Robert Kennedy Jr. is Trump’s nominee for secretary of health. If he becomes one, he wants to fight ‘Big Food’, the food industry that is making Americans massively fat with ultra-processed food. According to Elon Musk, on the other hand, the only cure for the obesity epidemic is appetite suppressants super cheap to make. Which of the two is right?
Kennedy’s opinions on health are largely incorrect and even dangerous; for example, he wants to abolish the polio vaccination. But ultra-processed foods can indeed be harmful. Biscuits, sweet dairy drinks, sausage rolls and chips are cheap, irresistibly tasty for many people and you hardly have to chew them; the calories slide in naturally. Such foods are a major cause of the obesity epidemic.
However, if you want to reduce its consumption, you must be able to define which foods exactly are fattening. For lack of anything better, half the world uses a description of ‘ultra-processed’, coined in Brazil. This means that it contains ingredients that you would never use in your own kitchen, such as soy isolate, modified starch, emulsifiers and sweeteners. Kennedy believes that such food additives – so E numbers – affect your metabolism and your cells damage. There is, however no evidence whatsoever for this. Research from France also contradicts the fact that additives make you fat: vegetarians and vegans are slimmer than meat eaters while they have more Eating “ultra-processed” foodssuch as plant-based burgers, oat milk and vegetarian sausage spread. These are masterpieces of food technology with many additives. But ultra-processed foods are only fattening if they are is irresistibleand vegetarian cheese and plant-based chicken pieces are quite tasty, but irresistible? No.
Long list of ingredients
Just because something contains ‘scary ingredients’ does not mean that it will make you fat. Take bread. Bread from the supermarket counts as ‘ultra-processed’ because it contains a long list of ingredients. But how often do you see someone secretly eating their lunch box? Artificial sweeteners also won’t make you fat; Replacing sugar with sweetener actually leads to: to fall off.
It is a misconception that super tasty food makes you fat because of scary-sounding ingredients. Is ice cream made from cream, sugar, egg yolk and vanilla less thick than ice cream with emulsifiers and flavorings? And cookies baked from white flour, butter and sugar, do you eat less of them than if they contain lecithin or whey protein? I don’t think so. Tackling convenience foods correctly could hold the key to obesity prevention, but eliminating ‘chemical’ sounding ingredients does little to solve the problem.
We need controlled experiments that reveal which properties of foods actually cause you to eat too much of them. Such studies have already shown the importance of ‘irresistibly tasty’ and of many calories per gram. Both lead to overeating. The structure of food also plays a role; when you hit something long and hard have to chew you consume fewer calories. We are not there yet, but unfortunately there is no money for this kind of expensive research; not with the government and certainly not with the industry, because it has no interest in people eat less. Consumers are also not asking en masse for measures against fattening food. Ever seen a demonstration for a sugar tax on soft drinks? The fight against fattening ultra-processed food is unfortunately difficult and thankless.
Heart attacks and strokes
Musk, on the other hand, has the wind behind him with his advocacy for appetite suppressants. They are not available in the US, even though they are five times more expensive there than in our country. That price will drop when the patents expire in five to ten years. Moreover, they are increasingly reimbursed by insurance; appetite suppressants are more than a cosmetic treatment, they lead to less diabetes, heart attacks, strokes and… kidney diseases. Sleep apnea is also strongly linked to obesity and appetite suppressants to help good against it. That is why in the US people with sleep apnea are now reimbursed for appetite suppressants. They also appear to inhibit the desire for alcohol, cigarettes and drugs; that’s going to be an extra argument for compensation. Once half of humanity injects or swallows them, rare side effects will undoubtedly emerge, but they will not outweigh the many nasty diseases that people now suffer from obesity.
The RIVM predicts that 64 percent of Dutch people will be overweight by 2050. However, that prediction holds no bill with the new appetite suppressants. The trend has already reversed in the US, where obesity is starting to decline and the same will happen to us. Nothing can match the rise of these medicines. It is sad that we cannot reduce fattening convenience foods, but Musk will win this argument and Kennedy will get the short end of the stick.
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