Ultra Processed Foods: Inflammatory and Addictive

By  Daniel Nuccio
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Industrial Formulations: It’s What’s for Dinner

Practically everyone has heard the term “processed food” at some point. Most, if pressed, could probably make some reasonable guesses about what is and isn’t a processed food, especially if presented with two clear options (e.g., a fresh grilled chicken breast and a chicken nugget).

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According to this system, food can be categorized into four groups. Group One is comprised of natural, unprocessed, or minimally processed foods. These are the edible parts of plants, animals, fungi, and algae. Water is also included in this category. Some basic level of processing to make food safer, more edible, or last a little longer does not inherently preclude food from this category.

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Group Two foods are processed culinary ingredients often derived from Group One foods and used when preparing other Group One foods. Generally, these would not be eaten alone. Examples include oils, sugars, and butter.

Group Three foods are processed foods comprised of Group One foods to which a limited number of Group Two foods have been added for preservation or as part of preparation. Canned vegetables and canned fish fall into this category, as do some cheeses and freshly baked breads.

Lastly, there are Group Four foods, also known as ultra-processed foods, or UPFs. Critics and researchers of UPFs are generally reluctant to even refer to such items as food, instead opting for such terms as “industrial products” and “industrial formulations.” Often, such items are comprised of cheap ingredients derived from high-yield crops and animal remnants subjected to processes absent from the kind of preparation that could typically be carried out in one’s home or a standard restaurant kitchen. Additionally, they also may contain multiple Group Two ingredients and a plethora of additives. Such additives may help with preservation. Alternatively, they may serve solely cosmetic purposes to enhance appearance, smell, taste, or texture.

The end result is often a food-like item that is energy dense but nutrient poor, simultaneously possessing higher levels of both fats and sugars than what would normally be found in nature. Compared to Group One foods, UPFs also generally have less fiber, protein, vitamins, and minerals. Examples include sweet or salty packaged snacks, pizza, french fries, TV dinners, and reconstituted meat products.

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Ultra-Processed Foods: They’re Grrrreatly Inflammatory

As I wrote in an article for Brownstone Journal about a year ago, there are a number of health problems associated with what has been dubbed the “Western diet.” Disturbances to the composition of microbial community in one’s gut, the deterioration of intestinal barriers, and increased inflammatory processes, both in the gut and the rest of one’s body, are among the greatest concerns here.

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On a broad level, many additives commonly found in UPFs like artificial preservatives, colorants, emulsifiers, and sweeteners, have been linked to perturbations of gut microbial communities, the erosion of one’s intestinal lining, and inflammation.

For example, colorants such as Red 40 and Yellow 6 have been shown to trigger inflammatory bowel disease-like colitis in genetically susceptible mice. Aluminum has been associated with chronic inflammation and granuloma formation. Emulsifiers are believed to disturb microbial gut communities in a manner that increases the prevalence of bacteria that trigger inflammatory processes that contribute to colitis and metabolic disease. Experiments using rodent models suggest fructose exposure also perturbs gut communities, as well as induces the death of cells in the intestinal barrier leading to its deterioration and the entry of bacterial endotoxins into one’s bloodstream, where they can damage organs like the liver.

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Once You Start, You Just Can’t Stop

A growing body of research on UPFs suggests that the consumption of such foods likely rewires the brain in much the same way as addictive drugs, thus giving new meaning to some now seemingly ill-advised marketing slogans.

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To better understand how food can become addictive, one must first look at how food processing influences the availability of the nutrients you can obtain from a particular food, the neurophysiological processes that regulate your motivation to eat, and how nutrient availability can affect these regulatory processes.

To start, when you consume food, your body breaks down that food into nutrients that can then pass through your gastrointestinal tract and into your bloodstream, which then transports those nutrients to different organs around your body. Cooking, along with other basic processing techniques such as boiling, baking, and crushing, can increase the availability of these nutrients and thus how quickly they can reach different organs. Simply put, there are more available calories in a cooked sweet potato than in a raw sweet potato or a cooked piece of meat compared to a raw piece of meat.

Neurophysiologically, nutrients and other stimuli in the gut trigger signals that ultimately reach the brain to influence feeding behavior. More specifically, a part of the brain referred to as the arcuate nucleus of the hypothalamus (the hypothalamus being a part of the brain involved in many basic behaviors related to survival) contains two sets of neurons that play important roles in the regulation of feeding behavior. One group, agouti-related protein (AgRP) neurons, is activated by hunger and fasting and can prompt mammals to search for and consume food. The other group contains proopiomelanocortin neurons that are activated by positive energy balance and encourage fasting.

Under experimental conditions, when different nutrients such as lipids and glucose are infused directly into the gut, AgRP neuron activity is inhibited, leading to a decrease in food consumption. Where this ties into addiction is that the hypothalamus shares a number of interconnections with the brain’s reward system and hence the various structures (e.g., the striatum and ventral tegmental area), circuits (e.g., the mesocorticolimbic circuit), and neurotransmitters (e.g., dopamine) involved in learning and addiction. This is also the system that drugs of abuse are said to hijack.

Over the course of evolutionary history, this reward system and all it entails likely developed to help mediate associative learning as it relates to biologically relevant behaviors such as reproduction and the consumption of food. With regard to food, this system appears to be influenced by both an organism’s explicit sensory response to food, as well as by signaling in the gut triggered by a food’s nutritional contents. As these two signaling processes are paired, the sensory experience of consuming a particular food becomes linked to its nutritional value. Subsequently, an organism comes to experience sensations of pleasure when consuming that food (or similar foods) and becomes motivated to seek out such foods in the future.

These kinds of associations are obviously important for an organism’s survival. Being motivated to eat things that provide nutrients can be beneficial for not dying of malnutrition. However, the development of these associations and subsequent behaviors can be influenced by a number of variables that can maladaptively affect food preferences and an organism’s motivation to eat, sometimes leading to a suite of behaviors and neurophysiological alterations akin to what one might see in addiction.

On a very basic level, simple food preparation can influence food preference. For example, under experimental conditions, rodents will come to prefer cooked sweet potatoes to raw sweet potatoes. Likewise, more complex food processing can influence a person’s ability to control how much they eat, as well as the desirability and perceived value of a food item.

Research involving human participants shows self-reported behaviors indicative of addictive eating (e.g., a perceived loss of control over how much of a food one eats) tend to be more associated with foods that are high in both fat and sugar, a characteristic of many UPFs (e.g., pizza, ice cream, milk chocolate), than foods that are high in either fat (e.g., salmon) or sugar (e.g., bananas). In an experiment involving a quasi-artificial bidding task, people similarly showed a preference for such foods in terms of their bidding activity. When snacks possessing this combination are incorporated into the diets of healthy participants, these individuals come to report a decreased desire for low sugar snacks and a decreased preference for low fat (and also very high fat) snacks.

Research using an fMRI has shown that the regular consumption of such snacks increases activity in several parts of the brain, including parts relevant to learning and addiction, when participants are presented with cues meant to predict the delivery of a high-fat-high-sugar snack and when they are consuming such a snack. Borrowing even more from the frameworks used to understand addiction, some researchers have suggested that the concentration of sugar and the speed with which sugar from a food is absorbed into the bloodstream can also influence the food’s potential for addiction. (In addiction terms, an addictive substance injected directly into one’s blood would have a greater potential for addiction than if swallowed in a time-release capsule).

Commentaries and opinion pieces in peer-reviewed journals take the comparison between UPFs and drugs of abuse even further, emphasizing how UPFs meet the scientific criteria for addictive substances put forth by the US Surgeon General in 1988 when cracking down on cigarettes. Namely, these pieces argue that UPFs cause compulsive use, alter one’s mood through effects on the brain, are reinforcing in Pavlovian and Skinnerian terms, and trigger cravings.

They also highlight that if a similarly harmful and addictive substance were to be introduced into our society today, we likely never would allow it to become available to the general public, especially not to children.

The Cornucopia of Mostly Bad Solutions

Because of their addictive nature, and the other harms they do, the stated or implied conclusion to which most UPF researchers arrive is that UPFs should be regulated in much the same way as tobacco products.

Needless to say, many of those who do this research tend to come off as do-gooders, would-be-social engineers who wholeheartedly embrace the idea of governments working with experts like them to micromanage every aspect of the food industry along with the personal diets of individuals and their families through the standard array of regulations, taxes, incentives, and nudges. Among the proposed suggestions for waging war on UPFs are greater taxation of the ingredients used in UPFs and the final products, a ban on advertising for UPFs, and a prohibition on the sale of UPFs within convenient walking distance of schools.

For those who are more libertarian-leaning, these kinds of solutions likely seem like government overreach and come off as undesirable. So should more technocratic solutions that embrace health surveillance devices that at best encourage Americans to hand over vast amounts of personal information to corporations (and possibly the government) in exchange for questionable benefits to their individual health. (RFK, Jr. himself seemed to come out in favor of something along these lines at a Congressional hearing, although, in fairness, he later made some clarifications). Back in March, Robert Malone wrote a piece regarding some of the practical and philosophical issues the MAHA movement faces here as they work to define the “acceptable limits” of the government’s role in their health.

However, whether one agrees with these kinds of solutions or not, their possible undesirability should not diminish the scientific merit of much of the research done in this area. Also, if one does not support the nanny-statist and/or technocratic approaches to UPFs, that leaves the lingering question of what, if anything, should be done about them.

To start, not all the ideas put forth by the experts are inherently bad. Better education about diet, nutrition, and the preparation of healthy meals through science, nutrition, and home economics classes in K-12 is a fairly reasonable idea that most people should be able to support. Encouraging exercise and fitness (and I would add putting an end to the embrace of obesity as an alternative lifestyle to be celebrated) would also be a good step in the right direction.

Removing UPFs from the menus of public schools, and possibly those of prisons and hospitals, probably aren’t the worst ideas either (although when dealing with populations of free adults, providing healthy choices would be the fairer option).

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Via https://brownstone.org/articles/ultra-processed-foods-inflammatory-and-addictive/