By now, you’ve heard it a thousand times—ultra-processed foods are bad for you. There are mountains of studies linking these foods to an alarming array of conditions and diseases.
In fact, the more we learn about ultra-processed foods, the darker the picture gets. These foods now constitute a public health emergency, says patient advocate and former anesthesiologist David Sherer, MD. Here’s what you need to know before you take another bite…
What are ultra-processed foods? The easiest way to identify an ultra-processed food is to ask yourself two questions—do you recognize and could you purchase the ingredients yourself?…and could you duplicate that food in your own kitchen? If the answers are no, the food is likely ultra-processed. Examples of ultra-processed foods include store and national brand cookies, cereals, chips, frozen dinners, frozen pizza and the like.
Food scientists design these foods very deliberately. First, they want the products to be profitable, so they use inexpensive, unhealthy ingredients including preservatives, cheap sweeteners, saturated fats and lots of added salt. Then they want the foods to be irresistible, so they leverage their knowledge of chemistry and the human palate to give them the “mouthfeel” that we crave and hit the pleasure centers in our brains.
Why do we love ultra-processed foods so much? They’re cleverly designed to exploit the preferences we developed in our hunter-gatherer past when food was scarce. We needed salt, which was hard to find, so if our hunter-gatherer ancestor stumbled upon some, he had an appetite for it. The same goes for fats and carbohydrates—our ancestors had to fill up when food was available, because they did not know when they might get the next opportunity. Obviously, our circumstances have changed drastically—we now have access to a supply of high-fat, high-calorie, high-sodium foods all the time. Scary statistics: 58% of what Americans eat is ultra-processed…80% of us are overweight or obese…and one in three Americans is prediabetic.
Ultra-processed foods cause changes in our brains. About 10 years ago, teams of researchers working independently discovered that a high-fat, high-calorie diet doesn’t just cause us to gain weight…it also rewires our brains.
The changes occur primarily in the brain’s hypothalamus, the part of the central nervous system that receives and sends messages to every part of the body via neurotransmitters and hormones. The hypothalamus regulates the body’s automatic functions, including breathing, blood pressure, heart rate, fatigue and hunger.
When we eat, our digestive system produces the hormone leptin, which travels to the hypothalamus and tells the brain, Okay, that’s enough food. Stop eating now.
Problem: New research shows that ultra-processed foods cause inflammatory cells to invade the hypothalamus. That results in tissue damage that renders the brain unable to understand leptin’s signals that the stomach has had enough. Result: We overeat, causing more damage to the brain, encouraging further overeating…and so on, in a cascading cycle of negative health effects.
Recent studies have investigated changes to the brain brought about by obesity. In a randomized crossover study (the gold standard of medical research) published in Nature Metabolism, researchers from the Netherlands examined images of the brains of obese and non-obese people after eating. Result: The brains of the obese people did not stop signaling for more food despite having received plenty of nutrition.
Overeating ultra-processed foods causes a long list of diseases and conditions. High blood pressure, diabetes, kidney disease, heart disease, fatty liver, cancers and autoimmune and neurodegenerative disorders all are associated with these foods. What do all of these conditions have in common? Inflammation as a driver of disease…and obesity as an accelerant.
Inflammation is the body’s natural defensive response to foreign substances. It is possible that the body recognizes some of these laboratory-created processed food ingredients as foreign bodies, and that may cause inflammation. Some inflammation is helpful, but excessive chronic inflammatory responses can harm “innocent” tissue as a form of collateral damage. Living with chronic inflammation for years can wreak havoc with tissues in the brain, blood vessels and other organs, laying the groundwork for disease. We now have solid evidence that a diet high in saturated fat and refined carbohydrates, such as those found in ultra-processed foods, increases risk for chronic inflammation.
Obesity, typically caused by ultra-processed foods, is not simply a problem unto itself—it also is an exacerbator, providing a pathway toward many other diseases.
What about the new weight-loss drugs? Several new drugs now are being used for diabetes and weight loss, including Ozempic, Wegovy and Zepbound. These are being heralded by some as the solution to the obesity epidemic, but be cautious about relying on them. Health-care providers and researchers still are not sure about their long-term effects…and while they’re generally considered safe, they can cause stomach paralysis, pancreatitis, bowel obstructions and other side effects. And once people stop taking the drugs, they quickly regain the weight they’ve lost.
Better solution: Reduce or eliminate ultra-processed foods from your diet, and follow anti-inflammatory eating patterns such as the Mediterranean diet.
