Hey there, it's Susan Peirce Thompson, and welcome to the Weekly Vlog. Oh, my husband sent me a text message with a link to an article the other morning, and I clicked on the link and the headline said, "USDA Scientists Create Healthy Menu With 91% of Calories Coming From Ultra-Processed Foods." I'm going to say that again. "USDA Scientists Create Healthy Menu With 91% of Calories Coming From Ultra-Processed Foods."
Oh, God bless us all. God bless us. God bless us. God bless us. This is so bad. Let me unpack for you the ways that this is so messed up. I could insert so many four letter expletives here. Okay, so I read it, I researched it, I looked into it.
The essence of the issue here is that they're using the criteria from the NOVA Food Processing Scale to determine what an ultra-processed food is. And I shot a vlog on this recently that the NOVA Scale, although extremely well-intentioned and created by scientists in Brazil doing their best to create a system to categorize and help explain that processed isn't processed isn't processed. I mean, I get these questions in Bright Line Eating. Well, why can we eat ground flaxseeds? Isn't that like flour? You're just grinding up the flaxseeds and it's kind of like flour. And I'm like, well, not really. Right? There's levels of processing, and that's an important distinction. Tofu is a processed food. The soy goes through a whole process to become tofu. But is that like eating Ritz crackers, a cookie? No, it's not.
Yes, there are levels of processing and scientists did their best to explain the levels to sort of systematize it, but unfortunately the NOVA classification system, which is, it's just taken off. It's the widely used one, and I don't see any hope in the near future of anything replacing it, especially since now the confusion that people are experiencing when they try to use it feeds right into the moneyed interests of big agribusiness in the United States. It's sad and tragic, but it does. So the issue is that things are counted as ultra-processed foods by some people doing their level best to look at and categorize a food according to this system that should not be counted as ultra-processed foods like milk, like whole wheat bread, like dried fruit, like canned beans, like canned tomatoes, canned green beans. So this is what they made this menu out of was dried fruits, canned vegetables, milk, processed lunch meats, sliced turkey at the deli or whatever. The foods that say ingredients, water, turkey contains 2% or less of.
And then there's this list of ingredients, right? Well, looking at the NOVA Scale, someone would look at a food like that and go, that's ultra-processed. It's going through a process. It's got eight ingredients in it because of the six that are in the contains 2% of or less of glucose, xanthan gum, whatever it's got in it. And it's an ultra-processed food. Okay, fair enough. But some people out of confusion are putting a can of green beans in there as well when the ingredients are water, green beans, salt, and they're calling that an ultra-processed food, which I think is ridiculous.
And milk and yogurt get categorized at all four levels of the NOVA processing scheme. To some people it looks like a level one food, which I think it should be. It's just milk is just a food that comes from cows basically. And it's unprocessed. I mean, yeah, then they pasteurize it and stuff, but so maybe you could call that a level two food, but a lot of people are calling it a level four food.
So in this study, they didn't require stringent levels of agreement among independent thinkers. Looking at the NOVA classification system, they only require two of the reviewers to count a food as an ultra-processed food for them to decide, great. It's an ultra-processed food. So a lot of foods slid in that really shouldn't be counted as ultra-processed foods. Now why does this really upset me? Why is this... It does, it upsets me. Gosh, I was so upset that morning. I was amused and upset and it's nothing new.
But I want to give you a look behind the curtain at what's going on, especially in the United States around dietary guidelines and nutrition, this whole word "nutrition." And I want to tell you what you're going to see because of it. You may have already started to see it. And I'm going to tell you the impact on our society and on people's collective weight, people's collective food issues. It's bad, it's bad news. This right here is terrible. So let me give you the look behind the curtain.
In the United States, we have a terrible, terrible conflict of interest where the United States Department of Agriculture, the USDA is responsible for two huge and absolutely conflicting things. They're responsible for nutrition in the United States. For the nutrition guidelines, which is what this study used to determine that they'd created a healthy diet, a healthy menu.
They used the USDA's Dietary Guidelines for America. That's what they used. Now, I looked at those Dietary Guidelines for America. They get updated every now and then, every five years. And I looked at the latest ones, the 2020-25 ones. They've gotten a lot better, but there's still a lot of stuff in there that shouldn't be in there, in my opinion. Things like one of the six food groups that they're asking you to try to get in your diet is vegetable oils. And I'm like, well, in what world should we be trying to get more vegetable oil in our diet? That's ridiculous, right?
I think some olive oil added to food is fine, but vegetable oils, I don't know. So it's better in the sense that they're not just pushing dairy with no alternatives anymore. Now they say one of the food groups they want you to get is dairy, and then they're like, or soy-based alternatives to dairy, soy milk, or whatever. Okay? A little better. At least now someone who's not eating dairy isn't considered defunct and deficient in the dairy group.
And at least now in the meat group, they've changed it to a protein group and it's protein, meat, fish, eggs, beans, and other legumes, nuts, and seeds are all in there. So someone who's not eating meat isn't considered deficient anymore in the meat group. That's great. These are changes. It used to be that you were seen as nutritionally deficient if you weren't eating meat and dairy, which brings me to the other arm of what the USDA does, which is protect the financial interests of big agribusiness in the United States.
That's their job is to protect our farming industry, to protect, support, nurture, preserve our farming industry, which is big agribusiness, which means the people who produce, the companies that produce our commoditized crops, primarily wheat, corn, and soy, genetically modified and produced at a massive scale. I'm not talking about corn you can eat like corn on the cob. I'm talking about corn that's not even edible until they process it into a meal to be fed to cows, into high fructose corn syrup to be put in snacks, that kind of corn, right? And soy, I am not talking about the soy that becomes organic tofu sitting on your shelf. I'm talking about genetically modified soy that becomes partially hydrogenated soybean oil that, oh, by the way, makes up about 20% of the calories that people are eating these days in crackers, cookies, french fries, all those sorts of things.
The partially hydrogenated soybean oil, the trans fats, okay?
And big agribusiness. The dairy, the meat industry, the commercial farming industry, right? So the USDA protects all of them and tries to set our dietary guidelines. And as part of the arm of the dietary guidelines stuff, they control and regulate the education and training that nutritionists receive, and the journals that publish nutrition science, the academic conferences that host scientists coming together to talk about nutrition research. I've been to these conferences. They feel like strange snow jobs for "dairy is healthy." "Here's why everyone should be drinking orange juice." Here's why. And these posters have these logos on them and coming straight from the USDA, the conflict of interest of them trying to help us all be healthier and also preserve the financial interests of these companies is astounding. It's heartbreaking, it's tragic, it's criminal, it's unethical.
So here's another one of these things where they've realized that because of the tremendous amount of wiggle room and poor interrater reliability in the NOVA classification system, they can now make the claim that they can create a healthy menu according to the USDA guidelines, the Dietary Guidelines for America consisting of 91% ultra-processed foods.
Well, anyone who is just thinking, just thinking has to realize that a healthy diet consists mainly of vegetables, like a lot of vegetables, a lot of fruits, a lot of vegetables, a lot of whole real foods. And you can't by definition be eating a lot of whole real foods and a lot of vegetables if you're eating ultra-processed foods. So by definition, that claim is false. And just anyone, like a seven-year-old reading that headline should look and go, that's not right. That can't be true. That's just false.
But what we have now already are people who are confused. And the import of this is tremendous.
I was talking the other day with Dr. Robert Lustig. Do you know who this guy is? He wrote the book, "Fat Chance." People call him the Sugar Guy. He is the guy that educated us all that sugar's really not healthy. "Hello everyone. Sugar's really not healthy." You know this. You're watching my vlog or listening to my vlog. You know this. He's the guy who put out these YouTube videos a lot of years ago saying, here's how sugar's not healthy. He's an endocrinologist. He's a pediatric endocrinologist at UCSF, and he's written a lot of great books. And he is now on a crusade to change the California school lunch program to help it go from processed foods and sugar- and flour-based foods to whole real foods, to people actually cooking in kitchens and serving lunch to kids. And he's got some school districts within the state of California doing it and making it economically viable and healthy and better food for the kids.
These menus that they sound like a lunch bistro in New York City as opposed to, like high end, like Upper East Side, New York City, as opposed to a school lunch menu. Amazing options and foods. And he's getting pushback as he proposes to different school districts and their committees overseeing their lunch programs, he's getting pushback in the form of, "well, why should we reduce or eliminate processed foods from our kids' diets? Processed foods aren't necessarily unhealthy. Yogurt's a processed food and it's not unhealthy."
That's what he's hearing. That's the pushback. By dieticians, educated by the USDA standards. And this message, scientists create healthy menu with 91% of foods coming from ultra-processed foods, 91% of calories. It was big news when it came out. It was spread widely over news platforms, and it's going to continue to miseducate us and confuse people. And here's what we know to be true. When people start eating ultra-processed foods, their brain gets hijacked. They want to eat more food. They can't stop eating more food, and they gain weight very rapidly, and their metabolic health starts to suffer really quickly. That's what happens when people eat ultra-processed foods. It's a runaway train and it doesn't end well.
And so I don't know what to tell you, my friend. I think the reality is that we're going to stay confused about what healthy eating means, what it looks like for a long time, confused as a society in general. People are going to have to think for themselves. They're going to have to be savvy and smart and wade through the BS. And the powers-that-be are going to keep pushing this narrative. And the narrative, the way they sneak it in is that ultra-processed foods can be part of a healthy diet. They don't need to be reduced or eliminated. They're part of healthy choices.
And you and I know the truth. I just got to say one more thing. I don't think I made this point in the vlog on the NOVA classification system, but the way the classification system is explicitly laid out is level one foods, the lowest level of processing are just whole foods, and they're minimally processed ingredients like flaxseeds and ground flaxseeds, maybe apples and apple sauce, like basically real food. Okay? Level two, so the next level up are ingredients that are used to make foods not usually eaten alone. Sugar, flour, salt, oil, those types of ingredients. And then level three is processed foods, which they call combinations of level one and level two. That should be your can of green beans, right? The green beans, water, salt combination in a can that should be level three. So people who are calling that a level four ultra-processed food are just misguided. That should be a level three food.
But any classification system of the processing of foods that puts white refined sugar and white refined flour, like those foods as lower on the processing scale than a can of black beans is just crazy town, right? That is not appropriate.
So yes, we need to revise the NOVA Food classification system. It's not okay. It's really creating a mess. And I think I'm going to title this vlog "No, You CANNOT Create A Healthy Menu With 91% of Calories Coming From Ultra-Processed Foods." No, you cannot. Let's be clear.
And that's the Weekly Vlog. I'll see you next week.
