Bettina Elias Siegel - The Challenge of Feeding Children in a Highly Processed World

Throughout this book, I use the term highly processed to describe certain foods and beverages. But what does it mean?

In its PR materials, the food industry tells us that processing is any deliberate change in a food that occurs before its available for us to eat, whether its as simple as freezing or drying food to preserve nutrients and freshness, or as complex as formulating a frozen meal with the right balance of nutrients and ingredients. By defining the term so broadly, the industry can then offer all kinds of reassuring messages, like: most of the food we eat is processed and food processing began about 2 million years ago (referring, I suppose, to fire-roasted wooly mammoth?). The industry and its supporters also like to remind usfrequentlythat even frozen fruit, bagged salad greens, and baby carrots are all processed foods.

Those statements are literally true, and its also true that modern food processing provides all of us with an unprecedented degree of food safety and convenience. We shouldnt discount the importance of those achievements, nor should we romanticize our preindustrial past, when food-borne illness was far more common and when preparing and preserving food was an exhausting, full-time endeavorespecially for women.

At the same time, though, foods most basic purpose is to nourish the body and foster health. If it causes harm, somethings clearly gone off the railsand I think we all know the problem doesnt lie with frozen fruit and baby carrots.

Because the industrys definition of processed food includes both the pear thats been sliced and dried and the unfortunate pear that winds up in a box of Betty Crocker Blastin Berry Hot Colors Fruit Roll-Ups (ingredients: Corn Syrup, Dried Corn Syrup, Pear Pure Concentrate, Palm Oil, Citric Acid, Sodium Citrate, Fruit Pectin, Monoglycerides, Malic Acid, Dextrose, Ascorbic Acid, Acetylated Monodiglycerides, Natural Flavor, and Color [Red 40, Yellows 5 & 6, Blue 1]), I would argue that the term has ceased to have any real meaning. So for the purpose of our discussion here, Ive turned instead to a classification system called NOVA, which was first put forth in 2009 by Dr. Carlos Monteiro, an expert in nutrition and public health at the University of So Paulo in Brazil.

The NOVA system assigns all foods and beverages to four categories, the last of which is ultra-processed. (You can find a description of the other three categories in the endnotes.) Ultra-processed foods and drinks are industrially produced, contain at least five ingredients (but usually many more), andin addition to salt, sugar, and/or fattypically contain industrial additives not commonly found in our kitchens. Sometimes these additives are themselves highly processed, like hydrogenated oils and soy protein isolate. NOVAs examples of ultra-processed foods include mass-produced: sweet and savory snacks; ice cream, candy, and cookies; breakfast cereals; energy bars; pre-made pizza and pasta dishes; poultry and fish nuggets or sticks; burgers; hot dogs; and packaged soups, noodles, and desserts.

When I first read the NOVA definition, though, I was actually inclined to reject it because it seemed to reflect a certain distasteful food snobbery. Like, why is a carton of mass-produced vanilla ice cream considered an ultra-processed food (with all of that terms negative connotations) while a batch of homemade vanilla ice cream is merely processed? After all, a few industrial additives likely make little difference to our bodies, and in the case of some mass-produced vanilla ice creams, such as Hagen-Dazss, the products ingredient listing reads like a recipe we might use in our own homes: cream, skim milk, sugar, egg yolks, and vanilla.

But when I read further, I learned that the NOVA system builds into its definition of ultra-processed food a number of external factors that clearly do make a difference to our bodies, by pushing us toward overconsumption of less healthy food while luring us away from healthier, whole foods. Specifically, in discussing ultra-processed food, the NOVA team includes this statement:

The main purpose of industrial ultra-processing is to create products that are ready to eat, to drink or to heat, liable to replace both unprocessed or minimally processed foods that are naturally ready to consume, such as fruits and nuts, milk and water, and freshly prepared drinks, dishes, desserts, and meals. Common attributes of ultra-processed products are hyper-palatability, sophisticated and attractive packaging, multimedia and other aggressive marketing to children and adolescents, health claims, high profitability, and branding and ownership by transnational corporations.

In other words, what makes the mass-produced vanilla ice cream problematic is the very ease with which we can buy it cheaply and consume it in great quantity, and the degree to which were encouraged to do so by a constant barrage of sophisticated and aggressive marketing. None of that is true of homemade ice cream, which takes time and planning to makeprecisely why so few people ever undertake the project, even when they actually have an ice cream maker languishing in their kitchen cabinets. Most mass-produced foods are also hyper-palatable, as the NOVA team notes, meaning their flavor and texture have been carefully calibrated to make them extremely pleasurable to eatso pleasurable that some experts believe theyre actually addictive, or at least potentially so.

In this way, the NOVA definition of ultra-processed food squares nicely with one of food writer Michael Pollans most oft-repeated Food Rules: Eat all the junk food you want as long as you cook it yourself.