Marion Nestle
speaker
375 appearances
4 recordings
4 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard 5 Jun
Marion Nestle’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Let me first state very clearly that nobody has asked me. I think what you have to do, first of all, is you have to put restrictions on the food industry. You have to stop the food industry from marketing junk foods to kids, ultra-processed if you like. You've got to stop that. Is RFK Jr. going to take on the food industry? I'll believe it when I see it.
When Michelle Obama attempted to do even much, much less than this just to get food companies to voluntarily stop marketing junk foods to kids, the pushback on it was extraordinary from exactly the people who are for it now. Well, I'm glad times have changed. I want to see them do something.
You have to understand the background of this a little bit, and that is that a professor of public health in Brazil, Carlos Monteiro, devised this concept in 2009, and he divided foods into four categories, unprocessed or minimally processed foods like corn on the cob or apples or... you know, things that you just eat. A second category was processed culinary ingredients.
And by that, he means salt, sugars, salad oils, vinegar, the kinds of things that you cook with. And then the third category is processed foods, things that are frozen, foods that have been packaged, foods that have been cut and processed in some way. But they're really pretty simple. The fourth category is different. These are foods that have been industrially processed.
The operating definition is you can't make them in your home kitchen.
The prototype.
This is the prototypical ultra-processed food because it started out with corn. Corn is the first ingredient. Does this look anything like corn to you? No. Not so much. Industrially processed. Yeah. It's got real food in it. It has corn, vegetable oil, but then it has corn maltodextrin as the third ingredient.
But it's got things like whey protein concentrate, potassium salt, tomato powder, lactose, spices, artificial colors, lots of them, disodium inositate, disodium guanylate.
I don't have that in my kitchen, and I cannot buy it at my local grocery store. These foods are processed to make them. A lot of people use the word addiction. I'm a little uncomfortable with it, but there it is. The idea that that old Frito-Lay's commercial that you can't eat just one, that's exactly the point of these. These foods were deliberately designed to be profitable.
That was their purpose. They weren't designed for public health purposes.
Whole wheat bread is in what I call the conditionally ultra-processed category because you can get whole wheat breads that are ultra-processed, and you can also get whole wheat breads that are not. Okay, the ingredient list. I love starting. Whole wheat flour, nothing wrong with that. Second, third ingredient, wheat gluten. Uh-oh. So that's to boost the protein content. Sugar, yeast, fine.
Vegetable oil, fine. Salt, fine. Preservatives, calcium propionate, sorbic acid, datum, natural flavors. There's no such thing. Monoglycerides, monocalcium phosphate, soy lecithin, citric acid, vinegar. Sesame seeds.
Ultra-processed. And why would they do that? Two reasons.
People like soft bread. People don't like whole wheat bread. Whole wheat bread is an acquired taste. It's very difficult for people. Humans have been making white bread for millennia because it tastes better. It's easier to digest. You don't have to chew it as much. This stuff is really soft.
Very, very soft. So that's what the datum and these other things in there are doing. And it'll sit on the shelf for a really long time. It won't get moldy.
So what's this one? So it's got cultured grade A nonfat milk. Yes. Water. Yes. Modified food starch. Sigh. Oh, it's got allulose, one of those indigestible sweeteners. Kosher gelatin, cornstarch, citric acid. Where'd you find this? Sucralose, an artificial sweetener. Tricalcium phosphate, potassium sorbate. Oh, another artificial sweetener. This thing has three artificial sweeteners in it.
Doesn't have any sugar. Doesn't say anything about the cultures. What you want in yogurt is you want all those friendly bacteria to make your microbiome happy. I'm not sure the friendly bacteria like all this stuff.
It's common sense. Okay. I mean, everybody knows what junk foods are. You know, when I talk about ultra-processed foods, everybody gets it right away.
If you've got a yogurt in front of you and it's got M&Ms added to it and it's loaded with sugar and it tastes like a dessert, you know that you're dealing with something that's ultra-processed.
The point about the ultra-processed food classification is that people were able to do research. And this research has been overwhelming in its consistency. Let me tell you, in nutrition, this is very unusual. Yeah. It's unusual to have this level of consistency where every study of ultra-processed food shows that people who eat a lot of these kinds of things have worse health outcomes. Yeah.
Showing 321–340 of 375 · page 17 of 19
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