Carrion Luggage

Trust the Process?

This is a pretty long article from Vox, though I'll try to keep my commentary brief. Also, it's from December, so some of the information is already outdated, and I'm not always sure which information.

    You’re being lied to about “ultra-processed” foods  
Coverage of the latest nutrition buzzword is overly broad, arbitrary, and wildly misleading. The problem goes deeper.

Yeah, we're being lied to. We're always being lied to. Sometimes it's malicious; sometimes it's advertising; sometimes it's both.

“New research,” the Washington Post reported in June, “found eating plant-derived foods that are ultra-processed — such as meat substitutes, fruit juices, and pastries — increases the risk of heart attacks and strokes.”

“Vegan fake meats linked to heart disease, early death,” the New York Post declared.

There was just one problem: The narrative was totally fake.

Meat industry propaganda detected.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Donald Trump’s pick to lead US health policy, promises to crack down on ultra-processed foods and has called plant-based meats instruments of corporate control over our food system and humanity.

As opposed to the existing corporate control over our food system? You think all the USDA dietary guidelines are science-based? Think again.  

The American food environment is unhealthy and disease-promoting, and the food industry bears much of the blame.

When I was taking a walking tour of Brussels, the tour guide pointed out, "You Americans eat like you get free health care!"

No arguments here.

But the framing of that University of São Paulo–Imperial College study, and the promotional materials associated with it, might have made it easy for reporters to misunderstand what the research really found.

I know we say there's "lies, damned lies, and statistics," but there's also innocent mistakes and repeating something that you're convinced is true, but isn't. For example, "lies, damned lies, and statistics" is usually attributed to Twain, but he attributed it to Disraeli, but there's no evidence that Disraeli ever wrote that, and in the end, we're really not sure who coined the phrase. Attributing it to Twain may not be a lie, but it might be an innocent mistake.

If you’re confused, don’t feel bad — some of the world’s top nutrition experts are, too. “You look at these papers, and it’s still very hard to pin down what the definition [of ultra-processed] really is,” Walter Willett, a professor of epidemiology and nutrition at Harvard, told me.

Seems there's always a villain in the food story. I remember when the Bad Guy was fat, then carbs, then gluten, and now UPFs. Things are never simple when it comes to nutrition science, and none of these things are wholly evil.

While I don't doubt that a carrot is "good for you" while a Chee-to of the same color is "bad for you," I'm not convinced the problem is processing in and of itself. Some foods absolutely need to be processed to be edible, and while most of us aren't in the kind of situation where we'd have to eat those foods, people have been processing meats, vegetables, and fruits for preservation for at least centuries.

This is further complicated, as I hinted above, by the lobbying and promotional efforts of corporations who want to convince you to eat their packaged food as opposed to the other guys' packaged food (or, for that matter, a carrot.)

The relevant question about a novel scientific concept is not whether it happens to correlate with stuff we already know is true, but whether it adds something genuinely new to our knowledge, without also being wrong about a bunch of other things, as New York University environmental scientist Matthew Hayek pointed out to me. UPF, at least so far, doesn’t seem to clear that bar — it casts a net that manages to be overbroad while excluding some unhealthy forms of processing that have been around longer.

And I'm including this bit because I wanted to remember it for other science articles.

Having said all that: I get it. It feels intuitive to think there is something fundamentally not right about ultra-processed foods. I can understand why people would be freaked out by a vegan burger that looks and tastes like meat. I shudder at the junk that was normal for kids to eat when I was growing up — Gushers, Fruit Rollups, Coke — and think: That is not food.

No, that's marketing. And no, I'm not immune; I just try to recognize it as such.

The breadth and ambiguity of the campaign against “ultra-processed” foods make it vulnerable to sloppy thinking and manipulation by pseudoscience purveyors like RFK Jr. Combine that with a political climate in which multiple red states have banned cell-cultivated meat and meat producers seize every opportunity to thwart plant-based competitors, and you can imagine how plant-based meats could be targeted by an unprincipled, politicized application of ultra-processed food research.

I'm glad the author doesn't mince words here. After all, mincing is a form of processing.

There's a lot more at the link. But let's not undersell the social impact of the food argument; one of the basic things that holds people together as a community is eating. This is one reason so many religions and cults have dietary constraints of one sort or another: it sets them apart from the rest of humanity. If you can get people to battle each other over what we should and shouldn't be eating, you can control them more easily through a "divide and conquer" strategy.

And that seems to be what's happening.