Kevin Hall

Whereas the broader questions about what is it about our food environment, how is it driving poor health?

What is it about?

How is it affecting our biology?

What are the specific attributes of ultra-processed foods?

And only a subset of that very broad category that are causing the problems and which ones are actually probably poised to help us into the future.

In fact, that's one of the reasons why you have petitions like David Kessler's recent petition to the FDA saying that there's a whole bunch of highly processed carbohydrates that are part of ultra-processed foods that should no longer be generally recognized as safe, which is a category of ingredients or additives into food that are basically pretty under-regulated in some sense.

Many of these things are self-affirmed, and when they were affirmed for these kinds of ingredients, folks weren't thinking about diet-related chronic diseases.

They were thinking about this acute food safety aspect and not necessarily cumulative exposures, given the conditions of use that are now present in our food environment.

Yeah, so I think an important clarification about what we talk about in the book and in that piece is that what we were trying to do is say what subcategories of ultra processed foods are probably perfectly fine and should be actually recommended.

And those would be the category of ultra processed foods that already meet the FDA's definition of a healthy product.

And so if it doesn't meet the definition of a healthy product, it could be perfectly neutral for health, in which case you don't also want to aggressively attack those products.

So what we said was, what subcategory of ultra-processed foods that is not already in the FDA definition of healthy, which is based on a long, long history of dietary guidelines from not just America but around the globe of health,

promoting its amount of vegetable intake and fruits and nuts and legumes and low in saturated fat, low in added sugar, low in sodium, all the things that we have a wealth of data behind what looks like a healthy diet.

And if they don't meet that definition,

And they also don't, if they do promote overconsumption of calories because they're calorie dense, for example, or because they contain hyperpalatable combinations of nutrients, that's the subcategory, the very small subcategory of this wide range.

of ultra-processed foods that we say, yeah, we don't want to remove those from the market, but we want to minimize their use as much as possible.

And we want to promote the kinds of ultra-processed products that actually do meet the FDA healthy definition.

So instead of demonizing this entire class of

foods like you mentioned, we want to basically be much more targeted in our policies and focus on what do we know about what makes up a healthy diet, which is quite a lot, and there's quite a bit of consensus around the world about what that looks like, and promote ultra-processed products that actually promote that kind of diet for people to make it convenient, inexpensive, affordable from a time perspective as well.

And so that's the kind of the way that we're approaching this problem.