet-related health conditions including obesity, cardiovascular disease and diabetes have significantly raised the risks of hospitalization and death during the Covid-19 pandemic, bringing addiction to ultra-processed foods to light.

“At issue,” Newsweek reported, “is the explosive growth in a broad class of food products that are not merely processed in the conventional sense to lengthen shelf life, but are also often modified to maximize flavor, visual appeal, texture, odor and the speed with which they are digested. These foods are made by deconstructing natural food into its chemical constituents, modifying them and recombining them into new forms that bear little resemblance to anything found in nature. So radically are they altered that nutrition scientists have given them a new name: ultra-processed.”

Major culprits are ingredients including sugar and processed grains that have been stripped of their outer shell, or bran, and the inner germ, which contain key nutrients such as fiber and essential fatty acids, leaving only refined carbohydrates, Newsweek reported.  According to Michael Moss, author of the 2013 book Salt Sugar Fat, recent studies show that 66% of food products in grocery stores now contain added sweeteners.

"These companies have learned how to find and exploit our basic instincts that attract us to food," Moss, whose most recent book, Hooked, explores food addiction, told Newsweek. "The problem isn't that these companies have engineered the perfect amount of sweetness for things like soda, cookies or ice cream. It's that they've marched around the grocery store, adding sugar to stuff that didn't used to be sweet, like bread and yogurts and spaghetti sauce. This has created this expectancy that everything should be sweet."