Marion Nestle

They're going to close the stores that are not performing well, meaning having lots and lots of people spending lots and lots of money at them.

And so as the big grocery stores have closed,

In inner-city neighborhoods, the dollar stores moved in.

Oh, it was long before the pandemic.

I mean, the tendency has been, you know, it's the same thing everywhere in the economy, get big or get out.

So that the top three chains in or three or four grocery chains own more than half the business, 60, 70% of the business.

And whenever you have

a highly concentrated industry like the meat industry, for example, where three companies own 85% of the meat, they get to set prices.

They get to set the rules of the game.

They get to go to Congress and to the president and say, we don't want dietary guidelines to say anything bad about our products.

And we want the president to keep meatpacking plants open during the pandemic, even though it's killing lots of people.

Oh, well, ultra-processed is a specific category of food named by Carlos Monteiro, who's a public health professor in Brazil, who came up with the concept.

And these are industrially produced foods that

contain large numbers of color, texture, and flavor additives that you don't necessarily...

have access to in supermarkets or in your home kitchen.

And they're now associated, consumption of a lot of them is now associated in literally hundreds of studies with poor health outcome.

Those studies are observational and they cannot prove causation, but we now have very, very well controlled clinical trials, at least three of them so far, that show that

People who eat a lot of ultra-processed foods take in more calories than they otherwise would if they were eating unprocessed or minimally processed foods.

And the easiest example to explain the difference is corn on the cob is unprocessed, canned corn is processed, and Doritos are ultra-processed.

Well, that has to do with the cost of production of the ingredients, plus the packaging, plus the waste, plus everything that goes into taking a food, transforming it industrially into something that doesn't look anything like the...