Search results: Ultra processed foods

I’ve been collecting articles on snacks.

Some things to know about snacks:

• They are hugely profitable
• They have largely replaced meals among some population groups
• They are mostly ultra-processed
• The more snacks you eat, the more calories you are likely to take in

With that said, here are some recent items:

• The Evolution of the Snacking Category:  Several food giants are turning to better-for-you ingredients and new flavors to meet changing consumer needs and strengthen their presences in the snacking category. Learn more in this Trendline.
• How to be snack-savvy: Key insights for 2024:  SNAC International has released its 2024 State of the Industry Report, which highlights category dollar and unit sales, the top performing brands and the influences that continue to shape consumer behavior and preferences…. Read more
• PepsiCo sees slowdown in US salty snack business, plans to ‘make disciplined commercial investments’:  PepsiCo’s second quarter 2024 earnings released this morning, revealing new challenges to its Frito-Lay North America business, as company Chairman and CEO Ramon Laguarta vows to tap into consumer demand for zero-sugar and functional products and increase productivity initiatives and commercial investments to spur growth…. Read more
• Conagra ‘nudges’ up snacks, frozen food volumes with merchandising, advertising & innovation:  Conagra successfully boosted “meaningful” volume sales of key snacks and frozen foods in the past year despite “a challenging consumer environment,” in which shoppers gave a cold shoulder to some competitors, including PepsiCo, thanks in part to strategic merchandising, advertising and innovation, CEO Sean Connolly told investors yesterday during the company’s fourth quarter earnings call…. Read more
• Why are snack prices continuing to rise? Analysis sheds light on inflation versus the costs of potato chips, chocolate chip cookies, yogurt and ice cream…. Read more
• ‘A snack is a snack, not a meal replacement’: UPFs, Nutri Score, the EC elections, regulations and other issues impacting the European snacks sector: A major concern for the European Snacks Association (ESA) is the debate over ultra processed foods (UPFs), which director general Sebastian Emig believes is not based on scientific fact and is causing confusion among consumers. We caught up with him at Snackex to find out how changes in the European Commission (EC) could impact regulations…. Watch now
• Bringing the snacks industry up to date on acrylamide:  Acrylamide – the naturally occurring chemical compound that forms in carb-rich foods like potato chips and pretzels during high-temperature cooking processes such as frying, baking and roasting – is an ongoing concern for the salty snacks sector…. Read more

And last but not least…

• Toothpaste chips anyone? Just how adventurous are you prepared to be?  With Snackex coinciding with Euro 2024, Hügli created mixes inspired by familiar dishes from the participating European countries, while Euroma showcased ‘crazy’ flavors that took snackers into new realms…. Read more

Politics, as they say, makes strange bedfellows and I cannot get my head around the MAHA hearings last week.

Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., has posted a video of the health and nutrition roundtable he held Monday with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the former presidential candidate now supporting former President Trump, and others including Vani Hari, the “Food Babe.”  He listed participants in a press release.

Vani Hari posted her own video on Twitter (X): “American food companies are making a fool out of us. They are knowingly poisoning us. It’s time for this to stop. Our movement is growing like I have never seen before. It’s going to be historic! This is a clip from my Senate testimony in Washington DC yesterday, watch the whole thing.”

Another Tweet pointed to testimony by Jillian Michaels: “This is one of the best overviews I’ve ever witnessed on how the whole system has been rigged, in what is essentially a ‘bad health by design’ framework As Jillian Michaels says emphatically – People have been ‘sacrificed at the alter of corporate greed.”

This is amazing!

What I find most remarkable is the lack of mainstream nutrition science in this lineup.  The speakers are mainly influencers and not among the most recognized nutrition scientists.  Nearly all havie some decidedly non-mainstream interpretations of nutrition research and the history of federal nutrition policy.

BUT: They are calling for fixing the food system, doing something to coordinate and address diet-related chronic diseases, stopping corporate power, eliminating conflicts of interest between industry and government, getting toxic chemicals out of the food supply, and doing everything possible to refocus the food environment and dietary advice on health.

Try this: “Ultra-processed foods are the new cigarette for my generation,” said Grace Price, described as an 18-year-old social media influencer.

These are things I’ve been writing about here for years.  It’s hard to argue with any of this and I won’t.

But where are my nutrition scientist colleagues?

As Jerry Mande wrote to me, referring to the PCAST report I talked about yesterday:

How did it come to this? We have the nation’s top nutrition scientists afraid to demand action and Senators turning to nutrition influencers for advice. I must admit the influencers did a better job than the WH science advisors stating the urgency of the problem and demanding action.

In Food Fix, Helena Bottemiller Evich described the experience as “rather disorienting.”

I’ve been covering food policy in Washington for 15 years, and I would have never expected this cast of characters to be together in the Senate – and hosted by Republicans, no less. (It was hosted by Johnson, but Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) also attended. Both said they’d changed their diets to improve their health.)  As I noted recently, there is a political realignment happening here. Many of the concerns discussed during this roundtable – lack of food chemical regulation, metabolic dysfunction, pesticide exposure, lack of focus on nutrition in medical school, etc. – were previously common policy fare on the left. That’s all been shaken up by Johnson’s office.

Could it be that we are heading for bipartisan support for addressing epidemic obesity and diet-related chronic disease?

If so, it’s about time and I”m all for it.

But the mind boggles.

PCAST, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, has released its REPORT TO THE PRESIDENT A Vision for Advancing Nutrition Science in the United States.

I learned about the report from a Tweet (X): 

I wrote about an earlier draft of the report in a previous post: The federal vision for chronic disease prevention: individual behavior, not the environment.  I called for the report to take on the need for fundamental improvements in the food environment aimed at preventing obesity-influenced chronic diseases.

If you read the fine print, the report has indeed done some of that.  It now mentions ultra-processed foods, for example,

people’s food selections are complex, influenced by various factors in a multifaceted U.S. (and global) food ecosystem, with many of these factors beyond an individual’s control, e.g., increased production and availability of ultraprocessed foods which are associated with overconsumption and obesity. In addition to widespread availability of inexpensive ultra-processed foods, the U.S. food environment has undergone huge changes in recent decades, including easy access to low-cost fast food and eating away-from-home becoming much more common…in the era of widespread internet and digital technology access and use, people’s food habits increasingly are influenced by advertising and social media, which are sources of both facts and misinformation. Acknowledging and understanding these factors and their intersections is critical to addressing nutrition-related health disparities.

It also says useful things like these:

• new emphasis must be placed on nutrition research that can equitably and effectively help all Americans achieve better health.
• [needed is an] equity focus that particularly considers those who are disproportionately affected—racially, ethnically, and socially minoritized groups—due to long-standing and structural inequities which make it hard for many people to eat healthy and be physically active.
• For such a highly developed nation, the U.S. has distressingly high rates of food insecurity, imbalanced nutrition, and inequities in food access, all further exacerbated by the pandemic.  With diet-related disease rates increasing, we have responded by focusing resources on costly medical treatments, further widening disparities and directing efforts away from prevention or addressing social determinants of health and a food environment that for too many Americans does not provide or promote good nutrition. The only way to reverse these trends and achieve robust health for our nation is to focus on prevention, which will require significant modifications of our overall food environment and must be informed by improved nutrition research.
• Preventing diet-related chronic diseases is among the most urgent public health challenges facing the nation.

Despite these statements, its two recommendations say nothing beyond the need for coordination aimed at addressing that challenge.

1. The Administration should implement a coordinated and sustained federal interagency effort, co-led by HHS and USDA, to strengthen the nutrition science base for current and future public and private sector actions to reduce the burden of diet-related chronic disease and maintain momentum toward the President’s 2030 goal.

2. To ensure equitable access to the benefits of nutrition research, federal agencies should prioritize equity in nutrition research, focus research on improving program delivery, continue efforts to diversify the nutrition science and dietetics workforce and engage the academic and private sectors in multisector research and intervention initiatives.

Yes, coordination would be a big help.  Nutrition research is all over the place at the federal level.  So would increased funding for nutrition research aimed at improving the food environment to prevent chronic disease.  Only a tiny fraction of the NIH budget goes for this purpose.  NIH’s main nutrition focus is “precision nutrition” aimed at individuals, not public health.  And much of the USDA’s nutrition funding goes to the kinds of industry-funded studies I post here on Mondays.

The report mentions what’s needed in theory; it ducks dealing with the tough politics of chronic disease prevention.

And alas, it did not cite my suggestions for what is needed (which I had sent to the committee).

So where is leadership for chronic disease prevention at the federal level?  It’s in an odd place at the moment, as I will discuss tomorrow.

Here’s how I learned about this one: Unilever, Nestlé and Coca-Cola villainised for government scientist ties.  Mondelēz International, Tate & Lyle, Pepsico and a host of other global food and drink manufacturing majors face fresh scrutiny over their links to government-advising scientists…. Read more

Villainized?  Isn’t this just business as usual?

Not exactly.  An analysis in the BMJ (formerly British Medical Journal) says UK government’s nutrition advisers are paid by world’s largest food companies(see BMJ 2024;386:q1909).

The authors examined declared links between members of SACN (The UK Government’s Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition) and the food and drinks industry.

:

The study found

More than half of the experts on the UK government’s advisory panel on nutrition have links to the food industry…Campaigners say that these conflicts of interests at the heart of policy making are detrimental to public health. Others say that they reflect the lack of funding for nutrition research and that removing experts with industry links from SACN would “diminish” its expertise..

Six members of SACN are members of the American Society for Nutrition, which is funded by Mars, Mondelez, Nestlé, PepsiCo, and the Sugar Association, among others…SACN’s current work includes reviewing the evidence over ultraprocessed foods, artificial sweeteners, and plant based food and drink…Experts including van Tulleken and Percival say that SACN did not do enough to present the case for tougher regulation on ultraprocessed foods.

Nutrition Advocacy in Public Interest is “A national think tank on nutrition” in India, “consisting of independent experts in epidemiology, human nutrition, community nutrition and paediatrics, medical education, administration, social work and management.”  This group is calling for regulation of unhealthy  ultra-processed foods. 

This new report gives examples of food product ads, (50 of them) by method of appeal along with what information is concealed.  One example:

Take a look.  These are fun.  It’s terrific to see this kind of analysis coming from India.

We do love sweet foods.  Alas, sugars have calories but nothing else of nutritional value and they are associated with poor health.

What are the poor makers of sugary foods and beverages to do?  Here are some recent approaches.

• Are sweeteners leaving a sour taste with consumers?  An ingredient developed from coca, considered amongst the most illicit and stigmatised plants on the planet, can cut sugar in beverages by up to 40%…. Read more  
• ​Roquette and Bonumose team up to enhance scalability of tagatose, a rare sugar with 92% of the sweetness of sugar, and 38% of the calories:​Bonumose has patented a low-cost production method it claims could catapult rare sugar tagatose from a niche to a mainstream sweetener…Tagatose does not raise blood glucose levels when consumed on its own and is Ketogenic Certified.Discover more
• Are sweeteners good or bad for the planet?  Research suggests some could be more harmful to the environment than others…. Read more

And then there are the safety questions.

But questions about sugar substitutes have been swirling for decades, with scientists and public health officials suggesting they might come with certain health risks of their own. The research on how sugar substitutes affect our bodies is preliminary, complex and sometimes contradictory.

…But longer-term studies on sugar substitutes have found no weight loss benefits, and even some harms. For this reason, the World Health Organization recommended in 2023 that people avoid using sugar substitutes for weight control or better health, citing research that linked them to greater risks of health concerns like Type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, obesity and earlier death. The sugar alcohols erythritol and xylitol have also been associated with a greater risk of heart attack and stroke.

What to do?  For me this is easy.

• I don’t like the way they taste.
• They are a marker of ultra-processed foods.
• I don’t eat anything artificial if I can avoid it.

How harmful are they?

I don’t know for sure but would prefer not to be a guinea pig.

I am indebted to Bakery&Snacks, a newsletter I subscribe to, for this unusully enlightening report.

The science of sound: What is it about the crunch that keeps snackers dipping in for more?  The sound of snacking is surprisingly important and impacts the multisensory experience that is so linked to the overall pleasure and satisfaction. From the Crunch Effect to the influence of onomatopoeias, it’s an enlightening subject that no product developer or marketer should ignore…. Read more

I always knew that tons of research went into developing snack foods, but was not aware that the “sound of snacking” mattered so much to sales.

The research demonstrates:

• People eat more pretzels if background noise cancels out the sounds of eating them (this is why restaurants are so noisy?).
• Crisp products produce higher pitched sounds; people wearing headphones eat less.
• Crunching sounds stimulate eating.

Here we have science devoted to pushing snack foods.

The study of chewing sounds involves a lot more than just the crispiness, crunchy or freshness of a product and the consumer’s perception.  It’s a science that involves knowing how the characteristics of the jaw, teeth and soft tissues in the mouth influence the perceived sounds, specifically the bone-conducted sound travelling through the teeth and jaws to the ear*. Then there’s the contribution of air and bone conduction, the number of sound bursts in a bite or chew, the frequency and pressure level and…it gets very complex and scientific.

Snacks, alas, are largely ultra-processed and sources of calories, lots of them (the more snacks, the more calories).

But look at the research, courtesy of this article.  Impressive, no?

• The crunch effect: Food sound salience as a consumption monitoring cue.  Ryan S Elder, Gina S Mohr. Food Quality and Preference 2016, 16(39-46); doi.org/10.1016/j.foodqual.2016.02.015
• Spectral composition of eating sounds generated by crispy, crunchy and crackly foods.  C Dacremont. Journal of Texture Studies (1995) 26(1); doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-4603.1995.tb00782.x
• Analysis of food crushing sounds during mastication: total sound level studies. WE Lee III, MA Schwitzer, GM Morgan, DC Shepherd.  Journal of Texture Studies (1999) 21(2); doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-4603.1990.tb00473.x
• Sound: The Forgotten Flavor Sense.  Editors: Betina Piqueras-Fiszman, Charles Spence.  Multisensory Flavor Perception (2016) 81-105; doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-100350-3.00005-5
• The role of auditory cues in modulating the perceived crispness and staleness of potato chips.   Massimiliano Zampini, Charles SpendFebruary 2005.  Journal of Sensory Studies (2005) 19(5) 347-363, doi:10.1111/j.1745-459x.2004.080403.x
• Figurative Language in Snack Advertising Slogan.  Hosana S. Juanda, A. SupriadiInternational Journal of Linguistics, Literature and Translation (2022), 5(12); doi.org/10.32996/ijllt.2022.5.12.15
• Crispness, the Key for the Palatability of “Kakinotane”: A Sensory Study with Onomatopoeic Words. Atsuhiro Saita, Kosuke Yamamoto, Alexander Raevskiy, et al.  Foods 2021, 10(8), 1724; doi.org/10.3390/foods10081724\n”,

The walnut industry must be desperate for greater market share.  Walnuts are great and make a terrific snack if you don’t eat too many of them (calories!).  But this is one-food research.  Can one food really make an important difference to health (yes, if you are seriously deficient in essential nutrients but most Americans are not).

One-food research has to be about marketing more than science.

To wit:

A Cross-Sectional Study on the Association of Walnut Consumption with Obesity and Relative Fat Mass among United States Adolescents and Young Adults in NHANES (2003–2020).  2024 Current Developments in Nutrition.  DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cdnut.2024.104407

Conclusions: For adolescents girls and young women, dietary intake of walnuts combined with other nuts has the strongest inverse association with measures of obesity.

Funding: This study was funded by the California Walnut Commission.

Comment

The study does not find an association between eating walnuts and obesity in adolescents.  I would not expect it to.  People do not eat that many walnuts.  They get most of their calories from fast and ultraprocessed foods.

The California Walnut Commission would like you to think the calories in walnuts do not count.  In a press release, it points out

Nuts, including walnuts, are nutrient dense and considered a key component of many recommended dietary patterns, including the Mediterranean and vegetarian diets. They are also recommended for daily consumption in the latest U.S. Dietary Guidelines.³ Despite the recommendations, nuts remain under-consumed by the U.S. population,³ perhaps due to nuts being calorie dense, leading to potential concerns that including nuts in the diet could promote weight gain. But new research suggests people, especially Gen Z and millennials, should reconsider nuts, like walnuts.

All true, but nuts in general, not specifically walnuts.  This is about increasing the market share for walnuts as opposed to other nuts.