One of the main organizers of the event – Calley Means – urged the Senate to rethink nutritional guidance and distrust almost every institution.

America’s institutions have lied to the public for decades, misleading people on nutrition, healing from chronic illness

Means, a former consultant for Big Food and Big Pharma, emphasized the need for skepticism regarding the advice offered by major institutions on nutrition and chronic diseases. “Life expectancy has not increased in the past century, and we spend 90 to 95% of all medical spending on chronic issues, yet outcomes remain stagnant,” Means stated.

Means highlighted alarming trends, noting, “Heart disease has risen with increased statin prescriptions. Type 2 diabetes has surged alongside metformin use, and ADHD diagnoses have also climbed as more Adderall is prescribed.” He further pointed out that rising rates of depression and suicide correlate with increased prescriptions of antidepressants, while opioid prescriptions have led to greater pain management challenges.

Means criticized the American food system, describing it as “weaponized” due to the influence of the processed food industry. He traced its origins back to the tobacco industry, stating that major cigarette companies strategically acquired food brands and applied their expertise in creating addictive products. “They moved addiction specialists into their food divisions, creating ultra-processed foods designed to be both palatable and addictive,” he explained. Food chemicals such as MSG are used to addict consumers to toxic food-like products that are void of nutrition. Consumers get accustomed to eating ultra-processed foods that do not provide their cells what’s necessary to carry out vital functions.

Means asserted that the standard American diet has not only contributed to public health crises but has also been financially beneficial for the healthcare industry, which profits from treating the chronic conditions stemming from poor nutrition. “The medical industry has been complicit in this issue, benefiting from the rise in chronic diseases,” Means added. It’s true: most of the new drugs manufactured today do not address the root cause of chronic disease. Many of the new drugs actually cause new health problems.

Ultra-processed, food-like items have replaced raw living foods and herbs that people need to thrive

Max Lugavere, a best-selling author and long-time advocate for nutritional awareness, echoed these sentiments. He warned that many items in grocery stores should not be considered food but rather “food-like items” that contribute to an obesity epidemic. “This isn’t just about willpower; it’s about our food system,” Lugavere asserted. He concluded with a poignant observation: “We are not simply living longer; we are dying longer, plagued by preventable illnesses.”

The discussions at the Senate roundtable were deeply distrustful of government guidelines like the USDA’s food pyramid, which ignores essential food groups such as herbs, seeds, roots, barks, berries, seaweeds and healthy fats, to name a few. As health education is dumbed down in school systems and in medical schools, there is growing concern about the effectiveness of current nutritional guidance and chronic disease management strategies. As chronic diseases surface, individuals are finding their own way out of these health struggles by researching and implementing holistic strategies that are dismissed by traditional allopathic doctors — most of which are not trained on nutrition and herbal medicine.

As the panelists called for a re-evaluation of institutional advice, they highlighted the urgent need for systemic change in America’s approach to health and nutrition. Food pantries are void of the raw, living foods, nutrient-dense superfoods, adaptogenic substances and medicinal herbs that can set people free from their chronic diseases.

Sources include:

• Lifesitenews.com
• Rumble.com
• DietaryGuidelines.gov [PDF]
• Naturalpedia.com

(Mercola)—Consumption of ultraprocessed foods in the U.S. grew from 53.5% of the total calories consumed between 2001 to 2002 to 57% of the total calories consumed between 2017 to 2018.¹

During a lecture at the Royal Institution in October 2023,² Dr. Chris van Tulleken from the University College London cited 60% of the total calories in Great Britain are consumed from ultraprocessed foods and 1-in-5 people consume 80% of their calories from ultraprocessed food.

A 2024 systematic review of the literature³ confirmed what multiple past studies have also shown — the higher your intake of ultraprocessed food, the higher your risk of adverse health outcomes. Many of these adverse health events are closely linked to obesity and van Tulleken finds strong associations between consuming ultraprocessed food and obesity.

During his lecture,⁴ he presented a slide illustrating the meteoric rise in obesity that began in the mid-1970s, calling the situation “pandemic obesity.” At the time, childhood obesity was a mere 2% but now it’s more than 20%.

Data Confirms Ultraprocessed Food Is Killing Us

To fully understand how ultraprocessed food is altering human health, it is crucial to understand what it is. The concept of ultraprocessed food didn’t become part of nutritional conversations until the NOVA system was first proposed in 2009 by Carlos Monteiro. Researchers now use this system to classify types of foods used in interventional studies.

Van Tulleken notes that the category definitions are long and involved, so he simplified ultraprocessed food as: “Wrapped in plastic with at least one ingredient you wouldn’t normally find in a standard home kitchen.”⁵ However, while van Tulleken notes that ultraprocessed food does drive excess consumption and weight gain, it doesn’t just cause obesity.⁶

There is also a strong association with a long list of other diseases such as cardiovascular disease, certain cancers, Type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, fatty liver disease, inflammatory bowel disease, mood disorders, frailty and other “complaints that we all just think are part of growing old.”

The 2024 analysis⁷ included 45 unique pooled analyses and 9,888,373 participants. There was a direct association between 32 health parameters and exposure to ultraprocessed food. These health outcomes included metabolic, cancer, mental, respiratory, heart, gastrointestinal and all-cause mortality.

According to this study and others, this increasing exposure is contributing to rising rates of chronic disease and illness in the population. In other words, eating ultraprocessed foods is slowly killing us and, we really are what we eat.

Humans Have Always Processed Food

Van Tulleken notes that processed foods are not the same as ultraprocessed foods because processing is ancient.⁸ He calls humans the “only obligate processivores,” or mammals that must process their food before eating. Compared to other mammals of similar size and weight, humans have much smaller jaws and teeth with shorter digestive tracts.

The kitchen became our extended gastrointestinal system where knives and grinders are used to cut and chop food and cooking is used to process, mash and extract to make food more easily digestible.

“For hundreds of thousands of years, we’ve been grinding it and mashing it and extracting it and salting it and curing it and fermenting it and smoking it and doing all of these wonderful things that make diets edible and delicious,” van Tulleken said.

A 2022 paper⁹ noted that a food product is not simply the sum of the nutrients and that “Human diets are progressively incorporating larger quantities of industrially processed foods.” Throughout his lecture, van Tulleken agreed. In the early 2000s when Carlos Montero proposed the NOVA system, he also proposed that food is more than the sum of its parts and that how we process food matters to how our body processes food.¹⁰

What We Do to Food Matters

As an example of why processing is important, van Tulleken recounted an experiment done in the 1970s by a group of scientists in Bristol. The group used apples. They left some unprocessed, some chopped into chunks, some pureed and some were squashed with the fiber out. The processing was done immediately before the participants consumed them and what they found was revealing.¹¹

“If you eat a whole apple, it leaves you feeling fuller for longer, it doesn’t spike your blood sugar, and you don’t get a sort of rebound hypoglycemia. If you drink the apple juice, you get a big spike of blood sugar, you don’t feel full at all. Now, when you back-add the fiber, so it’s whole pureed apple, you still get that sugar spike, and you still don’t feel satisfied.

So even when we have a pureed whole apple, it’s very, very different to eating the whole apple, to dismantling the apple with your teeth. Eating, the act of chewing, of manipulating food with your tongue, causes all sorts of internal physiological changes that are really, really important. So we do need to process food with our mouths.”

In 2016, Kevin Hall, a scientist and nutrition researcher with the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, was at a conference with a representative from PepsiCo.¹² They discussed the recent NOVA classifications and Brazil’s food guidelines to avoid ultraprocessed foods. Hall believed it was a silly rule because obesity had nothing to do with food processing.

He was attracted to the idea that food is the sum of its nutrient parts. Yet, there was damning evidence in the scientific literature that appeared to be correlative rather than causative. He believed that ultraprocessed foods were being wrongly blamed and so at the end of 2018 he and his colleagues were the first to test whether diet could cause overeating and weight gain.

In a randomized controlled, crossover study,¹³ participants ate either an unlimited amount of ultraprocessed food or an unprocessed diet matched for equal amounts of salt, fat, sugar and fiber for two weeks. The researchers found that while on the ultraprocessed food, the participants gained roughly 1 kilogram (2.2 pounds) and lost the same amount on the unprocessed diet.

Van Tulleken was also curious about how ultraprocessed foods affect the body. So, over one month, the 42-year-old increased his daily intake from 30% of ultraprocessed products to 80%, which mimicked how 20% of the U.K. population eats. By the end of four weeks, van Tulleken experienced a myriad of changes, including:¹⁴

• Poor sleep
• Heartburn
• Anxiety
• Sluggishness
• Low libido
• Unhappy feelings
• Hemorrhoids (from constipation)
• Weight gain of 7 kilograms (15.4 pounds)

“I felt 10 years older, but I didn’t realize it was all [because of] the food until I stopped eating the diet,” van Tulleken told the BBC.¹⁵ This is significant since the physician recognized that he had purposely changed his diet, and yet he did not recognize that feeling 10 years older after only four weeks was associated with the food he was eating.

Your Brain Predicts Nutrition From Taste

Van Tulleken makes the point that “The brain is a prediction engine. It’s constantly making predictions about the world. And when you get a mismatch between a prediction … there may be a stress response.”¹⁶

In his first example, he uses artificial sweeteners and Diet Coke. He notes that these artificial sweeteners are not linked to weight loss and the phosphoric acid in the beverage doesn’t just dissolve teeth, it also reduces bone density. He frames it as a way of “commodifying ill health.”

Looking at the labels on ultraprocessed foods, he noticed a theme.¹⁷ Each begins with four commodity crops — rice, corn, soy and wheat. The crops are broken down into powder, so they have “a nearly infinite shelf life and cost very, very little.” These are then mixed with commodity oils such as vegetable, sunflower and palm oils. These can be mixed with a little meat if needed and then the additives are included.¹⁸

“In the UK and in Europe we have around two and a half thousand additives that we use in food, and they’re somewhat regulated. In the United States, there are between 5,000 and 15,000 additives. No one has a list. The FDA who regulate, or are supposed to regulate additives, don’t have a list of all the additives that are added to food.”

Finally, whey powder, which was once a waste product of the dairy industry, and sugars may be added. Many of these ultraprocessed foods are being sold as healthy. The rating Diet Coke receives is an interesting example, which “gets four green traffic lights on the bottle. So, this isn’t just a health food. This is the healthiest product you can possibly buy. Very few foods get four green traffic lights.”¹⁹

As van Tulleken notes, the body has evolved a sophisticated system for understanding what food does. This may have been the basis for manufacturers developing the “bliss point,” or the point where salt, sweetness and richness were perceived as being just right on the tongue.²⁰ When you taste sweetness, it prepares the body for sugar and carbohydrates.

The initial theory was that the taste released insulin, which dropped blood glucose and made you hungry. Van Tulleken notes that more recent research has demonstrated that artificial sweeteners increase blood glucose, which may be part of a stress response when the body predicts sugar and doesn’t receive it.²¹

And the same may be happening with fat. In the 1980s when fat was demonized, food manufacturers began producing low-fat products. The food manufacturers also created the sensation of fatty textures but without real fat. Van Tulleken notes that your mouth isn’t tasting for fun, it’s an early warning system.

So bitter taste identifies toxins and sweetness tells your body that sugar is on its way. If your mouth detects fat in food that doesn’t have fat or savory tastes without protein, he and others believe this is one factor that drives excess consumption. The flavor tells your body a nutrient is coming, but it never arrives. This throws off the homeostatic mechanisms built into mammals.²²

“And remember, we do all have an internal mechanism that is able to say ‘I am full.’ There is no obesity in wild animals, and that is not to do with scarcity of food. Many animals live with very plentiful food, but they have homeostatic mechanisms …

We all have a way of keeping all of our internal physiology the same. Our temperature, our blood pressure, our oxygen levels, our carbon dioxide levels, our blood pH, our sodium, our potassium, we regulate it all tightly. It would be bizarre if we didn’t do the same for calorie intake, and we can if we eat real food.”

Debunking Food Manufacturers Reasons for Obesity

As the manufactured food industry became a primary driver of obesity and ill health, they also began proposing reasons that people were obese that had nothing to do with the ingredients in the manufactured products. However, as van Tulleken notes throughout his lecture to The Royal Institution, these reasons have since been debunked.

• Calories in, calories out — The theory is that if you eat more calories than you burn, you will gain weight. Van Tulleken notes that the phrase “exercise is medicine” was trademarked by the Coca-Cola Company and developed in partnership with the American College of Sports Medicine.²³

However, through study of different populations, researcher Herman Pontzer²⁴ found the benefits people spend roughly the same number of calories no matter the activity level. The difference is in where the calories are expended. In people in Western society, calories are spent on inflammation, anxiety, and toxic hormone levels. The benefits of exercise appear to be dampening those factors, which explains why you cannot out exercise a bad diet.

• Willpower — The second reason trotted out to explain obesity is a lack of willpower,²⁵ which has been used as a proxy for poverty.²⁶

During the lecture, in addition to other evidence to debunk the theory, van Tulleken points listeners back to the graph presented at the start of lecture demonstrating the meteoric rise in obesity at nearly the same point that ultraproccessed foods became popular, noting that “unless you propose that simultaneously there was some failure of moral responsibility in all those different communities, the willpower argument doesn’t stack up.”

The Most Destructive Ingredient in Ultraprocessed Food

While ultraprocessed foods contain a wide variety of harmful ingredients, including synthetic and/or genetically engineered compounds and contaminants like pesticides, one of the most harmful ingredients found in most processed and ultraprocessed foods is the omega-6 fat linoleic acid (LA), thanks to the liberal use of seed oils in the making of these products.

One significant problem with polyunsaturated fats (PUFAs) like LA is that they are chemically unstable, which makes them highly susceptible to being damaged by oxygen species generated from the energy production in your cells.

This damage causes them to form advanced lipoxidation end-products (ALEs), which in turn generate dangerous free radicals that damage your cell membranes, mitochondria, proteins and DNA. LA also breaks down into harmful metabolites such as oxidized LA metabolites (OXLAMs), which have a profoundly negative impact on your health. These ALEs and OXLAMs then go on to cause mitochondrial dysfunction, which is a hallmark of most all chronic disease.

The video above reviews the health risks associated with vegetable oils and seed oils, which are found in most processed foods. It shows how chronic diseases such as heart disease began to skyrocket after the introduction of these oils to the market.

Seed Oils Are Far Worse Than Sugar

While most nutritional experts blame the epidemic of chronic disease on the increase in sugar consumption, the role of sugar is relatively minor when compared to the impact of seed oils.

Processed foods typically contain about 21% sugar. However, up to 50% or more of the overall calories contained in most processed foods come from seed oils.^27,28 The connection is further confirmed by looking at the U.S. carb consumption. It’s been declining since 1997, yet obesity and Type 2 diabetes have steadily increased. Interestingly, this continued rise coincides with the surge of seed oil consumption.

Another major reason why seed oils are exponentially more pernicious to your health than sugar is that they last much longer in your body. The half-life of LA is around 600 to 680 days, or approximately two years. This means it will take you about six years to replace 95% of the LA in your body with healthy fats. This is the primary reason for keeping your LA intake low as possible.

Meanwhile, your glycogen stores will be exhausted in about one to two days. So, if you go on a sugar binge, that sugar doesn’t stick around for years destroying your health like the LA in seed oils does. Seed oils also play a far greater role in obesity than sugar.

Obesity Is a State of Energy Deficiency

It’s important to understand that obesity is a state of energy deficiency due to inhibited mitochondrial respiration, which causes calories to be stored as fat instead of being burned for fuel. The solution is to optimize your mitochondrial function and raise your metabolic rate.

This inefficient burning of fuel (metabolizing of food) is why people who are obese typically also struggle with other health issues, such as low energy, fatigue, an inability to maintain focus, digestive problems and poor immune function.

It is important to note there is a difference between energy and fuel. Your body uses food for fuel to create energy, which it uses in bodily functions, including muscle contraction, digestion, and cognitive function. An important misconception about weight gain is that you are converting your fuel from food into energy, which is adenosine triphosphate (ATP).

Without activity to burn the energy, your body converts ATP into body fat. In other words, you’re not producing enough energy and you’re in an energy-deficient state, but you have enough fuel. The fuel is stored because your body cannot efficiently metabolize it.

The result is body fat and insufficient energy which forces your body to down-regulate other systems, such as reproductive hormones, thyroid activity, and systems that are not essential for survival. Unfortunately, you also experience perpetual hunger because the hunger signal is predominantly regulated by energy availability.

This in turn leads to overeating, resulting in a vicious cycle of low energy and weight gain. The goal is to fix your metabolism or low energy production. Several strategies can help. You’ll find a deeper discussion about this vicious cycle, several suggestions to fix it and links to more help in “Obesity Study: ‘Fat but Fit’ Is a Myth.”

• ¹ The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 2022; 115 (1), Abstract/Results
• ² YouTube, October 26, 2023, Minute 22:55
• ^3, 7 The BMJ, 2024; 384:e077310
• ⁴ YouTube, October 26, 2023, Minute 29:15
• ⁵ YouTube, October 26, 2023, Minute 10:46
• ⁶ YouTube, October 26, 2023, Minute 26:07 – 27:08
• ⁸ YouTube, October 26, 2023, Minute 5:41
• ⁹ European Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 2022; 76
• ¹⁰ YouTube, October 26, 2023, Minute 12:34
• ¹¹ YouTube, October 26, 2023, Minute 27:55 and 28:54
• ¹² The Guardian, February 12, 2020
• ¹³ Cell Metabolism, 2019;30(1)
• ^14, 15 BBC Food, What happened when I ate ultra-processed food for a month
• ¹⁶ YouTube, October 26, 2023, Minute 16:54 & 17:44
• ¹⁷ YouTube, October 26, 2023, Minute 18:04 & 18:55
• ¹⁸ YouTube, October 26, 2023, Minute 19:12 & 20:20
• ¹⁹ YouTube, October 26, 2023, Minute 14:37
• ²⁰ NPJ Science of Food, 2018; 2 para 2
• ²¹ YouTube, October 26, 2023, Minute 16:35
• ²² YouTube, October 26, 2023, Minute 41:30
• ²³ YouTube, October 26, 2023, Minute 34:11
• ²⁴ YouTube, October 26, 2023, Minute 30:40
• ²⁵ YouTube, October 26, 2023, Minute 35:23
• ²⁶ YouTube, October 26, 2023, Minute 36:43
• ²⁷ ScienceDirect, Fatty Acids
• ²⁸ Cells. 2021 Jun; 10(6): 1284

In a novel stance, scientists at the Agricultural Research Service’s Grand Forks Human Nutrition Research Center argue that ultra-processed foods can make up to 91 percent of a balanced diet. The preliminary study by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) contends that a diet predominantly comprising ultra-processed foods can score highly on diet quality and meet most macro and micronutrient requirements.

Julie Hess, an ARS research nutritionist and the study’s guiding force, encourages a shift in perspective—prioritizing food’s nutritional content over its processing level. This approach suggests that ultra-processed foods, which have traditionally been maligned in nutritional debates, can contribute significantly to a balanced diet.

In the study, scientists leveraged the widely used NOVA scale, first introduced in 2009, to classify foods by the degree of processing. As the dominant system in nutrition science, the NOVA classification system categorizes food based on the nature, extent, and purpose of its industrial processing. It includes four broad categories: unprocessed or minimally processed foods (fruit, whole-wheat flour); processed culinary ingredients (sugar, oil); processed foods (fresh bread, cheese); and ultra-processed foods (mass-produced bread with various additives, commercial salad dressings).

Ms. Hess voiced concerns over difficulties with the NOVA system because of potential ambiguities.

“There is not a consistent or easy-to-apply definition of what an ‘ultra-processed’ food is,” she told The Epoch Times.

Her claim has set off a tide of criticism from nutrition scientists. They maintain that the study overlooks abundant evidence connecting ultra-processed food intake to an elevated risk of various diseases, regardless of the food’s nutrient profile.

Carlos Monteiro, a key contributor to the development of the NOVA food classification system, disputes the study’s methodology and the authors’ application of the NOVA system.

“It is a desperate attempt to prevent the Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGA) from mentioning ultra-processed foods since a recommendation against these foods would be beneficial for public health but detrimental to the profits of major corporations,” he told The Epoch Times.

Mr. Monteiro argues that the study miscategorizes certain foods as ultra-processed, thereby misrepresenting the NOVA system. He counters the assertion that ultra-processed foods are Americans’ primary affordable, nutrient-rich source, instead championing greater access to fresh and minimally processed foods.

Peeling Back Layers of USDA Research

For the study, USDA researchers sought to answer a straightforward question: Can ultra-processed foods be part of a healthy diet?

The researchers selected commonly consumed foods based on national survey data. They explain that they listed the ten most consumed foods in categories such as vegetables, fruits, or dairy and sought the ultra-processed version to assemble a diet.

“My lab wanted to include foods commonly consumed by Americans,” Ms. Hess said.

Researchers then called on external experts to evaluate an array of common foods. Their assessments relied on two main frameworks. One was the NOVA system, and the other was the DGA, which sets the standards for a healthy diet. Equipped with expert opinions and these guidelines, the researchers designed a weekly meal plan. Their target was a balanced diet of around 2,000 calories daily, aligning with the average adult’s energy needs.

The plan balanced ultra-processed items such as honey nut oat cereal, whole wheat rolls, and margarine with unprocessed foods such as eggs and broccoli. Despite falling short in vitamin D, vitamin E, and choline for certain age groups, the menu mirrored the Healthy Vegetarian Dietary Pattern’s nutrient profile in the DGA.

“Our study found that several nutrient-dense foods like whole wheat bread, nonfat milk, canned fruit, tofu, fruit juice, and canned fish could be considered ‘ultra-processed,’” Ms. Hess said.

The diet’s quality, as rated by the Healthy Eating Index-2015, was 86 out of 100, considerably higher than the average American score of 58 from HEI-2020. Due to excess sodium and inadequate whole grains, the menu didn’t achieve a perfect score.

Despite these findings, the researchers note some limitations in their study, stating, “This study exemplifies a possible healthy diet comprising mainly ultra-processed foods but does not necessarily use the most commonly consumed UPFs.”

Ms. Hess underscores the need for a clear definition of “ultra-processed.”

“Moving forward, a clear definition of ultra-processed foods and inclusion of nutrient density is needed before labeling ultra-processed foods as healthful or not.”

The authors propose that diets primarily filled with ultra-processed foods, as per the NOVA system, can fulfill nutritional standards and achieve high diet quality scores.

Food Scientists Push Back

The USDA study provoked a flurry of discussion in the nutrition science community and faces scrutiny from several researchers, including Mr. Monteiro. He raises concerns about the study’s unconventional approach and potential conflicts of interest.

“The authors are affiliated with soybean producer entities (an ingredient commonly found in ultra-processed foods) and other institutions connected to the food industry,” Mr. Monteiro said. “The U.S. is one of the largest consumers of ultra-processed foods in the world, and it is also home to major transnational corporations that profit from the sale of these foods.”

His critique extends to the methodological approach, which he refers to as “nutritionism.” He argues the study oversimplifies dietary health by focusing solely on individual nutrients, missing the broader picture.

“By simplistically analyzing a diet and considering only nutrients, the authors produce a false conclusion that it is possible to compose a healthy diet with ultra-processed foods,” he said. “In reality, they have not even been able to prove this hypothesis: the article itself highlights the excessive sodium and insufficient amount of whole grains.”

Mr. Monteiro challenges the study’s understanding of the NOVA classification, saying the authors cherry-picked “ultra-processed” foods that distort the intention of the NOVA scale, thereby mischaracterizing the term and implications of eating “unprocessed” foods.

“They attempt to do so by making a shallow comparison between nutrients in an ultra-processed diet and nutrients in a non-ultra-processed diet, but they fail to consider several crucial points in a study of this kind,” he said.

“They do not mention, for example, the impact of chemical additives in ultra-processed foods. They do not mention their addictive potential. They simply ignore the numerous pieces of evidence, including dozens of large, long-duration cohort studies and one randomized controlled trial, that link the consumption of ultra-processed foods with an increased risk of developing various diseases, independent of the dietary nutrient profile.

“It is a highly questionable study, even in terms of its methodology.”

He underscores that sporadic ambiguities in food categorization don’t undermine the comprehensive application of the NOVA system in worldwide research. Any such uncertainty was recently addressed in a Nature article, which offers scientists a guide on how to handle classification dilemmas for certain foods.

Mr. Monteiro insists the key responsibility to identify ultra-processed foods lies not with consumers but with public policies, education initiatives, or regulations. It’s a critical task that can’t be left to consumer guesswork, he said.

The study is further criticized for its alleged mischaracterization of ultra-processed foods. Monteiro clarifies that adding sugar to yogurt classifies it as processed, but not ultra-processed. It takes the inclusion of additional additives to reach that level. Similarly, whole-grain bread only ventures into the ultra-processed category when it contains nontraditional ingredients, such as emulsifiers or flavors.

“Accessibility and affordability are common characteristics of ultra-processed foods—and that’s exactly where the problem lies,” Mr. Monteiro said. “The focus should be on making fresh and minimally processed foods more accessible.”

He pointedly asked, “Who benefits from replacing fresh foods with ultra-processed options?”

Nutrition expert Marion Nestle shares Mr. Monteiro’s skepticism. In her blog, Ms. Nestle underscores the USDA study as an effort to “cast doubt on the concept of ultra-processed foods (UPF)” and research demonstrating their association with poor health outcomes.

She asserts, “I think the UPF concept is so solidly backed up by evidence that it is here to stay.”

Ms. Nestle further suggests that the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service is conflicted, arguing that it functions as a “marketing arm of the food industry.” Her criticism of the Healthy Eating Index used in the USDA study aligns with Mr. Monteiro’s, noting its focus is purely nutrient-based and not fully equipped to address the issue of ultra-processed foods, which contain additives such as stabilizers, coloring agents, and sweeteners that are linked to disease-causing biological effects.

In addition to the scrutiny from these prominent academics, the USDA study has sparked discussion among the broader scientific community. One voice chiming in is Kevin Hall, a scientist at the National Institutes of Health, who took to Twitter on July 12 to express his reservations.

“Interesting that @USDA is actively promoting to the public (via press release) a diet very high in ultra-processed foods as being ‘healthy’ despite its high Na [sodium] content and without the diet actually ever being tested in people,” he wrote.

Evidence on Health Risks of Ultra-Processed Foods

Ultra-processed foods, industrial creations transformed into easy-to-consume, appetizing meals with long shelf life, have become a significant part of the American diet. These products now comprise a substantial 60 percent of the average adult’s food intake.

There is a widespread lack of understanding about what constitutes ultra-processed foods among the general public. A survey from September 2022 by the International Food Information Council reveals that 76 percent of Americans are in the dark about the classification of ultra-processed foods.

Many consumers are quick to label soda and packaged baked goods as ultra-processed. Yet, some undercover ultra-processed items such as ketchup, certain plant-based milks, and flavored yogurts slip under the consumer’s radar.

“There are a lot of foods that may be marketed or thought of as healthy, but have actually been processed quite a bit,” said Dr. Neha Sachdev, a family physician and director of health systems at the American Medical Association. “It’s important to be aware of the foods you’re eating on a regular basis and how processed these foods are.”

Science continues to uncover the health risks linked to a diet rich in ultra-processed foods. A 2022 study in BMJ involving nearly 23,000 people found that those frequently dining on ultra-processed foods faced higher risks of heart disease and death from all causes. Another revealing piece from BMJ that same year raised alarm bells, suggesting that ramping up consumption of ultra-processed foods might stoke the fires of colorectal cancer risk.

Our brains aren’t fans of these foods either. Studies reveal that a mere 10 percent shift from ultra-processed to less or unprocessed foods could catalyze a significant 19 percent drop in the risk of dementia.

“It is important to highlight that calories are not all created equal,” Dr. Sachdev said. “The same calories that you might get from eating an apple, for example, are very different than the calories you might get from eating an apple fruit bar. These might be equivalent in number, but what ultra-processed calories represent and the nutrition that they provide your body is different.”

Yet, in spite of the concerns raised, the authors of the USDA study maintain that ultra-processed foods have a role in nutrition, particularly for specific demographics. They suggest that these foods, due to their accessibility and convenience, could provide a nutritional fallback in some cases.

“Some key points often omitted from the ultra-processed food discussion are the potential benefits these foods can offer as nutrient-rich options,” Ms. Hess said. “They can be a viable choice for individuals on a tight budget, families, people with limited grocery access, frequent travelers, and others.”

Article cross-posted from The Epoch Times.