Hidden dangers in modern foods
Uncovering what's really in the foods on our supermarket shelves
This 7NEWS Spotlight investigation is well worth a look. It explores what’s really in some of the foods on our supermarket shelves and experts say that Aussies are consuming far more ultra-processed food than they realise.
If you don't have time to watch the whole thing, I've pulled out some extracts below that highlight the main points.
They're not foods in the sense of a traditional food that we would have that's unprocessed or minimally processed. If you think like a fruit or a vegetable or … a piece of meat, an egg, something that hasn't been broken down, it's in its original state.
I've seen it referred to as industrially produced edible substances.
When the product itself is broken down, it doesn't look anything like a real food. So, you end up with a powder essentially.
Why do we call it food? I think it's just because it's sold in grocery aisles and it's sold as a food. In so many cases, real food broken down to powder and oils rebuilt with industrial colourings, flavourings, emulsifiers, and enough salt, sugar, and fat to keep you hooked. Not all ultra-processed foods are as bad as others, but many, when eaten everyday, can have devastating effects.
People assume that because it looks in terms of its actual physical shape like a food that it must have some type of nutritional benefit and that's the key issue that people aren't aware of the real potential risks.
Well, what you're describing is really a Frankenstein sort of food.
It's the sheer volume of these things that makes it so difficult these days. Back in the 60s when your parents or your grandparents were shopping in Australia, there was just 400 packaged products to choose from.
Today, shoppers have 50,000 of these things to work their way through, and you can't help but feeling overwhelmed. Your cheese slice that you're putting in your child's sandwich, they are ultra-processed. They've been formulated in a lab. They've gone under extensive testing to make sure they're palatable, that they last long, and they've often replace real ingredients with artificial ones to reduce the manufacturing cost for the brand.
Australian-led research into the data of nearly 10 million people linked diets heavy in ultra-processed foods to more than 30 separate conditions. Heart disease, type 2 diabetes, anxiety, depression, and a greater chance of dying early of any cause. The more of them you eat, the higher your risk.
If you pick up a packet of most ultra-processed products and you look at it, there'll be a list of multiple ingredients, multiple flavorings, multiple colorings. We have no idea of how they're interacting or what the accumulative effect if we were eating that product multiple times through the day are going to lead to or cause us. We have no idea of what that effect is of these industrial ingredients, emulsifiers and the additives and these industrial chemicals. And you don't know how they're going to interact together in in one person's gut.
This is one of the key issues we have with the way the industrial ingredients that are added to our food supply are currently regulated. So at a global level, they're evaluated by different agencies around the world, one chemical at a time. And so they go and test these chemicals, assuming that you and I will be consuming that one ingredient.
Do they test the chemicals on humans? No, they do animal studies.
…but the key issue is that they come from the industry that's making them.
this is where why we're seeing these incidents of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease be more prevalent than ever and particularly in children now. It's doubled in the last 10 years.
…teachers in the classroom say they can see how the the lunchbox correlates to behaviour.
Consumers are always talking about how confusing the labels are. Well, why would that be in why would we intentionally want to be doing that? Well, because currently the companies know that consumers are worried about their products, particularly the chemical additives cause they know that they're not well regulated. And so the idea is to put a lot of stuff on the package to keep us wondering.
But those companies were trained and owned by an industry universally decrieded as evil. be tobacco.
The idea was we have R&D over here that we've been using to make cigarettes. Let's make food with it.
They took everything they learned about selling a packet of cigarettes and applied the same sort of science to ultra-processed food….Little wonder we're addicted to ultra-processed foods.
tobacco companies were using the chemical additives they developed for cigarettes and huge amounts of added sugar to make food products as addictive as smoking. They're packing as much sugar as they can into these products because it's what lights up the reward system in the brain. And that's part of the mechanism for instilling brand loyalty. And it really comes down to leveraging this dopamine system in the brain. Today we know that these companies are using brain imaging technologies to design products that ultra-processed foods were born of big tobacco is scary enough. All of that R&D, all of the proprietary knowledge, all the chemical additive patents went with those brands and seeded the world's food supply products that are irresistible and harm health. But what's even worse, just as the cigarette companies tried to hook kids with flashy marketing and cartoon characters like Joe Camel, ultra-processed foods are being sold with the same lure.
Are you saying they they took everything they learned about selling a packet of cigarettes and applied the same sort of science to ultra-processed foods? They did, and they were able to do a lot of market research on on children and mothers. and understand basically what they were looking for as consumers. And so with children's they would have cartoon characters with some of their products. So they're very clever in terms of what they were trying to do with their marketing.
Australia is one of the most nannied countries on earth and we employ an endlessly ballooning number of people here in Canberra to tell us basically how to live. Now, we understood when cigarettes went to $60 and the packets themselves became an absolute horror show. But what about the foods designed by the same big tobacco companies to also be addictive? Apparently, we're on our own. You see, we're being poisoned by ultra-processed foods and yet, the people who could do something about it pass the buck on to the victims.
According to Professor Nick Chartress, Australia's current health star rating system for food, far from informing consumers, is in fact a deception by the food industry.
So this the health star rating system that we have, does that work to protect us? Not at all. The fact that we have a star rating system, healthstar rating system, and it was co-opted and co-developed by the food industry speaks volumes to the amount of influence it has, we need completely independent, non-financially conflicted people making decisions around what our food system looks like.
An example they show is the breakfast cereal “MILO” which has…
Four stars. That looks potentially good. And you can look at the front of the pack. It says it has essential vitamins and minerals, whole grain ingredients, source of fibre, no artificial colors or flavors. So that sells and there is someone playing a sport. So you would associate this with a healthy active lifestyle.
Yeah. And it says whole grain number one ingredient. Yes. But when we look at the ingredients list, we can see that's definitely an ultra-processed food. It contains you know here things like malttodextrin, emulsifiers, we have flavors um as well. So this is an example of ultra processed foods with four stars.
So let's see how the health star rating system can be gamed. I've come up with a cereal and just for the exercise, let's call it Bartlett's breakfast. The calculator asks for the energy per 100g. And the numbers I'll put here are those of a very popular brand. It has very little saturated fat, but a whopping six teaspoon of sugar in every 100 g, plus a pinch of salt. At this point, we look at the calculator, and I have two stars. Now, watch what happens when I toss in a little fiber and 21.8 g of protein. Both just additives, of course, never mind any fruit, veggies, nuts, or legumes. Fibre and protein have boosted us up to four stars. And there's nothing that takes into account those additives or processing. And yet this is the system encouraging Australians to make better choices endorsed by our regulators and partly designed by industry.
the health impacts from ultra-processed foods have hit crisis point.
In somewhere like South America, the foods that we have four or five stars on would have a warning label on them. Yeah. And so they should. So should ours. But we don't because it's a voluntary system. Industry plays a role.
We don't tell the consumer that this is full of sugar. It's full of fat. It's full of salt. It's full of other things that are no good for you. We don't. We put a star on it and we're led by that. We see that and oh must be good for us.
the true cost of the products, we're spending $270 billion a year on our health bill in this country. So there's an extra cost that comes after eating those products, but that's never talked about.
…the reality is that most Australians will continue to fall victim to the ploys and marketing of big food with little in the way of protection.
“Childrens have changed. Children used to be small, happy, running around, playing. Now they're overweight. They have disease. I have kids with diabetes.
I have kids with arthritis. I have kids with fatty liver. And these are kids that haven't even started high school yet.” Well, I blame the industry for knowing what they know and still doing it. They know what they're doing. They know what they're formulating. They know that it's not great for kids. And then they go out there and they market it as great...
what I think most people aren't aware of is how much effort has gone in to making it almost impossible to resist some of those foods. So, I don't think anyone's deliberately going out to make children sick or make people sicker. It's just a symptom of this industry we've set up where people want to make money. They want to please shareholders and so they'll do whatever they can to enhance their foods. But unfortunately, we're seeing the true cost of that happen right around the world.
Unlike tobacco manufacturers, makers of ultra-processed foods aren't forced to protect children in any way.
What what happens if we if we do nothing?
We become sicker. We become more overweight and we have greater and greater health care costs. And so the Australian population are going to suffer both physically but also we're going to suffer financially unless we address this. Now the evidence is unequivocal now. These products cause huge amount of harm to the population.
Children cannot protect themselves from these products. They are addictive and they came largely from the tobacco industry and so we should be thinking about them as tobacco products and if the government doesn't do that then they're not protecting the population's health like they should be.
As a dietitian, my number one priority is people’s health and the reality is that as life gets busier, many of us are relying more heavily on packaged and ultra-processed foods because of their convenience. We also rely on things like the Health Star Rating to help us make quick decisions in the supermarket, assuming that a product with more stars must be a healthier choice.
But what this investigation highlights is what’s lurking behind those convenient choices is a food industry that is ultimately driven by profit, with products designed to be highly appealing, easy to overconsume and very, very profitable.
It’s worth taking a look in your own pantry and fridge and noticing how much of what’s in there would be considered ultra-processed.
Then ask yourself is there a simple swap I could make? Is there a less processed version of this or a way of easily swapping it for something else that would be healthier?
Small changes over time can lead to better health outcomes — and our health is something we often take for granted and don’t think much about until things don’t seem to be working as they should.
You can’t control everything that happens to you, but you can influence it through the everyday choices you make.
And before you start to think that these foods really do control whether you eat them or not, remember that you always have free will. Nobody is making you buy or eat these foods. You are always choosing to do that.
And if you still think you’re addicted, read this.