Beige Food Five
Are Ultra-processed Foods Safe?
The problem with the entire medical and research industrial complex is that not only does it confuse links with causes when it comes to food and disease, but it fails to recognize the benefits of ultra-processed foods altogether. Ultra-processed foods are food. In as much as all food is safe, so too is ultra-processed food. If any food is tainted with pathogens then it will be unsafe to eat, hence those occasional nation-wide recalls of unprocessed, processed and ultra-processed foods due to the presence of a pathogen that causes illness. Sometimes foods are recalled due to the presence of an allergen that the label indicates is not present: when wheat is present in a gluten-free-labelled product, for example. In that case, the food would be unsafe to eat for those who have immune reactions to the presence of wheat.
If, when anyone asks the question “are ultra-processed foods safe?” what they are really getting at is: are these foods that promote good health and lower the chance of illness and disease, then no foods (raw and unprocessed, processed and ultra-processed) can be said to be safe. Or unsafe. Again, this topic of debunking the cultural framework of “healthy foods” is covered off with all the exhaustive referenced evidence in many pieces found across the site.
Of course there are two other concerns regarding ultra-processed food: the enormous environmental impact of their production and the chemicals used in the packaging that surrounds most of these types of foods. But the foods themselves offer some significant benefit to anyone with neither the time nor the energy to prepare processed or raw options, and to those with chronic conditions that make it hard for the body to extract the energy from processed or raw foods. If their environmental impact or chemical burden in packaging gives you pause, please know that far greater things in your day-to-day life impact your own carbon footprint and your completely unavoidable ingestion of unwanted chemicals. You breathe in, by volume, far more toxicants in a single day than you could possibly consume in several years from the transfer of toxicants from packaging of the ultra-processed food you consume. And keep in mind that with an eating disorder, your mind will naturally latch on to any avoidant tactic on offer, so resist the drive to use the carbon footprint or the packaging constituents as an excuse to avoid restoring your energy balance as efficiently and quickly as ultra-processed foods will do*.
While I would certainly prefer that toxic chemicals on the surface of packaging were not part of the equation of consuming ultra-processed foods, I think it is important for people navigating an eating disorder, and those dealing with either co-existing or distinct chronic conditions that cause secondary mitochondrial dysfunction, to consider that the bad outcomes when the body is energy deficient are the more immediate and dire threat.
It should also be mentioned that cooked and raw foods have similar transfers of toxic chemicals from the containers in which we originally purchased them, the water in which we wash them, the pots and pans in which we might prepare them, and the containers in which we store the leftovers. Growing your own veggies and wrapping them in homemade beeswax wraps for storage? There’s still the quality of the air overall and the soil to consider as sources of toxins you ingest.
I was often asked repeatedly on the forums, when I ran them, whether someone in recovery from an eating disorder would ever stop preferring ultra-processed foods to everything else. There was always panic that these foods were addictive in nature and that there would not be a time when the person would choose regular processed foods over ultra-processed foods.
When it comes to an eating disorder, a person will hit a point at which regular processed/cooked foods will be more appealing than ultra-processed foods because the ability to extract energy from food is usually not permanently damaged from having an eating disorder. But there might be a very extended period of preferring ultra-processed foods to all other foods, because being energy restored with all systems fully repaired lags significantly behind weight restoration.
However, other chronic conditions where the body’s energy extraction system and its mitochondrial function may have been permanently impacted, ultra-processed foods would always offer a better option for giving the body the energy it requires to keep going.
I also want to flag that completely energy-balanced people with no history of an eating disorder, or any other chronic condition, will preferentially choose ultra-processed foods at times and it’s normal. Everyone’s energy needs fluctuate and are impacted by all the external and internal goings on of life. There’s a reason that comfort food has existed as a concept for humans for millennia: we do require additional energy in times of emotional distress or overall stress and comfort foods have involved high levels of dietary fat because fat has always offered more energy per ounce than proteins and carbohydrates. It’s normal to be drawn to sit with a tub of ice cream, rather than a bowl of carrots, when you are in your feels.
Next section available November 28.
Image in outline preview: Flickr.com Rafael Edward.
* While ultra-processed foods offer higher net energy value to the energy-starved system, if you find yourself panicked that you’re not eating enough ultra-processed foods, or you are heavily focused on just getting to the end of the recovery process superfast (there is no end by the way), then that is not what is being suggested here as a good way to navigate a recovery process.
