Everyday Systems Podcast — Episode 102: The Superfood Cinematic Universe

In this episode: The No S Diet takes on Ultraprocessed foods.

Do you remember when blueberries were a superfood? This was back when the idea of a superfood was young. The humble blueberry. The blueberry that you might have eaten anyway, even if no one had ever pointed out its super powers.

These days of course, it’s different, the superfoods are much more sophisticated and refined, you would never have just eaten one by mistake or known how to pronounce it or even been aware of its existence: spirulina, baobab powder, adaptogens. And then it’s like total panic time when you find out about a new one because you’ve never been anywhere near it and have been living your superfood deprived life without so much as a whiff of its life altering benefits and you had better get some NOW.

Dramatically, of course, this makes perfect sense. But wait a minute — is this drama? Is nutrition a science or is it a literary genre? And maybe a not particularly sophisticated literary genre? Is it a comic book?

I sometimes feel like, nutritionally, we are living in the Superfood Cinematic Universe.

And there are super villain foods to go along with the superfoods. With the super villain foods it’s a little different, but also the same. In their case, there’s no drama unless it’s revealed to you that the supervillains already have you in their clutches: some familiar food you already eat plenty of, more than enough, and now, suddenly, its secret identity is revealed.

So the supervillains can’t be too obscure. In the old days it was some basic macronutrient like fat or sugar or carbs. But that was just too prosaic. It was like some schlub getting dressed up in a supervillain costume — comic book guy in the Simpsons. So we moved on to transfats, which were a lot scarier, but then it turned out to be too easy for manufacturers to tweak their formulations to avoid them and nothing happened to obesity rates so we forgot about trans fats and there was a new casting opportunity. What we have now is Ultraprocessed foods. Now that is a good supervillain food name.

You’ve probably been hearing this term a lot recently, ultraprocessed foods. But do you know exactly what it means? And do you know the mechanism by which ultraprocessed foods are said to be making us fatter?

The message most people get goes something like this: ultraprocessed foods are ultra bad. They are super fake foods that calorie for calorie make us fatter than more minimally processed foods. They practically glow in the dark with fakeness and have an effect on us like radioactive poison.

But if you look at the definition and the studies themselves neither of these impressions is quite true.

First, the definition, from the NOVA food classification scale: contrary to what you might think, ultra processed foods are not foods that are primarily fake, that are made out of mostly fake ingredients. Some of them are. But that’s not where the cutoff is. The cutoff is if they contain just a single ultraprocessed ingredient, in whatever amount, that qualifies. A drop of guar gum, makes your whole greek yoghurt or your cottage cheese ultraprocessed. Your innocent seeming strawberry chobani and your guilty as hell flamin’ hot cheetos are both in the same category. Ultraprocessed does not mean mostly fake, it means at all fake. Even a drop of fakeness taints a food as ultraprocessed by this definition. So when you read shocking statistics like “58% of Americans diet” consists of ultraprocessed foods, it’s very misleading. If you went through your fridge and pantry, categorizing every food by this measure, my guess is you wouldn’t be like “oh my god, who knew?” but “this is bullshit.”

The “ultra” in ultra-processed is pure drama — and poorly deployed drama. You’ve got terrible truly fake food right next to stuff that is actually good for you but now has this stigma attached to it. There’s bad stuff that falls into this category, no question. But if you’ve gone all the way up to ultra for all of it, what’s left? You’ve already cranked it up to 11. If everything even a little bad is ultra bad, what are you going to call the really bad stuff? Super mega hyper ultra processed food?

So when you hear things like “58% of the food we eat is ultraprocessed,” well, duh. With a definition this broad I would be stunned if that weren’t the case. It’s like saying “avoid beige foods.” What you want to be avoiding is the mostly fake foods, or eating less of them, but instead, what this label is doing, is getting you all amped up about the borderline foods, the mostly fine foods.

The other thing that is misleading about ultra-processed foods is the mechanism by which they make us fatter. It’s not that calorie for calorie, ultra processed foods are more potent in terms of making us fat, that they trigger some evil process in our digestive system. It’s that when we eat ultraprocessed foods, we eat more. This is well documented. But why do we eat more? The term scientists use is "hyperpalatability" In other words, it tastes really good. “Hyperpalatable” is the scientific term for “tastes really good.” I love this. I find it a little funny that this is even research. Take away the fancy terminology and you are left with something almost blindingly obvious: People will eat more food if it tastes good, especially if they can afford to because it is cheap and convenient. Ultraprocessed food tastes really good so we eat more of it, eating more food, eating more calories. At the end of the day, simple excess is still the giant heart of the issue.

Look, I am not saying that ultraprocessed foods are completely unproblematic. But I think that focusing on them as a conceptual category is not the best use of your very limited reserves of attention and willpower. It’s far too broad to be a useful guideline and not at all helpful psychologically to once again tap into this supervillain food trope that has served us so badly so often in the past.

I suspect it is psychologically completely counterproductive. It’s the latest stab in the back that we love to believe in, because it absolves us of our own role in the problem. It lets us think, oh wow, it wasn’t simple excess that was the problem, me eating too much, but THEY did it to me. The bad guys. I’m not saying there are no bad guys, without all this highly targeted temptation you wouldn’t be so tempted. But it isn’t helpful for you to think that way.

Instead of superheroes and supervillains, think of Aunt May, or the denizens of Smallville, how they ate, even before the arrival of the amazing stranger from the planet Krypton. They had the true secret. And even today, it protects against ultraprocessed foods without having to scour ingredient lists or even requiring you to understand what they are. It’s called meals.

The No S Diet is framed negatively. A bunch of “nos.” That’s because it’s the clearest way to express what you have to do, the difference between what you are currently doing and what you should be doing, the “delta.” And I think that’s the most useful way to put it. But there is also a positive formulation, even simpler, and maybe more inspiring, that can also be helpful to remember. It’s just two words: eat meals.

That implies all the rest. I like to think you can derive the No S Diet from just those two words, more or less, and vice versa. Meals have clear boundaries. You can’t have clear boundaries in a sea of permasnacking. Meals have a limiting role for sweets, as desserts. Eating meals doesn’t necessarily require limiting seconds, but it makes it very clear when they happen. It’s not this IV drip of more and more and more.

Instead of waxing nostalgic about the stuff people ate 100 years ago or whatever, wax nostalgic about the structure of how they ate, the structure of meals. All the rest follows from that, to the extent that it is actually important. Stuff follows structure. You can’t sustainably handle stuff without putting structure first.

How does the No S diet, or eating meals, reduce consumption of ultraprocessed stuff?

It’s very simple. Two rhetorical questions:

1. What percentage of meal food do you think is ultraprocessed vs. what percentage of snack food and dessert food?

2. How do you think your total consumption percentages would shift if you knocked out most snacking and sweet consumption?

These are rhetorical questions because I’m not aware of any study precisely measuring this, but it seems about as obvious as the concept of "hyperpalatability." And I have seen studies indicating that we get 30% of our sugar intake from snacks, so I have to assume the proportion of ultraprocessed food we get through snacking is even greater, probably far greater, and especially of the worst kinds.

Then there’s the spotlight effect of three single plate meals, of seeing each of your limited “input opportunities” laid out before your eyes. You’ve got just one chance to do each of them right. It’s embarrassing to load them up with crap. And it’s unavoidably obvious if you do. It can’t sneak past you. You can’t kid yourself about the quantity or the quality of what you’re eating.

Supreme court Justice Louis Brandeis famously said “Sunlight is the best disinfectant.” And It’s as true about dietary corruption as it is about the political corruption he was talking about. Three plates are your sunlight.

Finally: the No S Diet provides a signal to stop eating that hyperpalatable ultraprocessed foods are unlikely to give you—an empty plate. There is no “listen to your body” for a signal that isn’t coming. That may have been engineered not to come. You’re listening to your eyes. The signal is you see the plate is empty. It’s clear. It’s unambiguous. It’s habit forming — in a good way. As you build the association of one = done, it becomes easier and easier to resist the siren call of “just one more,” whatever you had on your plate. Just like Pavlov's dogs learned to drool at a signal, you will learn to stop drooling.

In these three indirect, but simple and powerful ways, the No S Diet already protects you from overconsumption of ultraprocessed foods. It’s built in, you don’t have to add any new rules to take account of them. But if you are worried that they’re not sufficient, you can add redundant safeguards without adding unsustainable rule burden. Just practice surgical flogging for a limited time to take stock of what you are eating, and then come up with an intelligent dietary default or two to ensure that you have convenient, more healthful alternatives on hand for common situations. Not requirements, but defaults. Not for all situations, but just for the most common, challenging ones that you’ve identified from your short term, food logging reconnaissance mission. Listen to my episodes on food logging and intelligent dietary defaults for more on those techniques. I’m hoping to do an updated episode on dietary defaults some time this year with some of the other defaults I’ve accumulated over the years.

There are so many other good things about meals that have nothing to do with avoiding ultraprocessed foods, like the social aspect, that meals, while they don’t require the presence of other people, encourage it — not a bad thing in our increasingly lonely society. Or the ceremony aspect of meals, the fuss, the sitting down at a table, the taking a moment, which besides being a speed bump, makes eating so much more enjoyable. But these are beyond the remit of this episode.

Now none of this is going to shield you from a drop of guar gum. But I hope it can shield you from the counterproductive worry about a drop of guar gum. And let you enjoy your Greek yoghurt again with a clear conscience.

That’s all for today. Thanks for listening.

By Reinhard Engels

Discuss