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7/2/2024 0 Comments Death in the Center Aisles: The Alarming Health Effects of Ultra-Processed FoodsUltra-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. 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. 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. 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. Studies confirm the harmful health effects of UPFs:
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. 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. 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. 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.
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InvestigatorMichael Donnelly investigates societal concerns with an untribal approach - to limit the discussion to the facts derived from primary sources so the reader can make more informed decisions. Archives
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