Some news about Ockham's Razor and introducing Quick Smart

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Hi there. Tegan here with a bit of news. As you may have realised, Occam's Razor hasn't

been too active recently. We're on a bit of a hiatus for the next little while. But if

you are thinking to yourself, where on earth am I going to get my little 10 minute brain

snacks? Well, you're in luck. I actually have not one, but two other shows that should help

scratch that same itch. One of them is coming up right now. It's my show Quicksmart, where

I break down some of the big ideas in the news so that you can sound clever and informed

in front of your friends. If you like what you hear, search for Quicksmart and make sure

you hit follow. And next week, I will have another treat for you here in this feed, a

taste of another short and sweet, slightly sciencey show called What's That Rash? Thank

you, as always, for listening and supporting me.

Thank you for supporting Occam's Razor, maybe even coming along to one of our live

shows. This isn't the end of the road. But for now, here's Quicksmart.

The technological advances of the 20th century gave us so many things. Antibiotics, space

flight, and some would argue, just as importantly, extruded, puffed and deep fried corn, dusted

in fluoro orange powder and lots of salt. For better or worse, ultra processed foods

are the backbone of our society. And that's why we're here today.

It's the backbone of many people's diets. But much like their effect on our cholesterol,

blood pressure and waistlines, the evidence that they do us harm is rapidly increasing.

I'm Tegan Taylor, and this is Quicksmart, the show that feeds you big ideas in bite-sized

pieces. So where did these foods come from? Are they bad for us just because they're packed

with sugar, fat and salt? Or is it just because they're not good for us?

Are they bad for us just because they're packed with sugar, fat and salt? Or is it

just because they're not good for us just because they're not good for us?

Or is there something more at play here? And if they're so very terrible, what would

a repackaging of our food landscape in a healthier direction look like? Someone who's been ripping

open foil packages in search of an answer is Jen Leak. Hello, Jen.

Hello, Tegan.

Let us begin with a definition. What is an ultra processed food?

Okay. I think to explain that, I'm going to have to give three other definitions at the

same time. Is that okay?

Let's get into it. Yes.

Because the term ultra processed food,

sits alongside some other definitions. Okay. So basically, this term came about in the late

2000s. It was developed by a team of Brazilian researchers. And they basically broke food down

into four categories based on their level of processing, not their nutrition profile. So not

how much fat, sugar, whatever. So quite different from how we think about food. So the four categories,

number one, minimally processed.

So this is fruit, vegetables, simple meats, like a piece of steak. Then you've got processed

culinary ingredients. This is stuff like flour, sugar, oil. Then you've got processed foods,

which is simple cheeses, canned vegetables or something. Then you have ultra processed foods.

You can define this in a number of different ways. But if you just think about it as you

couldn't make it in your home kitchen, and it's using a whole lot of ingredients, emulsifiers,

thickeners, all this stuff that you couldn't access at home. A classic example, if you take

corn, so you take corn on the cob, that's minimally processed. Then you take canned corn,

which is processed. Ultra processed is Dorito chips. You could not make that at home. And it's

using a whole range of flavors and enhancers. So yeah, that's a good simple definition of what

ultra processed is. And yeah, I've been looking at the history of ultra processed foods,

for a recent episode of Rear Vision. So you've been looking at kind of the backstory of how we

came to have them at all. Yeah. So I would say they're not actually recent additions.

The recent addition is us labeling them as ultra processed. I mean, obviously we've been processing

our food for thousands of years, and it's been a key to growing our civilization, making food more

reliable, much safer to eat. But the technology really took a massive leap forward during World

War II.

And it was led by the United States. They were fighting a war, you know, far away, and they had

to figure out a way to feed their troops cheap, tasty food that was going to have a really long

shelf life. So they just poured a huge amount of money into research and development. But what

happened after that is the food companies had put so much money into this that they were like,

we want to build on this. And we want to convince the civilian that these kinds of foods have a

place in their diets.

So that's the real shift when they started to try and convince consumers.

What I didn't realize was how much work had to go in to convince people that these

foods were food. And, you know, if you think of in the 1950s, a lot of women are at home

in charge of the kitchen, cooking most of the meals. And a huge amount of work had to go in

to convince them that, you know, opening a can, pulling out a powdered something and mixing all

together, that was actually cooking.

But they did this, and it didn't happen straight away. But they did it by playing on the idea of,

you know, you don't have enough time. This is modern. Your grandma had to slave cooking meals,

but you don't have to do that anymore. You get to just open a few boxes and put something,

blah, blah, blah. But that took a really long time. And then, you know, as technology moves,

and the food gets a bit better and stuff like the microwave, which by the early 80s was pretty,

widespread. And so again, you get this reshaping of what a meal looks like,

how quickly it can be ready. And yeah, that made a massive difference.

So we obviously got fairly thoroughly convinced these foods are inescapable and unavoidable.

But pretty soon, we started to realize that there were health impacts from them.

So we've seen changes in the prevalence and availability of processed food. And that

probably really kicked off in the early 80s. And so we've seen changes in the prevalence and availability of processed food. And that probably really kicked off in the early 80s.

And that probably really kicked off in the early 80s. And that's when we start seeing

wider health impacts of eating too many of these foods.

I mean, we hear so much about obesity, the obesity epidemic, not to really get into that today. There's

so many different health impacts that are linked to this. And there's a lot of drivers that kind

of feed into it the way our cities are designed and that sort of thing. But the evidence is

fairly clear now that ultra processed foods specifically are bad for us in ways that

we can't really fully account for by just,

the amount of fat or sugar that are in them. Yeah. I mean, one of the really important things

about this term ultra-processed, it's enabled people to identify a set of products and then

start to study them specifically. So it all started in the late 2000s. There was a Brazilian

researcher who had been working in sort of public health and nutrition since the 1970s.

And he was looking at household data and consumer spending, which had been gathered since the

1970s. And he could see that the Brazilian population were buying way less fat, sugar and

oil, but they were actually getting a lot fatter, which doesn't seem to make sense. And then what he

gathered was that they were still getting all of that. They were just getting it all from

ultra-processed foods. And that's when he decided to start categorizing food based on their level

of processing. And then once he did that, people started doing research. And I can go into

a particular study, which has really been massively impactful.

I really want to talk about that study because I think one of the things that people don't really

realize about nutrition research is that nutrition research, it's actually really hard to measure

what people put in their mouths. You're usually relying on self-reported data. You're often relying

on people recalling what they might've eaten a week ago. And I can't remember what I put in my

mouth an hour ago. But this study was so tightly controlled and they really found quite,

compelling evidence. Yeah, they did. So the guy who led it,

Kevin Hall, when he heard about this way of categorizing food and ignoring the nutrient

profile, he was like, I'm not buying it. Like fat, sugar, salt, that matters. So he wanted to

test it. And so he set up a trial that went for a month. He got 20 healthy adults. No one had

diabetes or any sort of particular health concerns. The first two weeks, they were served a

minimally processed diet. And then halfway through, they would switch and they'd eat a

ultra-processed diet. And the really important thing here is they were matched for fat, sugar,

and salt. So the only distinguishing factor between these meals was the fact that one was

ultra-processed and one wasn't. And they were told, eat as much or as little as you like.

At the end of this big trial, and obviously they lived in the facility, so they controlled every

aspect of their eating.

When people were eating the ultra-processed diet, they would eat on average 500 calories

more per day. And people didn't report liking one diet more than the other. When you talk to

anyone about ultra-processed food, they will reference this study because it was huge. And

to see a 500 calorie a day difference is ginormous. Yeah, that's so wild because it really showed

that even if the fat, sugar, and salt content, which is what you think is what's making these

foods so palatable, tasty, delicious, adjective of choice, it's not just that. So what do we think

it is about ultra-processed foods that is making them even snackier than already snacky things that

are less processed? There's a range of theories, but there's two leading theories that Kevin is

now trying to explore in a subsequent study, which is underway at the moment. And one of them

is calories per gram. So ultra-processed food in the

process of making them, a lot of water is stripped out. And so you'll get way more calories per gram.

The classic example is take an apple and then take a dried apple. Same amount of apple,

just one's a lot smaller and you could probably eat 10 of them, but no one's going to sit down

and eat 10 apples. So yeah, less water in the products, more calories per gram. The other idea

is that you get a combination of flavors and a threshold of flavors that you don't

find in minimally processed food. So a higher level of sugar, salt, and carbs together in the

one product, which is what we love so much. So that's the other big idea, the combination,

the threshold of flavors that you get, which just makes you want more and more.

Yeah, there's so more issues that I look down and suddenly there's the bottom of the bag.

For regulation in terms of actually helping people to identify this, if this is something that we

know, independent of the nutrient profile is important.

When it comes to our health, like we have the health star rating here that looks at

sugar and salt, those sorts of things. But in Mexico, they have like a warning label,

like what we have on cigarettes here, if something is ultra processed.

Yeah. I mean, Brazil pioneered the ultra processed sort of term, but Mexico, Chile, Argentina,

they're all doing a lot more when it comes to labeling. At least the hope with these labels

is that you go into a shop and, you know, a big black,

mark or whatever, it's clearly identified if this product is ultra processed. And the idea that

kids can easily identify it, even if you can't read, you know, I don't think it's been going

long enough that they can say it's made a difference, but I think their total approach

to it is quite different from ours. I feel like as a privileged,

relatively well-off person having this conversation, I can just say to myself,

well, I just won't buy this stuff. I'll just buy my own fruit and veggies and I'll just,

my own food in my nice kitchen that I have. Like I have, there's a lot of power in my individual

hands to choose to opt out of this. But for some people, these foods are the backbone of their diet

because they are cheap and shelf stable and they're easy to prepare. What kind of levers do

we have that are being considered to make access to healthy food more affordable or more equitable?

I mean, I would say we are a long way off any sort of extreme warning label like you see,

in Mexico and other countries. And I put that question to someone who's really advocating

for change in this space. And he said, yeah, I mean, that is the crucial point. It's very easy

for me to say sugar tax, blah, blah, blah. But I think his point is that the fundamental system

is wrong. We've got a system where these foods are too cheap. I don't think there's an easy

fix on that. I really don't. Because it's kind of like upending the whole food system.

Yeah.

So I suppose companies who are making profitable products probably aren't going to just

stop. So where are we headed here?

Well, I think if you look at the South American countries, one of the reasons why

they're pushing so hard on this is they know they don't have a public health system that's

going to manage the burden of the diabetes, the chronic heart disease, all of that kind of stuff.

And that's how they've managed to really make some change because they're not going to be able to

cope with the burden of health, really. The problem,

with this stuff, is it's chronic. The problems don't turn up straight away. You know, when you

look at some early wacky food processing in the turn of the 20th century, where someone adds

formaldehyde to milk to make it last longer, all that crazy stuff, it had an immediate terrible

health effect. So it was like, okay, well, we're going to have to regulate and stop this. But with

ultra processed foods, it takes a long, long time. And my reaction might be different to yours. So

it's just one of those chronic health things.

That we're able to kick the can down the road.

I mean, just because we have a public health system doesn't mean we should have to pay for

these chronic diseases long term. Hopefully we figure out a solution before then.

Yeah, exactly.

Jen, thanks so much.

My pleasure.

Quicksmart is made on the lands of the Jagera and Turrbal and Gadigal people.

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