Death in the Center Aisles: The Alarming Health Effects of Ultra-Processed Foods

Ultra-processed foods (UPFs), deceptively designed to be hyper-palatable, pose a significant threat to our health. Many of these products, due to their cunningly addictive potential, can hijack our neuronal mechanisms, making them difficult to resist.
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One can find UPFs in the center aisles of grocery stores, which charge vendors fees for shelf space. Crowding on those shelves are thousands of different concoctions fraudulently presenting themselves as food stuffed with chemicals and sugars, the stuff of slow suicide, and the path toward obesity and its sister ailments.

Ding Dongs are Impossible to Resist but Only Resemble Food

Over 60 percent of caloric intake in the United States is from UPFs, a staggering statistic that should raise concern. These products are industrially processed substances (oils, fats, sugars, starch, and protein isolates) extracted or refined from whole foods. They contain little or no whole food and typically include flavorings, colorings, emulsifiers, and other cosmetic additives.

This extreme processing creates foods so effortlessly absorbed by the body that they’re effectively predigested. Specialists claim food companies design these to overcome our satiety mechanisms, which pilot people to overindulge and gain weight.

Ultra-processing degrades the internal structure or ‘food matrix,’ the intricate core structures that not only hold the raw materials together but influence the bioavailability of the nutrients, how our bodies use the food, and whether we feel full after eating it.
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Most ultra-processed products are poor in protein and micronutrients and can potentially supersede nutrient-dense, unprocessed, or minimally processed foods. This displacement could lead to a low protein and micronutrient intake during critical periods of growth and development. 

Stuffed with Industrial Adjuncts, Doritos will Kill You

​Studies confirm the harmful health effects of UPFs:

• High consumption of ultra-processed foods is associated with cardiovascular and heart disease mortality risks. Evidence suggests these harmful associations may be more pronounced in women. 
• UPF consumption appears to cause changes in the gut microbiota composition related to the development of neurodegenerative diseases.
• There appear to be risk associations between the consumption of ultra-processed foods and the development of Alzheimer’s disease.
• Overall, the proportion of calories in youths’ diets from ultra-processed foods rose between 1999 and 2018, from about 61% to 67%. However, with the right interventions, the proportion of whole, unprocessed foods could be increased, potentially reversing this trend and bringing about a healthier future.
• In this large cross-sectional study, researchers positively associated UPF consumption with high fasting plasma glucose levels, elevated BMI, waist circumference, and fat mass index and inversely associated with HDL cholesterol concentration. 
• These findings suggest that high UPF consumption in young children is associated with obesity and other cardiometabolic risk factors, highlighting the need for public health initiatives to promote the replacement of UPFs with unprocessed or minimally processed foods.
• Consumption of UPFs was associated with increased risk of overweight, obesity, abdominal obesity, all-cause mortality, metabolic syndrome, and depression in adults, as well as wheezing but not asthma in adolescents.
• In addition, consumption of ultra-processed food was associated with cardiometabolic diseases, frailty, irritable bowel syndrome, functional dyspepsia, and cancer (breast and overall) in adults while also being associated with metabolic syndrome in adolescents and dyslipidemia in children. 
• Findings suggest that frequent UPF intake during early childhood may be linked to stunted growth, indicating that the displacement of whole food results in malnutrition.
• Greater ultra-processed food consumption was cross-sectionally associated with increased odds of depressive and anxiety symptoms.
• Furthermore, a meta-analysis of prospective studies demonstrated that greater ultra-processed food intake was associated with an increased risk of subsequent depression.
• Ultra-processed food consumption was associated with increased body fat from childhood to early adolescence, and this association was not just because of ultra-processed food on calorie content.
• Maternal consumption of ultra-processed food during the child-rearing period not only increases the risk of overweight or obesity in offspring but also does so independently of other lifestyle risk factors. This underscores the severe and long-term health implications of these dietary choices, urging us to act and make healthier food choices. 

Fast Food Outlets Make it Cheap, Fast, and Tasty

UPFs are manufactured via industrial processes, requiring large plants that cost a lot of money and are exclusively owned and run by large corporations. There’s gold in those center aisles, and these enormous corporations present calorie-dense, sweet, and salty foods that are impossible to resist.
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As the feedstocks for these ersatz foods are cheap and vendors sell many units of each, large corporations accrue huge profits and can sell their products at a lower price point than whole foods, thereby capturing the low-income market. Additionally, these food surrogates have exceptionally long shelf lives, as they only resemble food and are resistant to spoiling and decay.

Aerial View of ADM HFCS Plant

One of the most significant issues with UPFs is their ubiquitous added sugar, which manufacturers use as a flavor enhancer, flavor, and browning agent. Sugars turn brown with heat, providing a desirable visual hue to baked goods like bread and buns. Epidemiological data imply that the prevalence of metabolic conditions, such as obesity, nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes, has heightened due to the excess consumption of these sugars.

High fructose corn syrup (HFCS) is cheaper than other types of sugar and is made in America. Corn is the biggest crop in the United States; we grow it far more than any other country. In 2021, American farmers produced 15.1 billion bushels, and the process is mechanized and efficient. Since the middle of the 20th century, mechanization, advances in agrichemicals (both fertilizers and pesticides), and genetic modification of crops have increased yields dramatically.
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The United States government is complicit in the UPF boom, as it encourages farmers to grow immense amounts of corn through subsidies, helping ensure that prices stay low and production stays high, making HFCS artificially cheap. In addition to annual crop insurance coverage, farmers can obtain commodity payments for growing corn (and other crops like soybeans, wheat, and cotton). In 2019, the federal government dispersed more than $2.7 billion in free funding to corn growers. This influences a system that creates a load of cheap corn ready for processing. 
 
The United States uses about one-third of its corn grown for animal feed, with another one-third to produce ethanol. The rest enters the food supply, much of it in the form of HFCS, which is more sugar for an already sick and overfed population.
 
American adults now consume an average of almost twenty teaspoons of sugar daily, about sixty pounds of added sugar per year. Humans never encountered significant amounts of sugar in the natural world during their evolution, and thus, we couldn’t adapt to process them, so the sugar load shows in the health effects of this extreme consumption.
 
Are there solutions? Of course, there are, but aside from education, much more is hopeless in the current business-friendly American political environment. One can envision an American population continuing to struggle, with public health continuing to deteriorate.
 
Pursuing a similar approach to a contemporary public health problem, smoking, would likely work. Sin taxes to raise the costs of these phony foods would raise the prices higher than whole foods, which would steer consumers to whole foods. Requiring warning labels on these products, like warnings on cigarette packs, would be prudent.