Confronting Ultra-Processed Foods: My Journey

This week my obsession has been this book:

I’ve been reading it all week. I couldn’t put it down. It was horrible. I finished it last night.

I  mean, it was great, not horrible, it’s just that it laid out in so much horrible detail how utterly fucked up our food supply is. 

No wonder everyone is fat. No wonder everyone is sick. Our food is nothing but  chemicals, shaped like food. And it’s screwing with our microbiomes and our gene expressions, and our mental health, and the freaking climate.

And why does this toxic food exist? Because multinational food conglomerates are making billions in profits from this shit.

It’s cheap, has flashy marketing and stylish packaging, and it’s addictive. Physically addictive, like cocaine is physically addictive. 

I grew up on this stuff. The only time I ever ate real food was on Thanksgiving, and even then, there were UPFs on the table. 

UPF = Ultra-Processed Food

Here’s what I ate almost every day as a teenager:

Breakfast: Carnation Instant Breakfast. Chocolate Malt Flavor.

Lunch: A Drake’s Ring Ding, a soft pretzel, and milk.

Dinner: A Swanson’s TV Dinner. Favorite: Salisbury Steak. Or..

A bacon and pickle sandwich with mayonnaise.

There was always deli meat and cheese in the fridge. No soda, surprisingly. We drank milk, my sister and I. We never sat at the table to eat. We ate on the couch, on the floor, in our rooms. 

Besides the Ring Ding I bought at lunch, I loved these:

I still love these. I bought a box and had them in the condo fridge at the beach. I never broke into them, so I took them home. They’ve been sitting in my fridge ever since we got back. 

A few days ago, while taking a break from reading Ultra-Processed People, I went to the fridge and, out of curiosity, checked the ingredients.

Here goes:

Confectionery Coating (Sugar, Hydrogenated Palm Kernel Oil, Cocoa Processed with Alkali, Cocoa Powder, Whey Powder [Milk], Soy Lecithin, Salt, Artificial Flavor), Peanut Butter (Peanuts, Corn Syrup Solids, Hydrogenated Vegetable Oil [Rapeseed, Cottonseed, Soybean], Sugar and Salt), Sugar, Enriched Bleached Flour (Wheat Flour, Niacin, Reduced Iron, Thiamine Mononitrate, Riboflavin, Folic Acid), Water, Nonfat Milk, Eggs, Soybean Oil, Contains 2% or Less of Each of the Following: High Fructose Corn Syrup, Egg Yolks, Modified Corn Starch, Leavening (Sodium Acid Pyrophosphate, Sodium Bicarbonate, Monocalcium Phosphate), Soy Lecithin, Salt, Mono- and Diglycerides, Natural and Artificial Flavor, Propylene Glycol Mono- and Diesters of Fats and Fatty Acids, Xanthan Gum, Lactylic Esters of Fatty Acids, Calcium Sulfate, Cinnamon, Nutmeg, Potassium Sorbate (to Retard Spoilage).

I dumped it right in the trash. Never again, Peanut Butter Kandy Kakes! 

But even though I grew up eating exclusively UPFs, today my diet is very clean. 

That’s because I grew up.

 I learned to cook.

 I got to do my own grocery shopping. 

I read books and magazines about food and nutrition.

I even got certified as a Health Coach at one point.

So it’s not that I didn’t already know the horrors of our current food situation, I did, but I didn’t know in gorey, scientific detail. 

And now that I know in gruesome scientific detail, some button has been pushed in my brain, and I am now obsessed with UPFs, reading labels, and trying to eliminate UPFs from my life.

All the food in my house is currently under close scrutiny.

For example, I thought the rye bread I buy regularly from the bakery section of Wegmans was pretty clean. They make it right there. I can see the ovens. I have to ask to have it sliced sometimes. 

But when I inspected the label on it the other day, it’s not as clean as I would like. 

It’s not as bad as the commercial bread in the bread aisle, but I can do better.

So I asked Emily to send me a really easy, everyday bread recipe. Nothing fancy. Just a bread for sandwiches and toast. And she sent me the Peasant Bread Recipe from this book (which I already owned).

 I’m going to take a stab at it.

Eating out is a problem. I might have to cut myself some slack.  I don’t eat fast food as a rule, but I have been known to have a Starbucks Turkey bacon, egg, and cheese with a latte for breakfast when I’m traveling, and I’m sure that’s UPF. 

Emily also reminded me that the soft-serve ice cream cones we happily licked on the boardwalk every night in Rehoboth were most certainly UPF. 

But it’s one thing to have an occasional toxic ice cream cone made with milk solids, emulsifiers, artificial flavors, guar gum, carrageenan, and polysorbic acid, than to eat a Swanson TV dinner every single night during your teenage years when your brain is still developing. And that’s what’s happening now with kids’ diets. This food is messing with their cognitive abilities, their immune systems, and their ability to cope psychologically.

So even though I feel I’m okay, the people I see when I go shopping, out to eat, or today at the hospital while waiting for G to have her colonoscopy all look terrible: nurses, doctors, hospital administrators, technicians, relatives pushing their sick loved ones in wheelchairs—all of them seem unhealthy. 

I am alarmed by this. I wondered as I watched the hospital scene today, what I, a small-town yoga teacher, could do to help this situation.

This is what I thought of:

I could encourage people to notice the places in their lives where they are already in fairly good shape, where they are already healthy, and begin to build on that. 

Then, see if they can improve by 1% each day by doing something positive. For example, eating some food every day that doesn’t have a label on it, taking a walk, doing some stretching, or trying yoga because it’s simple and there are friendly people to meet and have good conversations with.

I think there’s hope. I think people might be waking up to the current food situation because of books like Ultra-Processed People.

Americans have the shortest life expectancy and experience the most preventable deaths among high-income countries.

This is scary. This is alarming.  The author of this book believes nothing will change until governments get involved. That was a disheartening thought because of the current state of our government. 

But what if enough of us stopped buying and eating UPFs? Profits drive action, so these multinational food giants would have to stop making and marketing this garbage.

In the meantime, I say, protect whatever level of health you have right now. Then begin to build on that by making micro improvements. Eat better. Read food labels. Or just don’t eat food that has labels at all! Stretch. Walk. Breathe. Go to yoga.

Yeah. Go to yoga.