There was much to note about Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.‘s endorsement of President Donald J. Trump last Friday.
The press and Democrats (but I repeat myself) have been in hysterics ever since RFK’s address at the Trump rally, which has been glorious.
One topic caught my eye, and I thought it might be worthwhile to discuss it here: the impact of ultra-processed foods on children and adults in this country.
About 18% of American teens have fatty liver disease. It’s like one out of every five. That disease, when I was a kid, only affected late stage alcoholics or those who were elderly. Cancer rates are skyrocketing in the young and the old….One in four American women is on anti-depressant medication. 40% of teens have a mental health diagnosis. 15% of high schoolers are an Adderall and a half-million children are on SSRIs [Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors].So what’s causing this? I’ll name two culprits. First, and the worst, is ultra processed food. About 70% of American chidrens’ diet is ultra processed food….”We are mass poisoning all of our children and our adults.”
Kennedy explains that he believes that the cigarette companies bought food processing companies. Those firms took their chemists and added substances to make the foods addictive. While that may be a bridge too far, the fact is that there is some evidence that additives in the foods are impacting human body biomes, which may be reasonably anticipated to result in adverse health consequences.
An ultra-processed food is an industrially formulated edible substance derived from natural food or synthesized from other organic compounds. The resulting products are designed to be highly profitable, convenient, and tasty, using preservatives, colorings, and flavorings.
As I have said before, food science is the least settled science of all. I think people should be allowed to eat as they wish and feed their kids according to parental preference.
However, I do find the recent defense of ultra-processed foods in a recently published Time piece very concerning. The article features Jessica Wilson, a California dietician who specializes in working with clients from marginalized groups.
Wilson spent a month eating these foods and came out feeling fabulous.
She swapped her morning eggs for soy chorizo and replaced her thrown-together lunches—sometimes as simple as beans with avocado and hot sauce—with Trader Joe’s ready-to-eat tamales. She snacked on cashew-milk yogurt with jam. For dinner she’d have one of her beloved Costco pupusas, or maybe chicken sausage with veggies and Tater-Tots. She wasn’t subsisting on Fritos, but these were also decidedly not whole foods.A weird thing happened. Wilson found that she had more energy and less anxiety. She didn’t need as much coffee to get through the day and felt more motivated. She felt better eating an ultra-processed diet than she had before, a change she attributes to taking in more calories by eating full meals, instead of haphazard combinations of whole-food ingredients.
And while this may have been published to discredit RFK Jr., it does nothing to refute the many troubling statistics Kennedy cites. For example, here is the accepted data on pediatric fatty liver disease.
Before the turn of the century, there were only a handful of documented cases of pediatric fatty liver disease in the medical literature. Today, millions are affected, and researchers in the journal Clinical Liver Disease estimate that 5 to 10 percent of all U.S. children have nonalcoholic fatty liver disease — making it about as common as asthma.“It’s the worst disease you’ve never heard of,” said Samir Softic, a pediatric gastroenterologist at Kentucky Children’s Hospital who specializes in fatty liver disease.
There have been studies linking ultra-processed foods to cognitive decline.
Several studies published in the past few years have found an association between eating more ultraprocessed foods and cognitive decline. In one study of more than 10,000 middle-aged adults in Brazil, for example, people who consumed 20 percent or more of their daily calories from ultraprocessed foods experienced more rapid cognitive decline, particularly on tests of executive functioning, over the course of eight years.
And there are several food ingredients banned in Europe but not the US.
It also might be helpful to assess the rationale behind the publication of the Time piece and the timing. Wilson is a California dietician who published a book focused on black women’s bodies. Watch the video for her hot take on body size and black identity.
Kennedy is asking the questions they need to be asked. “Experts” who were supposed to protect the American public from harmful policies have been clearly influenced by wealthy and powerful interests in other health areas, so why should food be any different?
Hopefully, Kennedy will be in a position to get the answers Americans need to make fully informed decisions about what they eat.
The timing of the article is shameful, and is completely devoid of science…settled or otherwise.
CLICK HERE FOR FULL VERSION OF THIS STORY