In Aus we're still catching up...with the dangers of UPF

The "health food" aisle at our local supermarket!

In Australia, if you Google UPF, the results are overwhelmingly about the Ultraviolet Protection Factor: warnings to wear sunscreen and protective clothing because of skin cancer.

In Australia, it appears we’re health conscious. At least about a problem that kills around 1500 people a year.

Now to put that in perspective. In 2021, some 63,000 people died from diseases that are essentially preventable: heart disease, dementia, diabetes, liver disease, (some) cancers...

So why was I googling UPF? I was looking to see if Australia has caught onto the dangers of another UPF - Ultra Processed Food.

It took me four pages into the google list to find one reference to ultra processed foods.

Australia is late coming to the realization that our everyday shopping is killing us. One in every five people who dies in Australia dies of a lifestyle-related preventable death due in part to a diet full of foodstuffs that are now known to be both addictive and highly dangerous – and part of our everyday food shopping.

While we’re worried about the sun, the rest of the world is trying to rein in the harm caused by food that isn’t really food – the addictive and convenient UPFs which are associated with an increased risk of obesity and chronic diseases, such as diabetes, CVD, depression, and cancer. 

Research in Britain, North America, Brazil, Argentina, Canada and many other countries is now focusing on just why their populations are becoming obese so rapidly and just how ultra processed foods are contributing to people dying of preventable diseases.

A couple of years ago a scientist set out to prove that human bodies can’t tell the difference between natural nutrients and manufactured nutrients.  He hypothesised that if the food was matched for nutrients and calories then our bodies react to ultraprocessed foods and home-made whole foods the same way if they are matched for nutrients and calories.

The scientist, Ken Hall, and his team assumed that because all food is made of molecules and it’s just chemistry, that it shouldn’t make a difference. He totally DID NOT expect the result that he got.

Participants on the UPF diet ended up eating 500 calories a day more! 500 calories more! And they put on a lot of weight (as you’d expect). So, given this blew their theories away, there’s now about 25 papers researching this phenomenon. (Read here)

The increase in obesity rates has occurred in parallel with changes in global food systems, which have driven higher consumption of ultra-processed foods (UPF) – in other words big food companies making stuff that is deliberately hard to say “no” to.

These products are cheap for food companies to produce, they’re aggressively marketed and they comprise up to 70 per cent of the average Australian diet.

Most of us know that “junk food” like McDonalds and KFC is never good for us but the reality of Ultra Processed Foods is more insidious.

These foods are everywhere, dominating our diets from breakfast through lunch and onto dinner with everyday foods that have only become “everyday” in the last 40 years. They comprise most of weekly shopping and are directly contribute to our falling health status.

UPF is convenient, shelf stable and addictive - and potentially deadly.

There’s two ways that UPF affects human health:

1.      Sugar, far and salt. We can’t resist it. Humans are programmed for a million years of evolution to seek out foods that provide energy. They were rare until 100 years ago. 

2.      Manufactured additives: All food (real food) is just chemicals, but when humans start mucking around with making industrial molecules that imitate food then things take a really bad turn. We’re just finding out just how bad these are for us.

Canned and instant soups, breakfast cereal, iced coffee, processed meats, salad dressing, mayonnaise, two minute noodles, chicken nuggets, wraps, icecream, bread, frozen desserts, flavoured yoghurt, “protein bars” and many, many so called “health foods”.

The “treats” we regularly consume: fruit juices, carbonated soft drinks, fast-food dishes, flavoured milk drinks and confectionary, chips, cheezels and TV snacks, pies, sausage rolls, frozen arancini….crackers, dips…the list goes on.

Not to mention the new meat “substitutes” and the increasing number of ultra processed ‘vegan’ and ‘health’ foods that are taking up more and more room on supermarket shelves.

They are generally easily identifiable by the fact they are wrapped in plastic and contain at least one ingredient you wouldn’t find in a household kitchen.

It’s only recently that we’ve started to look at food as a complex system, rather than a series of different replicable ingredients. And what we’re finding is very scary.

This is new science but there is no doubt that UPF is so bad for us. The structural components of the raw food are destroyed, separated and put back together (or synthesised) and then all sorts of molecules are added to make sure they stay “shelf stable”…eg don’t go rotten or separate etc. But what that does to our ancient bodies, used to whole foods, we just don’t know.

More here.....

A brilliant podcast about UPF is "A Thorough Examination" by the Van Tulleken brothers (if you've got kids you'll recognise the name from a very popular kid's TV show....https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/a-thorough-examination-with-drs-chris-and-xand/id1625865924

Or watch this short video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAxkGg8nk3w

Citation:

Hall KD, Ayuketah A, Brychta R, Cai H, Cassimatis T, Chen KY, Chung ST, Costa E, Courville A, Darcey V, Fletcher LA, Forde CG, Gharib AM, Guo J, Howard R, Joseph PV, McGehee S, Ouwerkerk R, Raisinger K, Rozga I, Stagliano M, Walter M, Walter PJ, Yang S, Zhou M. Ultra-Processed Diets Cause Excess Calorie Intake and Weight Gain: An Inpatient Randomized Controlled Trial of Ad Libitum Food Intake. Cell Metab. 2019 Jul 2;30(1):67-77.e3. doi: 10.1016/j.cmet.2019.05.008. Epub 2019 May 16. Erratum in: Cell Metab. 2019 Jul 2;30(1):226. Erratum in: Cell Metab. 2020 Oct 6;32(4):690. PMID: 31105044; PMCID: PMC7946062.