Ultra-Processed Foods

Introduction

0:00uh what do you have i have one too even though it's not my turn but what is yours wait i want to know what yours no no no no no no i want to see what you do with it first hi everybody and welcome to maintenance phase the podcast that's finding new and exciting ways to stigmatize the foods you love oh that's good that's very direct on brand the other thing that i

0:30thought about as an opening is uh asking you what your favorite ultra processed food is mine is smoked salmon oh nutella oh no mine was gonna be uh welcome to maintenance phase the podcast that

Ultra Processed Foods

0:41is finally going to tell the story of yellows one through four uh i'm michael humps i'm aubrey gordon if you would like to support the show you can do that at patreon.com slash maintenance phase or you can subscribe to premium episodes on apple podcasts it's the same content same content michael we're talking about ultra processed foods and this is a thing that people are like sort of constantly asking us to cover asking us to talk about all of that sort of stuff and i am fascinated to hear where we land well okay so the bad news is we have to start with

1:18the same tedious caveat that we start every episode with this is like my test of like can i do research without going down a bunch of like unnecessary rabbit holes and then cutting like

Research Challenges

1:28hours of footage out of the show the one thing we're going to talk about is like the definition of processed food oh my god i can't wait i think the core challenge of talking about this in a nuanced way is that there are two definitions there is the colloquial definition of processed food like when you are going about your business you constantly hear people say like i'm trying to avoid processed foods it's one of those concepts that is sort of like i know it when i see it that's what i was going to say is revised tagline is uh welcome to maintenance phase the podcast where

Colloquial Definition

1:59like pornography we can't define ultra processed foods exactly we know them when we see them right like you kind of know that a twinkie is like an ultra processed food you know that wonder bread is an ultra processed food and i i want to say that like as a colloquial matter i don't really police this stuff like if if i'm with somebody and they say like oh i'm trying to cut back on processed foods i'm not like how are you defining that the research disagrees with you yeah if you are a person who's trying to avoid processed foods like you know what that means there's all kinds of kind of arbitrary concepts in our lives that we still manage to live by and i think this is totally fine the question that

Scientific Concept

2:34we're trying to confront on the show is like is this useful as a scientific concept and as a concept that is now driving policy yeah so there are numerous countries that are passing taxes on processed foods we talked in our last episode about how rfk jr potentially might want to remove quote processed foods from food stamps and so it's kind of fine to have a colloquial understanding of a term that it's like a little murky or a little you know sort of changes depending on the circumstances but if we're going to be passing laws and if we're going to be putting out studies that say okay

3:08ultra processed foods is associated with a five percent higher risk of cardiovascular disease we need to have a clear understanding of what this term means i also think there is a way that

Carlos Montero's Work

3:19sort of processed food has come to act as a stand-in for what folks maybe previously would have referred to as quote-unquote junk food god damn it aubry this is in my conclusion oh shit i'm so sorry there's sort of an understanding that it might be uncouth or sort of judgmental to refer to some foods as quote-unquote junk foods and processed sounds like more technical or more descriptive or something to people fine aubry i'll scroll down to the part of my notes where i have information about this you know i was thinking about this last night and i was looking at my beloved bean shelf do my beans count as

3:54ultra processed what about i have a jar of barley is that ultra processed right the closer you get to trying to find a line the murkier it gets right it's very sort of impressionist it makes sense from a distance and then you get up close and you're like no the thing is the more i read about this the more i actually i think i prefer the term junk food because when people say junk food you know that it doesn't actually have a lot of informational content it basically just means like food i don't like you're like okay everybody's going to define it differently whereas processed food feels objective

4:25yeah but like it turns out to be like just as arbitrary it just sounds less arbitrary there is something that is genuinely helpful about people just sort of owning up to their judgments and biases because then you actually can have a conversation about it exactly versus someone who goes oh it's not junk food it's ultra processed foods totally where they just sort of keep sort of seeking a new refuge from any kind of conversation about how they actually feel so the the first thing to know about

History of Term

4:52the term processed food is that it's been around like much longer than i knew so i went on that like google gram thing that is like how much is this term being used the first reference that it has for processed food is from 1912 you can find old articles in like the new york times like decrying processed food and how it's harming people one of the first articles i found was from 1970 called bread is fatal to rats but that's not the point wait wait wait mike

5:23are you doing a rat sound board right no i'm not i don't i'm not doing this god uh i'm trying to find my fucking zoom window to turn on the camera oh wow when is this from this appears to be from the 50s i found this in an antique shop it's a print that says bread helps to keep up your energy in this sensible reducing diet bread helps burn up safely the fat you lose dude bring back this graphic design it looks dope it's so wordy it's like all these words and then like people at a

5:57prom or something because they ate bread also now i want a rat soundboard sorry this is okay i know i said i wasn't gonna go down rabbit holes and shit but the first paragraph of this article is for what may be the 1000th time the question of whether or not rats can live on nothing but ordinary white bread has been raised once again i'm like is that is that something we were raising a lot in the 1970s sorry are we coming back to this one a bunch just like a first date question where are you from do you have any siblings can rats live on bread if a tree falls in the woods around to hear it

6:32doesn't make a sound can rats live on bread so this is a study where they fed rats like ordinary white bread of course like refined flour you know they remove a lot of the fiber a lot of the nutrients etc if you feed rats just white bread they do die like they starve to death basically because there's not enough nutrients however if you feed them an enriched white bread that has these vitamins and minerals put back in they live yeah but what's interesting to me is like in this article from from the very beginning of this term nobody could really define what processing is because one

7:05way to think about it it's like okay you're processing the wheat you're taking out all the nutrients but also boiling down foods to get the nutrients out and turning them into powders and putting them into bread is also processing it's arguably 100 more processing yeah this is just a different kind of processing so it's like everyone uses the term process just to mean like food i don't like food that i think is bad right absolutely like there are very few definitions of processed foods in terms of the like colloquial usage that would include like olive oil this does actually get to like the biggest

7:37problem with the term and the biggest problem with like efforts to define it so the term becomes much more popular in the early 2000s especially with like the rise of michael pollen i went back to the omnivores dilemma for this and like he refers to processed foods many times but he doesn't refer to

Coining of Ultra Processed

7:51ultra processed foods the term ultra processed is coined in 2009 by a brazilian researcher named carlos montero who had been doing kind of field work in brazil in the 1970s and 1980s originally on malnutrition but he was noticing with these poor populations eventually the problem of malnutrition had started to shift to what he calls over nutrition you you basically have as the brazilian economy is developing there's more of these like commercial foods being produced and traditional diets are starting to give way to like

8:21you know sodas and twinkies and all the kind of stuff we associate with ultra processed foods so in 2009 he puts out the first use of this term in academia ultra processed and also an attempt to define it so this is a paper called the issue is not food nor nutrients so much as processing so i'm going to send you the first couple paragraphs it is now generally acknowledged that the current pandemic of obesity and related chronic diseases has as one of its important causes

8:52increased consumption of convenience and pre-prepared foods however the issue of food processing is largely ignored or minimized in education and information about food nutrition and health and also in public health policies so this is happening in the context of the shifting understanding of food right that the original understanding of like quote-unquote unhealthy food was food that was high in saturated fats right we talked about this coming out of the 1950s it was like we need to cut down on fat then in the early 2000s we get this stigmatization of sugar and carbs yeah and so what Montero is saying

9:26is like we need a more holistic understanding of this that it's not just like you measure the grams of sugar and then you're like this food is level eight bad like that's really one-dimensional we need a three-dimensional understanding and that comes from understanding the way that the food is made basically god the whole time you're talking about this i'm just thinking about other foods that are ultra processed protein protein powder protein powder we're getting there we're getting there we're

Defining Ultra Processed Foods

9:50getting there athletic greens you read two more paragraphs aubrey and then we'll get to the fun part which is us trying to define what ultra processed food is dunking on heel yeah exactly yes fuck you moon dust so i'm sending you these paragraphs about where he lays out like what is the problem with ultra processed foods modern diets usually do contain some unprocessed plant foods and meat and milk but also keep several of the unhealthy features of the processed ingredients they are mostly

10:20based on low nutrient density little dietary fiber and excess simple carbohydrates saturated fats sodium and trans fatty acids what makes snacks drinks dishes and meals mainly made up from the ultra processed foods different from traditional dishes and meals is that they are inalterable they come ready to eat or heat diets that include a lot of ultra processed foods are intrinsically nutritionally unbalanced and intrinsically harmful to health well now hang on are you gonna are you gonna mention exactly what i was

10:56about to say like you can say this but we just talked about like enriched flour and enriched cereals right that like growing up yes absolutely breakfast cereal was kind of everywhere but all of that breakfast cereal was like very prominently labeled as being enriched with vitamin a vitamin c vitamin yeah yeah yeah i don't know that you can argue necessarily that it's intrinsically nutritionally unbalanced right again athletic greens is an ultra processed food that advertises itself as being nutritionally balanced right

11:31there's also this core problem that you find in like every single paper about this where it says okay it's not about the nutrients it's not about what's inside of the food it's about the processes by which the foods are made and then it's like okay why are ultra processed foods bad it's about what's in the food so he's saying they're high in fat they're high in sugar and they're calorie dense oh my god mike are we gonna end up doing the reporting version of that briars commercial from the 90s where they made a little kid try to read the ingredients on a bucket of ice cream oh that was a briars commercial i

12:02actually looked up the ingredients of briars for this episode yeah because they were like but look at briars and the kid was like milk cream sugar guar gum that kid could pronounce guar gum it just really feels like that's sort of where we're headed we finally get to like the meat of this paper and like just such fucking mic bait the attempt to actually operationally define what ultra processed food is so he proposes in 2009 this classification that has three groups every single person who writes about ultra processed food has like the same paragraph where they're like well

12:37all food is processed yeah slicing up an apple is processing it but it has no nutritional content whatsoever but also like pringles like making like a slurry of potato and then shaping it into like chip shape is also processing it's like this term encompasses such a wide range of activities that it's it's probably better to just find a different term so he does acknowledge this so the first group in his classification is minimally processed foods or unprocessed foods obvious stuff right of like you

13:08pick an apple from the tree and it's like a group one food right but then he also acknowledges that even these foods include processing so he says such processes include cleaning removal of inedible fractions portioning refrigeration freezing pasteurization fermenting pre-cooking drying skimming bottling and packaging skim milk process this is the problem is it's like he's saying these are forms of processing but like they don't count it's not about whether foods are processed it's about like the

13:40intensity of the process yeah it just feels real goofy to be like the dried beans are not processed but you put them in a can and then they are so that is group one these are these are foods that are like they're processed yeah but they're not like ultra processed so they're they're gonna look the other way yeah they're fine right yeah group two is substances extracted from whole foods so this is anything like you know refining flour oh is that my olive oil yes this is olive oil so when you press

14:11olives you get oil out of them this is again also a form of processing but it's not like the bad kind of processing you're basically making ingredients out of whole foods yeah so he says traditionally they are ingredients used in the domestic preparation and cooking of dishes mainly made up of fresh and minimally processed foods because all of this is based on his work with like traditional families and like rural poor populations in brazil what he's really trying to do with this classification is separate kind of traditional food practices from modern food practices right he this is a critique of the

14:44modern food system and so what he's doing with group one and two is like well yeah you know if you look at like a poor family in rural brazil like they might be using some flour they're probably using some oil when they like saute vegetables they're using spices technically that's processing but that's not the kind of processing that is going to be harmful to health these are like traditional practices right but then he contrasts this with group three which is ultra processed foods so we're finally getting to the definition of ultra processed foods so here is this these are made up

15:17of group two substances to which either no or relatively small amounts of minimally processed foods are added plus salt and other preservatives and often also cosmetic additives such as flavors and colors this group of foods includes breads cookies ice creams chocolates candies breakfast cereals cereal bars potato chips and savory and also sweet snack products in general and sugared and other soft drinks that's the kind of you know it when you see it thing meat products such as nuggets hot dogs burgers and

15:49sausages made from processed or extruded remnants of meat can also be classified as ultra processed foods boy if anyone ever describes anything i'm eating as extruded remnants of meat i mean that's what they are it's true and i don't want to hear it i know don't think about it ultra processed foods are basically confections of group two ingredients typically combined with sophisticated use of additives to make them edible palatable and habit forming they have no real resemblance to group one foods although they may be

16:24shaped labeled and marketed so as to seem wholesome and quote-unquote fresh unlike the ingredients included in group two ultra processed foods are typically not consumed with or as part of minimally processed foods dishes and meals they are designed to be ready to eat sometimes with addition of liquids such as milk or ready to heat and are often consumed alone or in combination such as savory snacks with soft drinks bread with burgers it really feels like a very vibey definition the core

16:55definition is that ultra processed foods are made up of group two substances to which either no or relatively small amounts of minimally processed foods are added so the idea is that these products are majority like oil and fat like something like nutella which is like 13 hazelnuts and effectively everything else is just like oil and sugar but michael that's not typically consumed with or as part of minimally processed foods dishes and meals which means i'm sorry you never have dipped a banana into

17:29nutella you know earlier he said like the problem with ultra processed foods right is that they're very high in sugar they're high in fat they're very calorie dense but then he includes things in ultra processed here that are not particularly high in sugar or fat or energy dense like all breads you're including tortillas yeah this also excludes a lot of foods this definition does not include potato chips because like i looked at lay's potato chips like lay's original potato chips have three ingredients yeah yeah yeah it's potatoes oil and salt yeah and like lots of french fries also are just three ingredients

18:00right it's potatoes oil and salt that's kind of like the canonical food of like you shouldn't be eating so many potato chips you shouldn't be eating french fries but those actually count as minimally processed foods under this definition yeah you're saying ultra processed foods are bad for you but then you have this definition of ultra processed foods that includes a lot of foods that are not particularly bad for you and then you have this definition of unprocessed foods that includes a ton of foods that are bad for you or like at least they're calorie dense energy dense i was thinking because he includes milk in the sort of unprocessed category like a creme brulee would count as like unprocessed even

18:34though it's extremely calorie dense it's still mostly cream right yeah and just so very similar ingredients wise to like ice cream ice cream always makes the list of ultra processed foods but like i looked this up haagen-dazs ice cream has five ingredients it's like cream sugar vanilla there's nothing you can't pronounce in there as a person who occasionally makes ice cream there's not much to it but then the second problem with this definition is that it includes these concepts that are just not related to human nutrition so he goes into this whole thing that the the real problem with ultra

19:08processed foods is that they're profit maximizing they're they're produced by large corporations they're these kind of international commodities ah yes more vibes exactly so he says ultra processed products are typically branded distributed internationally and globally heavily advertised and marketed and very profitable but the problem with this is that fucking like fruits and vegetables and food that is good for you is also very profitable and also produced by fucking international global corporations like if you go to the grocery store and get strawberries they're going to be from fucking driscoll's

19:42driscoll's is like a massive corporation i mean i think here's the interesting thing here there is a critique to be had about the behavior of any number of multinational corporations that criticism of corporate behavior isn't the same thing as proving that there are negative health effects as a result of that bad corporate behavior again they're trying to kind of ride the coattails of like this kind of makes sense to you right yeah you kind of know that corporations are like bad so they're probably also bad for your health

20:12right we found this in the michael pollan book too that people keep presenting these dietary choices as somehow like a break from capitalism or somehow virtuous in all of these other larger economic ways and they just aren't food can be healthy and produced by miserable corporations this is the way that we've chosen to structure our economy you cannot escape from this by buying virtuous food i think this is a huge mistake in the way that people frame this stuff and if you can then the escape is only an escape that is available to

20:43people who can afford it exactly maybe the push then should be a we first have to establish that there is hard and fast evidence that this is like actively uniquely bad for you and b then i think the task becomes then you like regulate healthier products so as we just covered like this this definition is like not all that useful i i think this paper is like actually quite bad like kind of shockingly bad considering it like began this entire field like just obvious contradictions you know that i love

21:14like a petty like academic paper aubry you know i love like peer-reviewed like hmm interesting you and i both love the big brother house aspect exactly of academia absolutely so i found an article on all of the ways that they had to change the definition of this term over time between 2009 and 2017 they changed the definition of ultra processed foods seven times yeah that tracks and there's this article called ultra processed foods definitions and policy issues by michael j gibney that follows all of these changes in like a super

21:50petty but also very useful way oh it's our weight watchers episode yes you're the 17 different diets so in 2010 the definition of ultra processed foods is updated to durable accessible convenient and palatable ready to eat or ready to heat food products liable to be consumed as snacks or desserts or to replace home prepared dishes i like that they keep throwing in highly palatable which is just like if it tastes good it's good the other like the first thing that jumped out to me about this the first time i read it

22:25is this ready to eat thing was like these are often ready to eat but like do you know what else is ready to eat a fucking apple totally and some of that is like a grilled chicken breast that's cut up and thrown in a package at the grocery store and then you pick up right so like to refer to a food like that while conjuring an image of just like a heap of like hostess cupcakes and cheetos right feels misleading in a way that really verges on deliberate here there's also the thing you know it says it says

22:55they're they're intended to replace home prepared dishes but also this is not a biological concept the purpose of making food does not affect your body differently if i'm eating a brownie to replace a meal that doesn't make the brownie like affect my body differently it's like again we're just throwing in these concepts that are not actually related to nutrition at least let's just be honest about what we're grappling with exactly you already know which foods it is it's the foods you already don't trust right and you already know who eats those foods and it's people who probably make less

23:27money than you do we then in 2012 get another update where older processed foods are defined as these are formulated mostly or entirely from ingredients and typically contain no whole foods so this is yet another like message that you see in this world even in like academic articles it's like they're not even food they're like edible food like substances right this is the frankenfoods yeah i'm sorry but like a dorito is mostly corn i'm sorry yeah i mean to your point earlier about lays another one of those is uh fritos where you're like oh it's just corn and oil and salt so okay

24:01so finally we finally this is the whole episode aubrey just walking through technical definitions walking through definitions these efforts go on for like a decade to like try to come up with a classification they finally in 2017 come up with what's called the nova classification which is now what is used in all of the studies and from three groups they've now made it four groups there was a period where they're like three a and three b or whatever but now they're just like fuck it there's four groups so i'm gonna send you a jpeg of like the the current definitions and some examples

24:37group one is unprocessed or minimally processed foods naturally occurring foods with no added salt sugar oils or fats group two is processed culinary ingredients group three is processed foods defined as food products made by adding sugar oil and or salt to create simple products from unprocessed or minimally processed foods with increased shelf life or enhanced taste and then the last one is like a brick yeah and that is the definition of ultra processed foods industrially created food products created with

25:12the addition of multiple ingredients that may include some group two ingredients as well as additives to enhance the taste and or convenience of the product such as hydrolyzed proteins soy protein isolate maltodextrin high fructose corn syrup stabilizers flavor enhancers non-sugar sweeteners and processing aids such as stabilizers and bulking and anti-bulking agents they're industrially created food products created with the addition of multiple ingredients to enhance taste and or convenience the examples here are

25:47commercially produced breads rolls cakes cookies donuts breakfast cereals soy burgers flavored yogurts ready to heat meals such as frozen pizzas soft drinks and candy soft drinks are not ready to heat i know it's such a weird order the order that they're doing it in is weird the people who are doing this defining are not writers i'll say that i think the the greatest challenge that they come up with is this thing of there's processed foods which are fine and then there's ultra processed foods which are bad yeah this is like i think what they spent 10 years kind of trying to figure out because

26:21obviously everything is processed and there's stuff like cheese which is produced in like a very processing kind of process god damn it but they don't want to call that bad for you because that's kind of traditional or kind of virtuous i guess so that's in like group three yeah it just feels like so clearly such a a line drawing exercise around like how do i keep in the things i like and cut out the things i don't there's also the one that really stuck out to me the first time i saw this was in group three which again is good you have freshly made bread and then in group four which is bad

26:56you have commercially produced bread yeah again these are not nutritional concepts something can be made in very large batches and also be very good for you and the other way around and like at what point does bread become commercially produced on some level all fucking bread is commercially produced i bought it at the bakery well also group four talks about like high fructose corn syrup but group two includes honey and maple syrup yeah exactly so what is the metabolic difference right it feels like they're

27:27trying to have like a hundred sort of like scientific conversations at once and i'm like no dudes you got to go through beat by beat and be like here's the problem with emulsifiers and why they might be bad for your health here's the evidence for that here's why honey is different than high fructose corn syrup it isn't also aubrey what no one even like in academia can can fucking agree on what the four groups are i have seen honey in all four groups good yes no one can decide this is when i turn into

27:59that like elmo in front of flames like yes yes there's also i mean maybe this is me being annoying but like i also kind of object to like cakes and cookies being an ultra processed because like yeah some cakes and cookies are ultra processed but some cakes and cookies you bake at home with like five ingredients and surely the whole point of a fucking processing scale is to organize foods according to how processed they are like the processes by which they are made you just have like all cakes and all cookies are in

28:33here presumably because they're very high in fat and high in sugar but then if we're just putting in all foods that are high in fat and sugar then why isn't this just the fucking how high are foods in fat and sugar scale you could also argue that like while they've got like cookies in group four that if you're talking about macarons those are made with ground up almonds instead of wheat flour so does that mean that they're sugar nuts they're really trying to put a real fine point on it but in the process of so doing they are revealing how blunt that point is i could yell that on the internet for

29:04saying this the other day but like there's also the thing of like ultra processed foods are characterized by the addition of multiple ingredients and then they list like maldodextrin and all this kind of stuff but am i losing my mind aubrey ingredients are not the same as processing like if i make bread with like water flour yeast and cyanide that's not bad because it's processed like the process of making that is precisely the same as if it wasn't poisonous the reason it's poisonous is because of the ingredient none of this stuff is processed it's like if the ingredients are bad then it's bad for you

29:37but then the whole the the original article that kicked all this off was like it's not what's in the food it's the process but then they define it and it's like oh so it is what's in the food it really mimics the kind of way that i feel myself behaving when i'm looking for like shampoo or something and the container will say like no parabens and no phthalates and i'm like i don't know what those things are but it seems good yeah yeah they don't have them and you're like sort of creating this weird deliberate byzantine definition that carves out all the things that you trust and leaves in all

30:11the things that you don't trust so okay so that was the sort of decade-long and i think unsuccessful

Experimental Study

30:16effort to define what this term means we then in 2019 get the first evidence that this category of food is uniquely bad so this comes from a researcher named kevin hall who was previously a physicist but sort of drifted into diet research he was the guy that wrote the biggest loser study the study that found that like their metabolisms were still hella slow like years after they were on the biggest loser he in 2015 meets carlos montero at a conference and montero is like you're looking at this the wrong way

30:50you shouldn't be looking at nutrients you should be looking at processing according to the lore he's like i don't really buy this i don't i don't know about this whole ultra process thing i'm gonna design a study to disprove this concept and then he like accidentally ends up proving the concept i feel like what you're ramping up for is like what i was ramping up for when i was like richard simmons says he got a book deal by sitting next to someone yeah i don't have concrete evidence to be like no that definitely didn't happen but i'm gonna go out on a limb and be like but really didn't happen so the way

31:24that he does this is he gets a grant from the nih to basically take 20 people and like lock them in a room not really but like metaphorically and monitor their diets and so what he does is he gives them for two weeks a unprocessed diet so like completely whole foods and then for the next two weeks he gives them a ultra processed diet and and he switches this to like 10 people start with unprocessed and then go to processed 10 people start with processed and then go to unprocessed so that way he's like flipping them around they're they're given this food and they have 60 minutes to eat

31:58as much of it as they want and then when they're done the researchers take it and they weigh it to see exactly like gram by gram exactly how much of it did they eat so that way they can measure their intake and then of course there's like a ton of tests at the beginning and at the end you and i have talked about sort of like there are a couple of ways to do nutrition research and one is like in a lab in a vacuum yes it gets you uh much more limited in scope kind of data or you can go sort of larger scale more longitudinal but that's usually dependent on self-reports and people sort of like uh adhering

32:29based on the honor code yes so much of what i've heard about processed foods is about long-term health effects aubry are you saying you can't measure the long-term effect of lifestyle on health in two weeks with 20 people i aubry i don't know mike i'm not a scientist have you co-hosted the show i don't know i don't know maybe i don't know let me just make you read the description of the results this is from a new yorker article by drew coolar when participants were on the ultra processed diet they ate 500 calories

33:03more per day and put on an average of two pounds they ate meals faster their bodies secreted more insulin their blood contained more glucose when participants were on the minimally processed diet they lost about two pounds researchers observed a rise in levels of an appetite suppressing hormone and a decline in one that makes us feel hungry so this is very decisive it's like people who ate ultra processed foods gained a bunch of weight they ate more all of these markers got worse the

33:33unprocessed people they did great they lost weight they felt awesome this study when it comes out is like it's wild how popular the study was the study has been cited 1200 times yeah and i don't know this feels sort of like the glycemic index all over again which is like a teeny tiny group of people have a specific response to a food or group of foods and that then somehow becomes like conventional wisdom in really short order this study is so much worse than just the fact that it was two weeks

34:07so the whole kind of point of a study like this is to hold everything else constant and only look at the effect of quote-unquote processing but then if you read the fucking text of the study that was not remotely true the ultra processed diet what had twice the energy density of the unprocessed diet it had twice the saturated fat and it had 1.5 times more sugar so these are not equivalent diets at the most basic level and this is like in the fucking study you're like one group had a green salad and the

34:38other one had a like a value meal from wendy's and the ones who had a value meal from wendy's gained weight would you believe it aubrey aubrey oh no is it gonna be a fucking biggie size frosty is that what we're about to talk about the supplementary material of this study includes the daily menu so for every day it includes specifically what they ate for breakfast lunch and dinner with photos gogurt i am about to send you pudding packs we're gonna do day two dinner unprocessed menu day two dinner stir

35:09fried beef tender roast with broccoli onions sweet peppers ginger garlic and olive oil basmati rice orange slices pecan halves and salt and pepper so it's like a nice dinner of like i guess essentially like a stir fry yeah sauteed vegetables sauteed beef it looks nice right sure and then we have day two processed what what are you just the visual okay the visual is so fucking funny it is two

35:43whole chicken salad sandwiches for dinner white bread dinner a cup that appears to be an entire can of canned peaches in heavy syrup heavy syrup you get two keebler shortbread cookies and four fig newtons and then you get five crystal lights with fiber added even in my darkest days of like 80s 90s low-fat

36:14fucking dieting i did not get through five crystal lights in one day this is actually the reason why the energy density is so different between the two diets is because i think in an effort to hold the fiber constant there's no fiber in ultra processed foods it's like one of the things that makes them ultra processed foods so the only way to get participants fiber was to basically give them sodas every day with like fiber supplements in them so these are diet lemonade but oftentimes it's just like juice or like a little smoothie or milkshake something like that but like

36:46there are drinks with every meal for the ultra processed people there are no drinks for the unprocessed meal every once in a while they get a milk or something but like they're not getting like diet sodas or anything so that's a that's a huge difference between the two diets if you were sitting down to make yourself a meal the chances that you that like most people would make two whole sandwiches and eat an entire can of peaches like right it just is it's not representative of like how people

37:16eat well also the thing that really stuck out to me is that there are three desserts with this meal there are cookies there are fig newtons and there's a can of peaches in syrup yeah almost every single meal of the ultra processed comes with like cookies or shortbread or like some sort of like pudding there are no desserts with any of the unprocessed meals yeah the other like really striking thing about this is that they're not the same meal they're completely different if you want to do

37:47a one-to-one on your ultra processed you get the like i don't know stouffer's version of like beef and broccoli exactly okay let's go head to head with similar dishes this is the thing it's like what they're actually fucking doing they're they're calling this a test of like our ultra processed foods worse for you but it's literally it's like you give one group of people salads it's like a lot of salads you give another group of people fucking cookies and you're like oh my god the people ate more cookies therefore ultra processed foods are bad for you right you gave them six cookies with every meal

38:18yeah i actually think there's like a huge missed opportunity here because something people always talk about in this field is it like well pizza isn't necessarily bad for you right if it's if it's a frozen pizza from the grocery outlet then it's bad for you but if it's like artisanal and there's only three ingredients in the dough and it's like lovingly made then it is good for you right it doesn't have to be bad yeah so why didn't you fucking test that hypothesis can we look at their final meal they're like the the goodbye meal the farewell um is that it sorry i have so many i have

38:50so many files called supplementary material i have no doubt oh there it is day seven dinner it was only seven days i thought it was 14 i think they must have repeated oh they repeated yeah yeah yeah yeah okay the ultra processed menu for day seven dinner is it looks so bad also again there's fucking two desserts is made for a child yeah it really is all of them are it is two pb and j's that are packed

39:22to the gills yeah they really are like overflowing two cups of two percent milk with fiber added with horrible and then you get a snack pack of chocolate pudding graham crackers baked cheetos that's the way you disappoint everyone they're the color of like glow sticks at a rave they're the color of delicious i hate cheetos dude oh my god i love dude anything with powdered cheese

39:52anything with powdered cheese i love it so much there's there's these long sections of these articles where they're like people can't stop eating doritos and i'm like really day seven dinner unprocessed menu what you're seeing is a pretty sizable bowl of pasta it looks like a salad with a side salad it does this is my nightmare aubrey this is it this is where i flip over the table also with a side salad of green leaf lettuce baby carrots and broccoli can't have too much salad

40:24apparently god it's raw broccoli too wow i wonder why people ate 500 fewer calories wow we give them the most boring food imaginable uh they're not listing the giant bowl of grapes you gluttons i guess that's the dessert it seems visually like there's an implication here like if you weren't having two cookies you would be eating a bowl of grapes and i'm like i just don't think that's how people think and eat but also if the title of the study was like people eat more cookies

40:55than grapes i'd be like yeah i don't know that this says anything about processed versus unprocessed foods these are different foods but listen if you sort of scrape off this top layer of like sort of window dressing kind of stuff around like we're actually concerned about long-term health conditions we're actually concerned about blah blah blah most of those things are things like diabetes like heart disease and things that we associate with fat people so i think part of what you're seeing here is an assumption about how fat people eat yeah and how poor people eat okay so

41:30that was the experimental study that was that was the attempt to prove that ultra-processed food is bad for you like in a lab we then of course get a huge wave of observational studies you can look up on like google scholar there are dozens of studies that measure ultra-processed foods versus non-ultra-processed foods and like they all basically find the same thing it's like higher rates of cancer higher rates of cardiovascular disease like it's all the stuff that you would expect this is sort of the second way that you can measure the effect of food on health it's like you take these these big studies

42:06of like hundreds of thousands of people you give people food frequency questionnaires how often are you eating something oftentimes they'll do this in two ways at the same time they'll be like how often do you eat these foods in general and they'll also do a 24-hour recall like what did you do yesterday this is like kind of as good as it gets although people are so bad at estimating what they're eating and like especially the amounts right like if you if you go to a restaurant you have like pod thai can you say how many ounces you ate so there's that sort of layer of just gathering the basic information but then on top of that researchers will then go in and they will code people's answers

42:40for ultra-processed food so they get these answers this is what i eat i ate cake yesterday cookies yesterday whatever and then researchers will go in and go aha cake is ultra-processed so this person is yes eating ultra-processed food so there's two layers of errors with this and the biggest thing with this is that they're not fucking measuring whether people are eating ultra-processed food they're just having these food categories so again fucking cake cake can either be ultra-processed or not ultra-processed it depends on the fucking cake well and also again like i wonder about like how are they

43:16coding things like tofu exactly we've seen now multiple ways that processed and ultra-processed foods are categorized and we've already sort of explored that like reasonable minds can differ right that like two people could in good faith put the same thing in like any of the four different categories or two of the four categories or whatever right and they do some of the studies do actually attempt to control for that they'll have blinded uh like one researcher will do it and then another

43:46researcher will also do it like independently and they'll say like okay we have 95 agreement they're attempting to control for this but then what the the real problem is that it's not actually the coders it's the actual designers of the research they all say like oh we use the nova classification system but if you read studies different studies have like different classifications so like we mentioned honey before shows up in all different categories i also notice alcohol some studies just like remove it all together they're like we're not looking at alcohol consumption some studies will put it as like not ultra-processed some studies will put it as ultra-processed i also found one

44:21that put wine and beer as not ultra-processed but like vodka as ultra-processed mike it's a potatoes it's a carbs the same study also put it was bread was not ultra-processed but pretzels were ultra-processed when you put it in a shape that's processing mike the other one that really bugs me is like hamburgers are always in the ultra-processed category but like i looked this up a mcdonald's hamburger is 100 beef it's beef it doesn't have a bunch of weird ingredients in it do you think there

44:52may be counting on like buns and american cheese and ketchup and all of that kind of stuff well that's the thing is like technically yeah you could put it in there but you again it could be ultra-processed or it could not be like everything fucking else like the cookies and the cakes and the pizza like pizza is always in ultra-processed as well but like it kind of matters for your whole thesis whether it's like a frozen pizza or like homemade artisanal whatever quote-unquote nice pizza what's has anyone hazarded a guess at what the mechanism is here yeah this is this is something that you find in like

45:24the critical literature is that they're like we're actually like as a research field we're actually missing a crucial component and we're kind of leapfrogging over this because we thought it was saturated fat then we thought it was sugar now we think it's processing but no one can agree on what the fuck processing is yeah there's also aubrey i wrote down like nine other problems with these studies i'm gonna try to go through them very quickly i know you were talking a big game about we're gonna record for two hours i know i'll tell you what i'm looking at that ticker we're at one hour 54 how's it coming well we're getting we're on page 40 of 91 another problem with these studies is

46:00they don't distinguish between different types of ultra-processed food oftentimes it's just this weird binary distinction between like ultra-processed food and everything else so all three of the first three categories are just like good and ultra-processed is bad but there's a couple studies that actually look at different categories of ultra-processed food they're like okay breakfast cereal candy bars various other things in this study that looked at 10 categories of ultra-processed foods the only ones that showed a clear and consistent association with worse disease was soda processed

46:32meats and alcohol all the other ones like cookies refined bread all this other stuff it was like too mixed to really say anything but even within those right like if we're talking about breakfast cereals my guess is that grape nuts is going to have a different health effect than like lucky charms all of this stuff breaks down once you try to get granular yeah that's kind of what i'm thinking and like okay so you've got the entire category of sodas i think there are probably a lot of people out there drinking like poppy and olipop and all of the like probiotic sodas thinking that that's a

47:05different thing so and the the final thing i want to mention is the lack of a dose response so the way they do these studies is they compare the people who eat the least ultra-processed foods to people who eat the most ultra-processed foods and it's like a really wide gap like some people are eating like 60% ultra-processed foods and some people are eating like 7% when you compare the least versus the most you do get these like pretty large effects however there's some studies actually list the effect for each of the quintiles in between and there's something weird that like the death risk actually goes down sometimes if you

47:39eat more ultra-processed foods don't get you heard it here first team a real effect should have a dose response like a little bit of ultra-processed foods is a little bad for you a lot is a lot bad for you but we don't find that in the results one of the papers found a 50% higher cancer risk if you're eating a ton of ultra-processed foods but then once they adjusted it for the dose response they only found a five percent difference whoa some people if you eat a little bit of ultra-processed foods you're actually less likely to get cancer that's something that never comes up i mean i don't think this is causal

48:10right and also it's based on these fucking food frequency questionnaires so who knows but it's like to the extent that we can give diet advice which we all know everybody's going to give diet advice on the basis of these fucking correlational studies to the extent we can give diet advice it's like well yeah if you're if you're not eating any ultra-processed foods you should start eating some because those people actually have a lower risk of dying well this is sort of like the like for seniors it can be more beneficial on a number of health fronts to be in the overweight category versus the quote-unquote healthy weight category right but you're not seeing that as like health guidance for folks right because like this we already have some sort

48:46of cultural conclusions drawn right ultra-processed foods or cheetos and candy bars and those are bad for you and you shouldn't eat them this is maybe more damning than i mean it to be but like it feels like it's sort of masquerading as science this is what i mean with this like is this a scientific term or is this just like a thing people say yeah because i don't really mind if people say processed food but if we're gonna have a scientific term we should have clear consistency about what is in that category and what is not in that category you don't read biology papers that like can't agree on

49:19what a mammal is yeah like yes there's some edge cases like there's platypuses but also like in general that's like a pretty fixed category for this it's like sorry bread we can't decide where bread goes i would argue that honey is processed by bees it's flowers processed by bees if it's animal processed then it's fine i mean i guess milk is processed by cows maybe we're on to something aubrey let's publish so this brings us to the massive mainstreaming of this term in 2023 when a guy named chris van

49:50tulikin comes out with a book called ultra processed people why do we all eat stuff that isn't food and why can't we stop as soon as it came out we got so many episode requests so many episode requests so chris van tulikin is a professor at my alma mater ucl do you know what ucl stands for university college of london it's the worst name of a university in the whole fucking world university college guys that's really funny uh yesterday i had lunch at food restaurant listen i went to a school called

50:22portland state oh portland's not a state do they know correct do they know correct i know oh no also you went to brown why are you pretending you went to a different school i went to two years of portland state and two years of brown no i do know this i just like reminding listeners that you went to brown because you hate him any excuse now you're gonna leave all this shit in too so the thing is we're not gonna go super duper into this book mostly because like i already have

50:55a podcast that does that and like i can't just like do fucking books all the time the book honestly i've read worse from like british tv presenters as i was going i would sort of double check things and like most factually like it mostly checks out you don't catch him saying anything completely false but i think the core problem of the book is that this concept of ultra processed food just does not hold up to like 300 pages of discourse i think throughout the book you keep getting this sense

51:25that like the the ultra processed concept is not really helping us understand anything so he has a whole section about climate change that like the way that we're eating is like really bad for the climate which is absolutely true and then he says like well ultra processed foods are driving climate impacts and i was like are they though i went to their various ngos have like rankings of like foods that are the worst for the climate and so the top 10 foods that have the worst climate impacts are beef lamb cheese cow's milk kind of like dairy products generally chocolate coffee shrimp palm oil pork

51:59and chicken oh shrimp and chris ventillican like admits this he's like well you know these aren't necessarily ultra processed foods but they're part of like this ultra processed food system and he sort of tries to like make that work but it's like if you if you want to reduce your climate impacts you wouldn't stop eating ultra processed food you would stop eating meat like meat is like catastrophically bad for the climate especially cows anything involving cows is really bad well and you could argue just as much if you're saying like beef is part of the problem imported beef is also a big part of

52:34the like fine dining landscape this is the thing is he's constantly straddling ultra processed and unprocessed because you can eat a steak which is unprocessed but that's terrible for the planet even worse if it's like why you from japan yeah like flown in frozen it just it's like i don't like over and over again in the book you're like this is interesting as like a critique of the food system but processing isn't like a very good entry point to this he also has a whole section about how ultra

53:05processed food is addictive so i'm going to send this to you nicole avena is an associate professor at mount sinai in new york and a visiting professor at princeton her research focuses on food addiction and obesity she told me how ultra processed foods especially products with particular combinations of salt fat sugar and protein can drive our ancient evolved systems for wanting quote some ultra processed foods may activate the brain reward system in a way that is similar to what happens when people use

53:40drugs like alcohol or even nicotine or morphine the neuroscience is persuasive if still in its early stages there is a growing body of brain scan data showing that energy dense hyper palatable food ultra processed but probably also something a really good chef might be able to make can stimulate changes in many of the same brain circuits and structures affected by addictive drugs is this just pleasure yeah this is are you just experiencing pleasure i read a really good

54:12paper on this called food addiction a valid concept we're like it was basically a debate like here's the case for food addiction is a real thing and here's the case against food addiction is a real thing and like again there's there's a colloquial definition of food addiction where people say like i'm addicted to chocolate like the authors are actually very like compassionate about this and are like if that helps you that makes sense like the way that people talk about it colloquially is fine however as a scientific concept the term addiction means something specific in like brain science

54:43and we don't actually have good data on that for food i think that there are pitfalls to the ways that people talk about it colloquially because there is a point at which it stops being your own internal lens and starts being a lens that you apply to other people yeah yeah yeah yeah it also turns into like scrutinizing other people's eating and eating habits through the lens that works for you right right i don't think that it's like totally unproblematic how people talk about it colloquially but agreed that like the research should have a higher threshold than that yeah exactly and a lot of it basically is based on

55:17these functional mri studies where like they show you pictures of food or you eat food and like you can see different parts of your brain light up as you do that and so we always get these studies there's like it lights up the same part of your brain is cocaine but like yeah that's just like the i'm happy part of your brain like this this is the same part of your brain that lights up when like you see your best friend we talked about this with like the idea of quote-unquote sugar addiction yeah sugar episode right that like yeah dude you get that when you eat like a chocolate bar but you also get it when you pet your dog it's also very different person to person like which part of your brain lights up

55:52it's not as easy to say it's like oh the cocaine part like you're touching the cocaine part of your brain it's just like that's like the happy part and it's very different for people it's not really it's not like a mature enough science to say that this exists and then the other kind of category of evidence for food addiction is rat studies oh your favorite you can't really do rat studies on ultra processed foods because rat like they feed rats like little pellets of like specific formulations right of like it's 40 carbohydrates and 20 protein so like that's

56:22basically as processed as it comes you're making like a slurry and then drying it into pellets and feeding it to rats so all rat food is like equally processed like as processed as it can possibly be there is something there there's studies where they feed this is literally what it's called they feed rats sweet fat chow which is like a specific kind of chow and then they measure like what they do and like there's some evidence but also most of the rat study work is on sugar addiction and sugar addiction as we talked about is like very disputed in the literature and it's just like

56:56not clear that it exists hang on i gotta go on etsy and find a like a potter to make me a cookie jar with a label that just says sweet fat chow i know i love these sweet fat chow at a very basic level it's sort of indicative this sort of stuff but it's it's very we're we're very far from like kind of proving that food is addictive and we're also very far from proving that ultra processed food is specifically addictive it is sort of feels like a frustrating thing when we do cover concepts like

57:30these that like the assumption from jump is that this has to be a biological reality and that culture plays little or no role right in how all of this stuff you know sort of gets metabolized by people you know it also brings us back to the definitional problem because there's actually a study by nicole avena this this researcher that he's quoting here where it's just like a qualitative survey they just asked people like what food are you most quote-unquote addicted to like what are the what are the foods that you feel out of control around and the number one answer beans

58:02my bean shelf i'm clawing my bean shelf all the time that's only you aubrey and if you want to talk about it like that that's fine but scientifically the bean shelf is not in the rock listen get back at me when you see me at 2 a.m in the kitchen just chomping down on dried beans but the the top five foods that people feel addicted to are chocolate ice cream french fries

58:33pizza and cookies sure most of these are not ultra processed like another thing that really bugs me about this ultra processed food research is that it always includes fucking chocolate and like any you pick up any almost any like milk chocolate basic milk chocolate bar at the store and it has like five ingredients like i looked at giardelli it's unsweetened chocolate cane sugar cocoa butter vanilla extract and soy lecithin and the only sort of frankenfood ingredient in there is soy lecithin like are there health effects of soy lecithin well exactly then it's sort of like we're we're back to

59:05this issue of like what's the mechanism here because is so are we saying soy lecithin is addictive in food or harmful because soy lecithin is in a shitload of foods it's in like salad dressings bread etc those foods aren't addictive the way that chocolate is right people don't have the same relationship with those foods that they have with chocolate so it's like sorry what what is this theory is it that soy lecithin is bad or is it that like well chocolate is an ultra processed food because it's high in sugar and high in fat if it's ultra processed because it's high in sugar and high

59:35in fat then ultra processed isn't doing anything for us right i mean like if you're gonna take aim at like stabilizers and emulsifiers uh-oh green juice right because if you don't put something in the green juice it separates and then you end up with like yellow liquid and green silt right in a bottle on the shelf and nobody's buying that shit right like right another emulsifier is when you put a little bit of mustard in your vinaigrette right right you can sort of give all of these things more sort of nefarious sounding names or whatever more complicated names but like that doesn't actually

1:00:08establish the case make the case that they are harmful to your health i i feel like there's there's this systematic lack of precision because i'm actually open to the idea that like there's stuff in food that is harming us and like i don't love the fact that there's like weird fucking like hormones and the beef and shit like i don't love the the artificialness of our food supply however like i would much rather that conversation be led by actual scientists who know like the dosages that are shown to be harmful and the ways in which it is harmful like we need actual evidence

1:00:41for these things we can't just say like there's chemicals in the food because like baking soda is a is a white powder that you add to bread it's in everything is that bad for us well and again we're throwing all of this stuff in the same bucket right and if you sort of chase down each one of these ingredients individually some of them may have some mixed scientific evidence some of it may have none right we're just shunting so many things into this sort of giant bucket labeled ultra processed foods yeah i think i mean this also sort of brings us back to his own problems with defining the term

1:01:14because throughout the book the definition of this term changes a bunch of times he starts out by saying that an ultra processed food is any food with any ingredient that like you wouldn't find in a standard home kitchen well it doesn't matter the amount of that ingredient it doesn't matter sort of like some of these ingredients there's like things you haven't heard of because like you're not a chemist well and also some of them are like the chemical names for shit you already know the gimmick of the book is he's doing a super size me thing where he's like for 30 days i'm gonna only eat ultra processed food and of course he like gains a bunch of weight and he feels worse and he says his like

1:01:47mri is different whatever well yeah he's eating two pb and j's and a half a pack of graham crackers for every meal again it's it's just very hard to separate this from like the actual contents of the food but so he has this section as my diet went on i became obsessed with what is and isn't ultra processed food so did everyone around me friends started sending me ingredients lists does fruit concentrate means this is ultra processed food yes it does by the way to reiterate that means

1:02:18one ingredient if it has one ingredient it's ultra processed and also like fruit concentrate is just like boil down fruit juice yeah you could also get fruit juice and boil it down yourself and make like a barbecue sauce or whatever like i just like what sugar is i met b wilson at a food festival at which we spoke on a panel together she's a food journalist and author who has written about ultra processed food she asked whether i would classify baked beans as ultra processed food

1:02:48she didn't think that they were canned baked beans comprising white beans in tomato sauce are a staple in the british diet as wilson put it although they're obviously not the healthiest food in the world quote in the context of so much else that's in the average diet there's quite a lot of real food in the can this is true most of a tin of baked beans is actually beans and tomatoes so these are these are back to back paragraphs by the way it's like if it has fruit concentrate in it one ingredient means

1:03:18it's ultra processed but then as soon as we get to baked beans he's like well a lot of people like them and most of it's you know beans and water sorry is this a scientific concept or not hang on i'm looking it up dude michael aubry would you like to know the ingredients to heinz baked beans oh i have it that's like the next thing in my notes but read it read it read it water white beans tomato puree sugar salt calcium chloride mustard onion powder paprika extract spices and garlic powder now sir

1:03:55they're fucking ultra processed by your own definition you can't just say oh well they're like a big part of like the british diet that's important culturally and it's mostly beans sorry what are we doing here it's if it's this qualitative where just anything can sort of jump from this category to the other category then this is not a useful category for scientific research well and if you're talking about like ingredients that you don't have in your kitchen calcium chloride if you're right like tomato puree like i don't know guys i don't know what is tomato paste if not a fruit concentrate this is

1:04:29like really this is not the end of the book but this is like to me the culmination of like my engagement with the book because i got so annoyed at this section so he's trying to eat a healthy diet while also doing ultra processed food so he's like okay i can't just like cheat and like eat fucking cookies all the time so like i need to look for some ultra processed food that isn't so bad he goes to sainsbury's which is like the relatively high-end grocery store in the uk he gets a frozen lasagna but the problem with the frozen lasagna is that it's all like normal ingredients it's just like wheat pasta sauce there it doesn't count as ultra processed in his own definition but then he looks

1:05:04he goes to aldi which is like the much cheaper grocery store and that one has a bunch of like additives and emulsifiers and stuff and he's like okay so then he calls a member of carlos montero's team to kind of ask about this like well is is lasagna then kind of ultra processed and not ultra processed at the same time so here's sort of the answer some products are not technically ultra processed food she explained but they use the same plastics the same marketing and development processes and

1:05:35they're made by the same companies as ultra processed food the additives are part of the definition but they are not the only problem with the food some additives are harmless whereas others cause direct harms but in either case their presence indicates that a product probably has lots of other properties that may cause harmful effects according to lusata the sainsbury's lasagna is not ultra processed food if you apply the technical classification quote but these foods are like a fantasy they are not

1:06:06homemade foods there is a very consistent like snobbishness throughout this book and i think this whole concept you're basically looking at frozen lasagnas which meet all of the criteria you say that you want right these are all these are whole foods they don't have too many ingredients they don't have a bunch of chemicals in them and you're like oh but they're still ultra processed because like they're not homemade people should be making it at home again is this a scientific concept or not because like do we all want people to have more time to make stuff at home yes fine whatever but it's

1:06:38like now we're just judging people for like microwaving a dinner also just like you really could say hey some frozen foods are actually not ultra processed yeah you could actually add some nuance and this appears to be leaning away from that nuance and going no no it's frozen it's still bad you didn't make it it's still bad also like i have made plenty of bad food yes my housemate and i when i was in my 20s decided that we were gonna make cheese sticks at home and instead of using bread crumbs we used flaming hot cheetos that is a homemade meal i would argue it's maybe not

1:07:15nutritionally our strongest effort but also again not nutritionally devoid of value right like mozzarella cheese has like a bunch of fat and protein in it that are like generally pretty good for you like you know what i mean like there's like a bunch of stuff uh well i think the only thing i like ever like bake at home because i'm really bad at baking is banana bread because it's like any dumbass can make banana bread but it's extremely bad for you it's really good but it's a fucking cake it's not like delicious at one point in the book he actually says like well if something is like

1:07:46made with love then it doesn't count as an older processed food i'm just like dude please have a fucking definition and stick with the definition man yeah i think increasingly as we talk about this the more i'm sort of in your camp of like oh well then just say junk food because that is honest fucking junk food yes it's not my favorite term but it is more honest than being like actually there are these like extremely concrete health effects that are like widespread for like every preservative that is ever used in foods right or every ingredient that you can't pronounce what a

1:08:21deeply weird bar yeah i can't pronounce shit people know it's like all of our inboxes me not being able to pronounce stuff let's hope there's not a denouement in your food york is technically ultra processed food at this point i i now have no conclusion aubrey because all i had was the junk food thing we already talked about the junk food thing oh sorry sorry sorry now i have no closing can i tell you a conclusion oh yeah what is yours you were talking about pringles earlier and i remembered that there was a specific name for the shape of pringles saddle saddle bags no michael it's the universe it's called a hyperbolic paraboloid wait what uh it's mathematically known as a

1:08:59hyperbolic paraboloid put that on the fucking labels and nobody will ever buy them again like i will give you a food that is that uniform in color flavor texture and shape i'm like i won't fight you on that being ultra processed yeah i mean this is the thing is i feel the need to reiterate that like both of us are like relatively careful about how we eat and like i really do go out of my way to like try to eat healthy and part of that is like avoiding like i don't know foods that should go bad

1:09:29but don't go bad that's like one of my like little food rules i'm like if it should be perishable and it's not perishable i probably don't want to eat it i don't know how like scientific that is i think if people have food rules like this and they're kind of arbitrary or like kind of weird like fine i don't really police other people obviously diet related disease is like is real and is like something that we need to address but also we need to have scientific concepts if we're going to have like scientific approaches to issues we're still so deeply in the process of discovery about this

1:10:00stuff yeah totally yeah but the stuff that takes off is the stuff that comports with our cultural ideas of what is and isn't healthy which are not the result of science right i just wish that we were able to have a cultural conversation about the cultural stuff and a science conversation about the science stuff yeah i think it's just worth being honest with ourselves yeah that most of our sort of like hard and fast thinking about what is and is not okay to eat comes much more from like a set of assumptions and sort of a mismatch of like life influences and also if it's working for you then

1:10:36keep doing it and i'm not gonna tell you not to we're not here to tell you what to eat or what not to eat i am here to tell you not to eat hyperbolic paraboloids i'm here to tell you to eat them only hyperbolic paraboloids get the pizza flavored ones nice

1:11:13quote you you you you you you you Thank you.