Healthy eating has become a bit more complicated again. In addition to too much sugar, too much fat, too much meat and too many calories, there is now a new, rather vague category that the conscious citizen must take into account: the degree of processing. According to the latest academic hype, highly processed foods are bad for your health. I’m not sure exactly how editing is defined, but it roughly equates to what Insta girls and herbalists have been saying for years: that anything you make at home is good and anything the industry makes is bad. The processing of tomatoes that the mother performs in the kitchen for the soup produces something healthy, while tomato soup in a bag is ‘ultra-processed’ and therefore unhealthy.
A British study was recently published in which 200,000 people were divided into four groups: with 0-10 percent, 10-20 percent, 20-30 percent and 30-100 percent ultra-processed food in their food and drink. What turned out? The more ultra-processed, the more cancer one got. In short, anyone who cares a little about the health of her family is good again at the stove.
And? Is that eternal dogma that cooking at home is healthier now scientifically proven? Mwah. Zooming in reveals some pretty disturbing details in the study. For example, a dose dependence was missing. There were no differences in cancer diagnoses between the lowest three groups. In short, you can replace up to 30 percent of your daily intake with industrial junk and there is still no increased risk of cancer. It is only above that that it becomes unhealthy, and even then the question is whether that was due to the diet, or whether this group was simply significantly poorer, less educated and fatter. Smoked more, exercised less, had higher blood pressure and lived in poorer neighborhoods.
What was also missing was a pattern. There was hardly any agreement with previous studies. In France and the United States they also found associations between ultra-processed food and cancer, but there they saw an increased risk of breast and colon cancer in particular. Not in this study. In England, people were more often diagnosed with ovarian cancer, but surprisingly also much less often with head and neck cancer. The headlines above the newspaper articles might as well have written that potato chips protect against cancer.
Or rather, Coke. Because this is only partly about bread, sauce or soup. Even though we often talk about a food pattern, the real differences between the groups turned out to be mainly in their glass. Self-cooked meals with traditionally baked bread for six euros are washed down less often with cola, but with wine or beer. The pure eaters drank twice as much alcohol, but less soft drinks. You have to celebrate all that moral sublimity and healthy lifestyle at the stove a bit, don’t you?
I think this kind of research is net bad for our public health. It does something that the industry loves and consumers can’t deal with: making easy things difficult. The industry knows what to do with it. The marketing department orders a few new recipes, substitutes some ingredients and a processing step or two, and then bluntly proclaims on the front of the sweet cookies, candies, cakes, and sodas and chocolates that it’s all guaranteed to be “minimally processed,” so you get the most out of it. may enjoy.
And the consumer? He has long had the idea that nothing is allowed anymore. If they had just replaced meat with a soy burger, it suddenly turns out to be ultra-processed. If they just buy 0.0 beer, it turns out that their lives are still not considered good enough by the diet gurus in the academic fortress. Many throw in the towel at this new, inimitable health advice. Rightly so.
If research into industrial feed shows anything, it is that people eat and drink much more of it. More chips, more M&Ms, more coke. What is striking about the diet of the group that ate a lot of ultra-processed food is that they consumed an average of 20 percent more (400 kilocalories per day). That is the problem.
We shouldn’t complicate nutritional advice. We should make it simpler: Devour fewer calories. Point.
Rosanne Hertzberger is a microbiologist.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of February 11, 2023