Processed Foods

For those of you following closely, I apologize that this blog post is a few days late,  I have been working a long article on "Saturated Fat - Good, Bad or ...?"  (Stay tuned, it's taking me a bit longer than I expected but I think it will be worth the wait.)

In the meantime, I wanted to share something with you that I think is really relevant and actionable.

UCSF pediatric endocrinologist Dr. Robert Lustig lays out a powerful indictment of the food industry in a talk entitled "Processed Food: An experiment that failed"

This is definitely worth the time to watch - Lustig is a great speaker and the information he shares is damning.

If you don't have time - here are some selected notes that are worth reflecting on:

What is processed food?  (Food Engineering Definition) 

• has to be mass produced
• has to be consistent batch to batch
• has to be consistent country to country
• specialized ingredients from specialized companies
• virtually all macronutrients are pre-frozen (which means that the fibre is usually removed)
• has to stay emulsified (fat and water do not separate)
• has to have a long shelf-life or freezer life

What is processed food?  3 things too little - 8 things too much  (Nutritional Definition)

3 things too little

• fibre
• omega-3 fatty acids
• micronutrients (often removed along with the fibre)

8 things too much

• trans-fat (now being removed)
• branched chain amino acids - (good if you are building muscle, but in excess get turned into liver fat)
• omega-6 fatty acids - essential, but too many leads to a pro-inflammatory state
• food additives
• emulsifiers (polysorbate-80, carboxymethylcellulose) - these are detergents - not good for the gut
• salt (15-20% of us are salt sensitive, and excess leads to hypertension)
• nitrates (processed red meats - linked to colon cancer)
• sugar - this dwarfs everything else in terms of impact!

Sugar is addictive and harmful to our health

Of the 600,000 food items in the American food supply - 74% have added sugar!  Therefore sugar is the marker for processed food.

Lustig explodes the myth that all calories are equal - promoted by Coca Cola to justify that 180 calories of Coke is equal to 180 calories of vegetables.

You are not what you eat - you are what you do with what you eat.

The higher intake of sugar and industrial vegetable oils intake in the past 30 years - in response to the low fat and saturated fat recommendations (I will have more on this next week) are the two leading factors behind the high rates of obesity and metabolic syndrome.

The metabolism of sugar leads directly to fatty acid synthesis in the liver, and in excess - fatty liver disease, obesity, metabolic syndrome and diabetes.

For cardiovascular disease, the data is very clear - the more sugar, the higher the rates of disease:

Lustig and his colleagues estimate that 25% of diabetes worldwide is explained by added sugar consumption.

Lustig finishes with the societal math:

• US Food industry  grosses $1.46 trillion/year - $657 billion gross profit
• US Health care costs: $3.2 trillion/year
  • 75% chronic metabolic disease
  • 75% preventable (caused by the processed food industry)
  • $1.8 trillion/year wasted 

In other words - the US food industry costs the healthcare system $1.8 trillion per year - more than 3 times it's gross profit - this is truly crazy!

(while these figures are from the US, the numbers in Canada and elsewhere are headed in the same direction)

Bottom Line:

• processed food - characterized by its added sugar content - is driving the obesity and metabolic syndrome epidemic
• a calorie is not a calorie - added sugar leads to fatty liveer disease, obesity, metabolic syndrome and diabetes
• we lose more (3X) money per year on preventable health care costs than the food industry makes in profits
• the answer is to eat real foods - starting with no added sugars!