Yesterday, I watched this video:

The Lie That Made Food Conglomerates Rich…And Is Slowly Poisoning Us

The concepts are not fundamentally new to me, but several details caught my attention (see below).

More importantly, this video made me think about classifying foods into 4 groups:

4 food levels

  1. Natural foods, as they occur in nature (eg: vegetables, eggs)
  2. Minimally processed foods for convenience (eg: buy a cut of meat instead of a whole animal, buy flour instead of grains, buy olive oil instead of pressing your own olives…)
  3. Processed foods where you kind of know the ingredients but they are transformed (don’t recognize the ingredients. E-g: In Pizza you don’t see the tomatoes that made the sauce, you don’t see the flour used to bake it. What other ingredients did they hide inside? These ingredients may be all natural but the quantities, the combinations and silent additions may already be engineered to be addictive.
  4. Ultra-processed foods which contain ingredients that you would not use or even have access to if you were doing that yourself (High fructose corn syrup, Exxx, but also just glucose syrup…). This includes all types of candy but also most yoghurts, pre-made meals to re-heat, pre-made salad dressings, fancy ice-cream…

If in doubt between 3 and 4, think about shelf life (is it naturally or artificially long?) If still in doubt, check the ingredient list…

TODO

AFAIC, I’m going to identify everything that is Ultra Processed in my diet and try to get rid of it entirely.

Key Takeaways from the video

  1. The food industry and Big Tobacco use similar deceptive marketing tactics used to keep people consuming unhealthy products.
  2. Ultra-Processed Foods make up over half of the American diet, are linked to serious health issues like heart disease, diabetes, and cancer.
  3. They are designed to be addictive and actually manage to be more addictive that tobacco.
  4. They contain ingredients not found in home-cooked meals, actually ingredients we would not have access to ourselves.
  5. Adding excessive salt, sugar, and fat to make their products more palatable and to mask undesirable tastes from the manufacturing process, for example: Kellogg’s uses salt to mask “off-notes” in corn flakes. Without it, the taste was described as “metallic.”
  6. They sponsor health organizations and then call themselves “partners to give a false impression of their products being healthy.
  7. Major food companies were once owned by tobacco companies, which explains the similarities in their marketing and product development strategies.
  8. Studies sponsored by food companies often show favorable results, contributing to public confusion about nutrition. Only 3% of the studies funded by the food companies show unfavorable results to them. Examples:
    • Coca-Cola funded research to emphasize exercise over diet for weight loss, downplaying the role of soda consumption.
    • Kellogg’s sponsored studies suggesting that eating breakfast leads to better health outcomes (we might not even eat breakfast if Kellog’s did not market breakfast to us.)
  9. There is significant conflict of interest within the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, with many members having ties to the food and pharmaceutical industries.