Check out that headline: “Why Is the American Diet So Deadly?” The adjective isn’t “detrimental” or even “dangerous,” but a much more loaded d-word: deadly. Who wrote this thing, anyway? Some show-offy apprentice reporter who thinks that it’s cool to shock the reader? But wait, the “deck” or subhead injects an element of intrigue:
A scientist tried to discredit the theory that ultra-processed foods are killing us. Instead, he overturned his own understanding of obesity.
Of course, no one here suggests that anyone who writes about any topic under the sun must be a professional in that field. Still, it is reassuring that this author possesses credentials up to here. Dhruv Khullar is a practicing physician trained at the Yale School of Medicine and Massachusetts General Hospital, and also holds a master’s degree in public policy, and serves as an associate professor, and a director, and an associate director, and a fellow, and a journalist, all with different institutions.
So, what’s the bad news?
The bad news is contained within a prodigious magazine article, with a word count of 6,393 and a 46-minute listening time. The question: Why does the American diet cause people “to gain weight and develop chronic diseases at such staggering rates?” The author interviewed a man who was taking part in a month-long program designed to shed light on that topic. In order to preserve the strict routine that accounted for every morsel of food taken in, and for each and every unit of expended energy, no patient enrolled in the study was allowed to leave the premises unsupervised.
Visiting him there, Dr. Khullar observed the strict routine that recorded not only those activities but many other measurable factors. Even when the patient had a meal, his visitor had to leave the room, because being observed with the food would influence a person’s behavior, and this experiment was tight, down to the last calorie.
At this point in time, America had pretty much gotten used to the idea that sugar-filled beverages and saturated fats were at the root of the country’s obesity trend. However, the principal investigator of this National Institutes of Health study, Kevin Hall, had another villain in mind, and its name was ultra-processed food. Rather than just sugar and fat, chemical modifications and industrial techniques were beginning to look like the root of the problem.
The author consequently interviewed Hall about the work that he and others had been doing to verify their suspicions:
In recent years, dozens of studies have linked ultra-processed fare to health problems such as high blood pressure and heart attacks, and also to some problems that one might not expect: cancer, anxiety, dementia, early death.
There was even an inexplicable difference between the sexes. Women who consumed the highest amounts of ultra-processed foods had a much greater likelihood of suffering from depression, while men who overindulged in that stuff developed a noticeably increased amount of colon cancer.
Investigating the investigators
Dr. Khullar was even allowed to visit the institution’s kitchen, where cooks followed meticulous instructions designed to isolate the effect of processing. Like an Olympic race that would determine a world championship, cooking time was controlled with a stopwatch.
Consulting research that had been done in many different parts of the world, the visitor learned that it was now considered counterproductive to label individual ingredients, like saturated fat, as the villains. Around 2009, the trend toward laying the blame on processing really took off. Brazilian epidemiologist Carlos Monteiro…
[…] reasoned that something very bad had happened when industrial food systems started churning out cheap, convenient, and tempting foods. He argued that scientists should classify foods by their most unnatural ingredients and by their means of production.
In order to discuss this meaningfully, degrees of processing were delineated. Group 1 means processed minimally or not at all, like eggs and vegetables. Group 2 is the ordinary, traditional stuff that is in everybody’s kitchen: like sugars, oils, butter, and salt. Mix Group 1 with Group 2 ingredients, and you’ve got Group 3 — “processed, but not automatically unhealthy.”
But once we enter the territory where foods are “refined, bleached, hydrogenated, fractionated, or extruded — in other words, when whole foods are broken into components or otherwise chemically modified,” then ultra-processed is the applicable term.
If you can’t make it with equipment and ingredients in your home kitchen, it’s probably ultra-processed.
(To be continued…)
Your responses and feedback are welcome!
Source: “Why Is the American Diet So Deadly?,” NewYorker.com, 01/06/25
Source: “Dhruv Khullar,” NewYorker.com, undated
Image by Leonardoscish/Pixabay
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