A major new Canadian study shows that diets high in ultraprocessed foods are strongly linked to early indicators of serious health problems.Graham Hughes/The Canadian Press
Vass Bednar is the managing director of the Canadian SHIELD Institute and co-author of The Big Fix.
In a historic case, the city of San Francisco is suing 10 major ultraprocessed-food companies, alleging that they have saddled governments with excessive public-health costs.
The case targets household names that include Coca-Cola Co. KO-N, PepsiCo Inc. PEP-Q and Kraft Heinz Co. KHC-Q, and it cites that they comprise roughly 70 per cent of the American food supply.
The suit accuses manufacturers of knowingly selling products that harm consumers while marketing them as being “wholesome” or “convenient” in a violation of California’s public-nuisance and unfair-competition laws.
It’s a novel premise, and the connective leap makes a lot of sense. These companies are reshaping what we eat through cheaper inputs sold at higher prices. Processed food is being optimized for margin and shelf stability, promoting addiction instead of nutrition.
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Perhaps the ubiquity of ultraprocessed food is ultimately a governance failure. We treat obesity and other metabolic diseases as personal moral failures; but they are a predictable result of market design.
In Canada, our pushback on the degradation of our food system has been tepid, though a major new Canadian study shows that diets high in ultraprocessed foods are strongly linked to early indicators of serious health problems.
Drawing on data from more than 6,000 adults, researchers found that people who eat the most ultraprocessed food had much higher blood pressure, insulin and triglyceride levels, larger waist circumferences and higher body mass index numbers compared with those who eat the least.
These are well-known risk factors for heart disease and Type 2 diabetes.
Data from Statistics Canada confirms that many Canadians get a large portion of their daily calories from highly processed food products. The rapid expansion of ultraprocessed items in our food supply appears to be reshaping our health. That is undermining metabolic and cardiovascular well-being long before overt disease and across all income and education levels.
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The federal government is starting to address this pollution, but in a very narrow way. Earlier this year, Health Canada mandated a new nutrition symbol on the front of food packages that makes companies declare when defined thresholds for saturated fat, sodium and sugars are exceeded.
The rationale behind this is similar to how we have approached tobacco regulation: Regulators seek to inform, stigmatize and gradually suppress demand for products that are now well understood to drive chronic disease.
But we haven’t dared to test whether companies themselves can be held financially responsible for the downstream public-health costs to which they directly contribute. Plus, we already know that public-health expenditure is ballooning, not unlike our waistlines.
It’s time to reckon with the quality of the food system we want, and what else we might be able to do to support access to healthy, affordable food. A food system dominated by foreign conglomerates will always prioritize margins over health.
Ultraprocessing is the next frontier of public-health governance. In some ways, we have been here before, pushing back against corporate power: Quebec restricted junk-food ads to kids in 1980. A decade later, we banned lead in gasoline, then we capped lead levels in tap water in 1992, got BPA out of baby bottles in 2010, removed trans fats from food in 2018 and regulated tobacco packaging in 2019.
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Each time, industry swore that regulation would be disastrous, but public health won. The question now is whether and why we want ultraprocessed foods at all. Europe bans a lot of U.S.-made food.
And while it makes sense for people to obsess over grocery prices, we may be ignoring a deeper loss: a general lack of control over the quality of ingredients and processing standards. Not only is food getting more expensive, but it is also getting demonstrably worse. This is largely due to a lack of competition, and our hesitancy to regulate junk.
In a way, the claims made by these food companies about ultraprocessed products are fundamentally a form of economic disinformation: Providers deliberately use misleading tactics that distort the truth, often to pad corporate profits.
In the case of food, other tactics such as skimpflation (reducing the quality of the inputs of a product without lowering the price) are designed to mislead us. Costco may have a $1.50 hot dog, but the chain’s bagels have fake blueberries. What used to be chocolate is now mostly a chocolate-flavoured palm oil.
If San Francisco wins, food giants may face the same reckoning that Big Tech is encountering: accountability for designing harmful defaults and for profiting from our predictable dependency.
It’s something to chew on.