Independence from UPFs
Farmers Markets offer nourishment, public health and thriving food systems
One thing I love about farmers markets is how healthy they are—for people, communities and the planet.
Fruits and vegetables—food groups, for which Americans have for years failed to meet dietary recommendations—are in abundance. While there is no requirement to follow organic growing methods to sell at my local market, several vendors do so, using little if any chemical inputs. Likewise, meat vendors providing wholesome cuts of chicken, pork and beef can raise animals following a variety of methods. Customers interested in meat from animals raised on pasture and organic feed can find them at the market.
Some eggs come with the expected white shells while others look like they’ve been dyed for an Easter egg hunt. No matter the shell color, the yolks are a rich golden yellow, sometimes approaching deep orange, an indication* (though not a guarantee) that the chickens who laid them spent time on grass eating plenty of beta-carotene rich foods: marigold, alfalfa, pumpkin, and various leafy greens.
A gorgeous display of baked goods at the Wide Awake Bakery stall—hearty whole grain loaves, baguettes and batards, croissants, scones, and sweet or savory focaccia—attracts a long line of customers hungry for great tastes and eager to support one of the bakery’s missions—to revitalize diverse and organic grain production in a state that’s been called America’s “original breadbasket”.
A great benefit of shopping at a farmers market is being able to come face-to-face with producers. Customers can—and should be encouraged to—ask producers directly about farming practices rather than assume they are consistent with their values.
A critical absence
The health benefits that farmers markets offer stem not only from the extraordinary abundance of nutritious local foods on offer, but, just as important, because of what’s not on offer. Nowhere among this panoply of goodness is a single ultra-processed food.
Carlos Monteiro, a Brazilian epidemiologist and Director of Center for Epidemiological Studies in Health and Nutrition at the University of Sao Paulo, coined the term “ultra-processed food” which has been variously defined to describe industrially produced edible substances formulated mostly or entirely from substances derived from commodities—such as sugars and oils.
The void of much, if any, actual whole food in UPFs is filled by compounds quite foreign to most home kitchens: high-fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated or inter-esterified oils, and hydrolyzed proteins, preservatives, flavors, flavor enhancers, colorings, emulsifiers, emulsifying salts, sweeteners, thickeners, and anti-foaming, bulking, carbonating, foaming, gelling and glazing agents, among others.
These food additives are combined with more familiar less-than-ultra-processed food ingredients such as sugar, oils, fats, salt, antioxidants, stabilizers, and preservatives.
Like the industrial ingredients that make up UPFs, the types of processing required to manufacture them—extrusion, molding, hydrogenation—are also foreign to household kitchens. By design, UPFs are hyperpalatable (to the point of being addictive), convenient, shelf-stable, and, importantly for the food industry, highly profitable.
From a nutrition and public health standpoint, none of this would be that big of a deal if UPFs didn’t dominate the United States food supply and if people didn’t eat much of them. But sadly, UPFs do dominate and people eat a lot of them.
According to GroceryDB, a database with over 50,000 food items sold by Walmart, Target, and Wholefoods, a whopping 73% of the US food supply is ultra-processed. The same dataset reveals that, on average, these foods are 52% cheaper than minimally-processed alternatives.
Little wonder, then, that these highly palatable, cheap, ubiquitous, industrial foods—as threatening to health as UPFs are (keep reading)—make up, on average, more than half of the calories Americans consume.
UPFs and health
An evaluation of evidence published this past February in the British Journal of Medicine describes several “associations between exposure to ultra-processed foods, as defined by the Nova food classification system, and adverse health outcomes.” The authors of this meta-analysis concluded that the greater one’s exposure to ultra-processed food (translation: the more one eats), the greater the risk of adverse health outcomes, such as mortality (now that’s adverse!), cancer, cardiovascular disease, depression, gastrointestinal disorders, and diabetes.
In one of the first studies to look seriously at the health impacts of diets rich in UPFs, researcher Kevin Hall and colleagues controlled the food intake of 20 adults in an inpatient setting. After two weeks on an ultra-processed diet followed (or preceded) by two weeks on a minimally processed diet, researchers found that study participants consumed more calories (508 ± 106 kcal/day)—through an increase in carbohydrate (280 ± 54 kcal/day) and fat (230 ± 53 kcal/day)—when on the UPF-rich diet. Participants gained nearly 2 pounds (± 10oz) during the ultra-processed diet and lost as much when on the unprocessed diet. Most people who have tried losing weight would be delighted with a steady loss of a pound a week.
UPFs and policy
In terms of changing the food system—one of my bold aims in writing Eat Right Here—UPFs relate to two important areas of food policy. One is the Dietary Guidelines for Americans and the other is the Farm Bill. New versions of both are currently under development.
The last version of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGA), published in 2020, was silent on the issue of the extent and purpose of food processing. Given the amount of nutrition research on UPFs published in the intervening years, I hope the current Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee makes a strong recommendation to the USDA and HHS—the two agencies charged with issuing the DGA—that the 2025-2030 Dietary Guidelines for Americans includes guidance on UPFs.
This won’t be easy. There is, as expected, strong pressure from the food industry to keep quiet about the health risks associated with UPFs. We can hope the committee will follow the science that increasingly shows that diets rich in ultra-processed foods are nutritionally unbalanced and harmful to health.
What our federal dietary guidelines say about UPFs really matters. For example, as the DGA make clear, the guidelines form the basis of Federal nutrition policy and programs (such as the school lunch program), they support nutrition education efforts, and guide local, state, and national health promotion and disease prevention initiatives. To the extent that these programs lead to lower UPF demand by individuals and public institutions, they have the potential to change the food system.
For more on problems associated with UPFs, industry pressure on scientific bodies like our Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, and creative approaches to controlling the dominance of UPFs worldwide, I highly recommend following Marion Nestle’s meticulous coverage on her blog, Food Politics.
The next Farm Bill (revised approximately every five years) is also currently in the works and has a major impact on the ubiquity, price and consumption of ultra-processed foods.
Let’s look at corn.
Our agriculture policies, long favoring corn production, have made the U.S. the world’s largest producer, consumer, and exporter of corn, the commodity used to make a common UPF ingredient: high-fructose corn syrup. Corn subsidies in the farm bill, help keep prices low for food manufactures and caloric sweeteners flowing freely from massive fields in the Heartland and into junk foods across America.
It turns out, though, that only a small fraction of corn grown on an estimated 90 million acres is used to make corn-based sweeteners. Over 40% of corn grown in America is used for ethanol, thanks in part to the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) established in 2005, and nearly 40% is used for animal feed.
The promised environmental benefits of corn ethanol have hardly been realized. A recent study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS) found that with the substantial expansion in corn production following the RFS (8.7 percent, 6.9 million acres, between 2008 and 2016), nationwide annual fertilizer use surged and water pollutants rose. Further, as Virginia Gewin writes in Civil Eats, “the sheer extent of domestic land use change, however, generated greenhouse gas emissions that are, at best, equivalent to those caused by gasoline use—and likely at least 24 percent higher.”
Putting food dollars to work
It's the U.S. corn system, as Jonathan Foley described in his 2013 piece in Scientific American, that we should focus on, since it “dominates American agriculture compared with other farming systems”. Further, the system exerts enormous costs to the environment and to public health. As Jules Pretty, author of the Agri-Culture: Reconnecting People, Land and Nature, put it, we pay for our food three times: first at the till or online, second through taxes to subsidize commodity production, and third to treat preventable diet-related diseases.
As I walk through the farmers market pavilion, I think about what every dollar I spend pays for. Since my money goes directly to a farmer, it supports her, those who help her on the farm and at the market, and helps feed her family. It supports farming practices that strive to provide environmental benefits, feed soil microbes and protect water quality.
Most importantly, money spent at farmers markets is a Declaration of Independence from a system that produces ultra-processed foods.
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*An indication, though not a guarantee. According to Kimberly Holland and Ariel Knutson writing for The Spruce, “Chickens can also get these foods without ever stepping foot into a big open pasture. Feed manufacturers can add these ingredients—marigolds and alfalfa are most common—to their product, and the chickens will in turn produce eggs with sunset orange yolks.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/04/well/eat/ultraprocessed-food-mental-health.html. The Link Between Highly Processed Foods and Brain Health.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/06/well/eat/ultraprocessed-foods-harmful-health.html. How Bad Are Ultraprocessed Foods, Really?
Another excellent post, Jennifer. It made me think about our fellow citizens who are enslaved by our industrial system of agriculture and ultra-processed foods. So many people have no choice, no independence. Think of those living in rural communities with easy access to a Dollar Store, but not to a farmers' market, or those who are institutionalized, for example. Whether in prison or a hospital, if price paid to the vendor is the only determining factor for "food" purchases, then the ultra-processed versions win out. How I wish we had a full-cost accounting method for truly communicating the "price" of our food. Thank you for the extensive research, time, and expertise you share with your readers (fans!).