Why ultra-processed foods are so addictive
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Why are ultra-processed foods so addictive?
The humble potato chip. A classic that is easily recognisable by sound alone. And that's not a fluke. Food companies put time and money into perfecting the sound of the crunch, all in an effort to bring you back for more. They're doing it using techniques on addiction, perfected by the tobacco industry. But it's not just the foods itself. It's ads like this.
Ooh, they taste good! And this one. When you feed your kids the protein, fibre, multigrain, B vitamins and iron in NutriGrain, they will be unstoppable. Well, they won't be unstoppable, but it will give them the fuel they need to try again and again.
They draw us into buying these products again and again. Today on The Detail, we look at why we find ultra-processed foods so addictive and how they always seem to end up in our trolleys. How we're being sucked in by celebrity endorsements, bright colours and something called the health halo effect. Chips, biscuits, yogurts, protein bars, instant noodles, these are all examples of ultra-processed foods, or UPFs. They're different from just processed foods. Senior Research Fellow in Population Health at the University of Auckland, Kelly Garton, explains how.
humans have been processing foods for millennia.
How do marketing techniques mimic the tobacco industry?
And, you know, usually it's taking like raw, unprocessed or minimally processed ingredients, combining it with things like salt or sugar or, you know, using different processes to ferment or preserve or, you know, cook, extending shelf life. And, you know, that's the kind of thing we've been doing forever. What's more recent is the advent of ultra-processed foods. So these are commercial formulations that made from cheap ingredients that are extracted or derived from whole foods and combined with additives, but they mostly contain little to no whole food in the end product. So, you know, you can identify them by seeing long lists of ingredients on packaged food and drinks, and also usually ingredients that you wouldn't see in a home kitchen.
So these are really, you know, rely on industrial processing to make.
And the recent research that you came out with is around ultra-processed foods. Can you tell me a little bit about why you did this research?
Well, first of all, research has shown that ultra-processed foods is taking on a larger and larger share of our diets, particularly in high-income countries like New Zealand.
Now, in just the last three decades or so, New Zealand's imports of ultra-processed food have skyrocketed from 16 kilograms per person to over 100 kilograms per person.
We don't have a recent dietary nutrition survey telling us exactly how much we're consuming, but other similar countries like Australia, Canada, UK, it's about 50% of people's energy intake. And we know that dietary patterns that are high in ultra-processed food increase the risk of developing a wide range of serious health conditions. And we've known for a long time, the research has been there that Consuming a lot of ultra-processed foods is bad for us, but we still seem to be consuming a lot. You know, consumption continues to stay high and stable, and it's increasing in many lower- and middle-income countries. So we were really curious at looking at, like, why is this still so high and stable in our food system?
And we were really interested in sort of what the deeper, you know, patterns and feedback loops might be behind that.
What was the new things that you guys had found from this research?
Yeah, so what we did was we looked over a decade of literature that described sort of the way ultra-processed foods are designed and the way they're marketed and how those factors influenced consumption. And there's a growing body of literature around this. It's interesting, a lot of this is not... In the health literature, for example, we had to go into different sort of food science bodies of literature. And we also ended up speaking to a lot of experts in the field of food product design, as well as food marketing to really look at, you know, how different mechanisms are perhaps triggering or capitalizing on human biology or human psychology and sort of things that we are innately drawn to.
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