A new study has found that nearly three-quarters of American adults are now obese or overweight, and there’s growing concern — among politicians, scientists and consumers — about one potential culprit: ultraprocessed foods.Guest: Alice Callahan, a nutrition and health reporter for The New York Times, discusses how these foods came to be such a big part of what we eat, and why that’s so hard to change. Background reading: There’s not enough evidence to recommend avoiding ultraprocessed foods, a scientific advisory committee says. Some experts disagree.Name a common condition — heart disease, Type 2 diabetes, cancer, dementia, irritable bowel syndrome — and chances are good that a diet high in ultraprocessed foods has been linked to it. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Full Episode
From The New York Times, I'm Sabrina Tavernisi, and this is The Daily. A new study has found that nearly three-quarters of American adults are now obese or overweight. And there's been growing concern among politicians, scientists, and consumers about one potential culprit. Are ultra-processed foods to blame for addiction to sugar and ultra-processed foods? ultra-processed food.
We are all addicted to eating fast food and ultra-processed foods, and that is melting our brains in real time. Straight up.
Today, my colleague, nutrition writer Alice Callahan, on how these foods came to be such a big part of what we eat and why that's so hard to change. It's Friday, December 13th.
Alice Callahan, welcome to the show. Thank you. It's so good to be here, Sabrina.
So you cover nutrition for The Times, and you, as I understand, are uniquely qualified to have this conversation about ultra-processed foods because you literally have a PhD in nutrition.
I do have a PhD in nutrition. That's right. So I started out in academia. I thought that I would be a nutrition scientist.
But pretty soon after, I actually decided to transition to science writing because I really wanted to be in a position where I could read the science, talk to the scientists, and then be able to turn around and kind of interpret it for everyday people who are trying to figure out what to eat.
And one of the things that we've seen in just the last few years in this field is a real change in the way we talk about food. When I was in graduate school, we were learning all about carbs and fats and protein and vitamins and minerals and how we break these nutrients down and use them in our bodies. Nobody at that time was talking about how foods were processed.
And now just in the last few years, we're seeing a lot of attention on how food processing might affect our health and especially this category of ultra-processed foods.
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