RFK Special: What Are Ultra-Processed Foods and Why Are They So Bad for Us?

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has identified ultra-processed food as one of the key causes of America’s unprecedented health crisis

Robert F. Kennedy Junior’s decision to retire and endorse Donald Trump has electrified a presidential race that was hardly lacking in excitement. Donald Trump had already come millimetres from having his head blown off, and Joe Biden was deposed in a carefully orchestrated palace coup, to make way for Kamala Harris. This has been a campaign of shocks and firsts, and now we can add another first to that list: a member of the Kennedy family supporting a Republican ticket.

In his announcement on Friday, before he joined Trump on stage in Arizona, Kennedy said that he would work with the Trump administration to “make America healthy again.” He described watching a generation of children grow up “damaged” as a result of poor diet and environmental pollution, and said that four more years of Democratic rule will “complete the consolidation of corporate and neocon power, and our children will be the ones that suffer most.”

“For 19 years I prayed, every morning, that God would put me in a position to end this calamity. The chronic-disease crisis was one of my primary reasons for running for president, along with ending the censorship and the Ukraine war.”

Now Kennedy is in a position to do that, and Trump has confirmed that he will head a task-force to investigate, and hopefully solve, America’s unprecedented health crisis.

The prevalence of obesity, diabetes, autism and AHDH, cancer, auto-immune conditions, infertility and reproductive issues, and neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s is exploding across the Western world, but especially in America, which leads the world, or once did, in virtually every single metric of ill health you could care to name. Over 40% of adults in the US are now classified as obese, and 1 in 36 American children have an autism-spectrum disorder.

On Friday, Kennedy identified two major contributors to this health crisis: ultra-processed food and toxic endocrine-disrupting chemicals. These are things Kennedy has talked about, at length, for years—decades, actually—including in the 2022 Tucker Carlson documentary The End of Men, which I’m proud to say I featured in prominently, alongside him.

The harmful effects of ultra-processed food and endocrine-disruptors are no longer fringe topics for discussion, but you may still be confused or unsure about what they are and why they’re bad. That’s where I come in. I’ve not been writing about these things for quite as long as RFK Jr. has, but I have been raising awareness about them for the last four years, including in my book The Eggs Benedict Option and my various media and podcast appearances.

Today and on Monday, I’ll be telling you everything you need to know to get a handle on ultra-processed food and endocrine disruptors. These two primers can be shared with family and friends to help educate them and give them an incentive to improve their health by reducing their dependence on and exposure to ultra-processed foods and toxic chemicals.

Today I’ll tell you about ultra-processed foods in particular.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF FOOD PROCESSING

Food has been processed since the dawn of human history, or at least as far back as we can see through the mists of time. Our distant ancestors used fire to cook meat and other foods, and they also discovered how to grind wild grains to make flour for early forms of bread. They also discovered how to harness bacteria—not that they knew anything about microbes—to ferment foods, helping to preserve and increase their digestibility and nutritional value in the process. They learned other preservation techniques like drying, smoking and, where the weather was cold enough, freezing.

Foods prepared using any one or more of these techniques satisfy the common-sense definition of “processed food,” and for the longest span of human history, until the nineteenth century, this is how food was processed by human beings, if it was processed at all.

We cooked at home. Bread was made at home or in a local bakery. The majority of ingredients were sourced locally, apart from luxury items obtained through long-distance trade like sugar and spices.

In the last century or so, food began to be processed and sold to the public in new ways. Food started to be manufactured in factories owned by large-scale conglomerates, using new industrial processes and new ingredients like hydrogenated oils, seed and vegetable oils, refined sugars and refined grains. Special additives were created to alter the properties of the food produced—to alter its texture, color it or make it last longer—and new storage methods like canning and tinning also meant that the shelf-life of food could be extended, allowing these foods to reach new markets at home and overseas.

The creation of the first factory-made foods heralded a major shift in Western dietary patterns, and these foods soon made their way outside the West, to every corner of the globe.

The immediate effects of this dietary shift were nothing short of disastrous. The pioneering dentist Weston A. Price described the early effects in his classic book Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, from 1939, a book I consider to be the greatest book on nutrition ever written.

Price noticed worrying changes in the physical health of his patients, especially the children, in his practice in Cleveland, Ohio. It wasn’t just that their teeth were getting worse—and they were: their mouths were suddenly full of cavities—it’s that the entire structure of their faces seemed to be collapsing. The teeth themselves, the jaw and the roof of the mouth weren’t forming properly, and nor were the cheeks or nasal passages. What’s more, these worrying physical changes were accompanied by behavioural changes, including learning difficulties, that had previously been unknown.

Price knew that diet had to be to blame, and eventually he got the chance to test his hypothesis with rigor. He travelled the globe with his wife, visiting small-scale communities on every inhabited continent, from the Inuit in the Arctic to pastoralists like the Nuer and Masai in Africa, and even remote communities in Europe, like the crofters and fishermen of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, and the high Alpine Swiss. Price found that, wherever the people in these communities cleaved to their ancestral diets—wherever they ate locally produced whole foods, and especially nutrient-dense animal foods like organ meat, fatty cuts of meat, dairy, seafood and shellfish, eggs, blood products and butter—the people displayed remarkable health and vigor, including resistance to infectious diseases. The symptoms of physical degeneration Price had seen back in Ohio were totally absent.

But wherever these people deviated from their ancestral diets and started eating Western industrial foods—especially tinned foods high in sugar and refined wheat products—the symptoms of physical degeneration became apparent very quickly.

Weston Price’s work provided an early warning against the abandonment of traditional diets for new factory-made foods. Sadly, it went unheeded. In the decades since, we have moved further and further away from our traditional diets in the West, and across the rest of the world, increasing our reliance on factory-made foodstuffs that contain ingredients and additives that humans have little or even no history of ever consuming. The manufacture of processed foods has become more and more sophisticated, employing new manufacturing techniques and an ever-expanding list of ingredients. Importantly, processed-food manufacturers have employed powerful targeted advertising that focuses on their products’ convenience and irresistible moreishness. These are the true “ultra-processed foods.”

PROCESSED FOOD TODAY

Before we go any further, here’s a minimal working definition of ultra-processed food: food that’s produced in a factory, contains one or more ingredients you wouldn’t find in a normal home kitchen—emulsifiers, humectants, colourings, stabilisers, preservatives—and is sold to you wrapped in plastic.

There’s a certain amount of quibbling about the definition of ultra-processed food, especially from scientists who happen to be funded by manufacturers of ultra-processed food, but it’s absolutely clear that there is a significant difference between the kind of processed food people are consuming in enormous quantities today and even the sort of foods Weston Price associated with physical degeneration back in the 1930s.

In many Western countries, children now derive the majority of their daily calories from ultra-processed food. A study from 2021 showed that toddlers in the UK (children aged between two and five) derive an average of 61% of their daily calories from ultra-processed food. Toddlers in the US hardly fare much better, getting 58% of their daily calories from ultra-processed food.

Scientific research has linked processed foods to virtually every single one of the prevailing chronic diseases of modernity I discussed at the beginning of this piece—to everything from autism to Alzheimer’s.

The best way to illustrate the whole host of problems associated with massive processed-food consumption would be to point you in the direction of a BBC documentary that was made during the pandemic. In What Are We Feeding Our Kids? a British doctor called Chris Van Tulleken spent one month eating a diet comprising 80% ultra-processed food. At least one fifth of British adults now follow such a diet.

The changes Dr Van Tulleken experienced were shocking. He gained a considerable amount of weight. He suffered from constipation and hemorrhoids. He couldn’t sleep, and began waking up in the middle of the night to raid the fridge for more sugary snacks, despite, by his own admission, not being hungry. His libido disappeared and he became paranoid and anxious.

MRI scans taken before and after the experiment revealed that Van Tulleken’s brain had actually been rewired in the manner we’d expect of a drug addict. The scans showed significant increases in connections between areas linking reward and automatic behaviour, and these changes appeared to be permanent. Months after the experiment ended, the connections were still lighting up under the scanner. He had been hardwired to crave ultra-processed food.

Manufacturers of ultra-processed foods are well aware their food is addictive. They make it that way deliberately. They call this addictiveness “hyperpalatability,” and they employ small armies of highly paid food scientists to exploit the complicated neurobiology of food pleasure—sensations like sweetness, saltiness, crunch and chew—to ensure that consumers reach the so-called “bliss point” and can’t stop eating.

A 2019 study showed that we eat ultra-processed foods 30% faster than normal foods. As a result, our bodies’ natural hormone mechanisms to signal satiety don’t have time to respond. That means we overeat, and if all we eat is ultra-processed food, we overeat all the time.

I’ve called ultra-processed food “weaponized food” with good reason. The companies that manufacture it know exactly what they’re doing and why. Of course, if you were a food manufacturer, you’d probably do that too: you’d want to maximize your profits as well. But that doesn’t make it right.

Interestingly, recent research has shown that tobacco companies may have played a pivotal role in hooking consumers on new ultra-processed foods in the 1980s, deploying the same marketing tricks and techniques as they used to hook people on cigarettes decades earlier. RFK Jr. has mentioned this.

WHAT’S WRONG WITH ULTRA-PROCESSED FOOD?

It’s not simply that ultra-processed food is designed to be overeaten, and overeating anything will, at the very least, make you overweight. The individual ingredients that go into processed food are bad too.

Processed food is full of cheap, low-quality ingredients, many of which are now genetically modified. Production of the base commodities that are turned into these ingredients—which means corn and soy, principally—is heavily subsidized by the US government. Processed food has been the main vehicle for corn and soy producers to get rid of the vast amounts of these crops they produce annually, whether in the form of high-fructose corn syrup, modified corn starch, soy protein or soybean oil. If you want to know more, in detail, about why American farmers produce so much corn and how it ends up in so much of the food Americans eat, I’d recommend you read Michael Pollan’s book The Omnivore’s Dilemma.

One ingredient of particular concern in ultra-processed food is seed and vegetable oils, which RFK Jr. has singled out for their health effects on a number of occasions, including during his announcement on Friday night. Although seed and vegetable oils have been marketed as healthy alternatives to traditional animal fats for the last 70 years, the truth is that they are anything but healthy. A large body of scientific evidence now links these novel fats to chronic inflammation, which is the cause of many diseases, as well as obesity and genetic dysregulation in animals and humans. These fats are toxic by their very nature, and shouldn’t be consumed in the kind of quantities people are consuming them today, mainly via processed food.

Take soybean oil, for example, consumption of which has increased a thousandfold over the last century. A study from 2020 showed that, as well as being obesogenic, soybean oil causes serious genetic dysregulation and neurological damage in mice. The genes affected included genes associated with inflammation, neuroendocrine and neurochemical processes, insulin signalling, and the production of oxytocin, the “love hormone,” which is responsible for social bonding. Other genes that were affected are linked to neurological diseases including Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s, and autism. The authors of the study conclude that, although the study was conducted on mice, the results are likely to hold for humans as well: “the [soybean-oil-rich] American diet may be not only contributing to increased rates of metabolic disease but also affecting neurological function.”

But it’s not just the “food” ingredients that we should be worried about. In recent years, there’s been a growing focus on the harmful effects of the non-nutritional additives that are found in ultra-processed food. These are the kind of ingredients you’ll not find in a standard home kitchen: things like emulsifiers, colourings, humectants, texturisers, preservatives and anti-fungals, anti-caking agents and so on.

Artificial sweeteners, for example, have been linked to depression and gut dysbiosis—disruption of the digestive system—which is, in turn, linked to a whole host of other illnesses, from behavioural conditions like autism and ADHD, to neurological conditions like Alzheimer’s.

The US system of food additives, under the management of the FDA, is a beacon of stupidity and corruption. I’ve described the FDA’s “Generally Recognised as Safe” (GRAS) system as “Generally Recognised as Insane” for the ridiculous attitude to novel ingredients it licenses. The system was first introduced in 1958, when the Food Additive Amendments were passed, to require that all non-standard food additives—the kind of things that aren’t typically found in a normal kitchen—should be tested adequately for safety in humans.

When the new system was introduced, there were reckoned to be about 700 food additives in use, 400 of which were thought to be safe in the long term. The new system was supposed to guarantee additives that were already in the food supply were safe, but what happened instead was a process of “grandfathering,” where substances that were in use were simply assumed to be safe, for that very reason. That included substances like potassium bromate, which over 50 years’ worth of research has since shown to be linked to cancers such as thyroid and testicular cancer, kidney damage, gut dysbiosis and reproductive issues. The EU, Canada, China and India have now banned it. Even Nigeria has banned it. But not the US.

Around 2,000 additives are licensed for use in the EU. In the US, the figure rises to 10,000—and that’s just an estimate. Nobody knows how many additives are in the food supply, not even the FDA, because companies are simply introducing additives without telling anybody. A company can produce a new food additive, decide it’s safe and then bring it to market without any scrutiny from the FDA at all.

How did this happen?

When companies began applying for GRAS designation, they were allowed to submit their own safety data for their novel ingredients, which the FDA could then choose to accept or reject. But as a huge backlog of applications started to build up at the FDA, companies chose to add novel ingredients to their products without consulting the FDA at all. The FDA could have asserted its authority, but it did what any poorly staffed, totally compromised institution like the FDA would do: It simply made the problem disappear by defining it out of existence. The FDA retrospectively normalised the situation, a process that was finally completed in 2016. And so a company can produce a new food additive, decide it’s safe and bring it to market without any scrutiny from the FDA at all.

We are now at the corrupt heart of the American food supply today, at the center of a system that favors corporate producers at the expense of the people it claims to nourish. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is right. If we are ever going to make America healthy again, the corporations that produce its food system must be brought into line. They must be made to serve the needs of the American people, and not the other way round.

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