Ultraprocessed foods – essentially those boxed and wrapped in plastic, ready-to-eat items lining grocery store shelves. [Also widely used in fast food restaurants.]
Dr. David Kessler is the former commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. In the 1990s he helped expose how the tobacco companies manipulated nicotine levels to hook consumers.
* Over the last 40 years, the United States has been exposed to something that our biology was never intended to handle. Energy-dense, highly palatable, rapidly absorbable, ultraprocessed foods that have altered our metabolism and have resulted in the greatest increase in chronic disease in our history. Type 2 diabetes, pre-diabetes, hypertension, abnormal lipids, fatty liver, heart attacks, stroke, heart failure.
* The scale of this [consumption of ultraprocessed foods compared to smoking]– this affects everybody. Understand, not everybody smoked. But look at the number of people who consume ultraprocessed food. It touches all of us.
* Processed refined carbohydrates – sweeteners and starches such as corn syrup and maltodextrin – are so rapidly absorbed in our system that it caused metabolic havoc. – they target the brain reward circuits that keep us coming back for more. They, they trigger overeating. They deprive us of any sense of fullness. — those calories are not just empty. They’re ending up in your liver, and that fat in your liver is gonna migrate into other organs. And it’s the cause of cardiometabolic disease.
* Pick up any one of these products. You ever look at the– the ingredient label? [A lot are things we cannot pronounce.]
* Is that food? Corn syrup, corn solids, maltodextrin, dextrose, xylose, high-fructose corn syrup. And then these ingredients were subjected to industrial processing so that our system can’t handle it.
* We changed how this country views tobacco. We need to change how this country views these ultraprocessed foods.
* I’d like them to understand the consequences of what they are doing and to do something about it.
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