As I discussed in last week’s post, The one question you need to ask yourself if you want to get healthy, I am fascinated to the point of outright obsession with the complex dynamics of behaviour change, and the role that beliefs play in our willingness to change – or the lack thereof.
One belief in particular can completely block people from even contemplating adopting healthier eating habits, and it’s one I mentioned in last week’s post:
“I will never find any other sources of pleasure or satisfaction in my life to replace the bad habit that’s undermining my health.”
Some people are quite aware that they hold this belief, and will even say it out loud. My own father told me that if the price of overcoming his type 2 diabetes was to give up his meat pies, ice cream and biscuits, he’d rather be dead. And before too long, tragically, he was.
Others are less conscious of believing it, but the struggle they experience whenever they attempt to give up their ‘vice’ reveals the truth. Deep down inside, they’re afraid they’ll never find anything that’s as pleasurable – or that numbs their pain as effectively – as the junk food that’s killing them.
If you think I’m being overdramatic when I say that junk food kills, think again. A study conducted in France and published just last month found that the more ‘ultraprocessed’ food that middle-aged and older adults ate, the higher was their likelihood of dying prematurely.
In fact, for every 10% increase in the proportion of overall energy (kilojoules/calories) intake derived from ultraprocessed foods in the diets of the nearly 45 000 French men and women aged 45 years and up who were included in this study, there was a 14% increase in all-cause mortality, or the risk of dying from any cause.
What exactly is ultraprocessed food? It’s defined by NOVA, an international food classification system, as “ready-to-eat or -heat formulations made mostly from ingredients [as distinct from actual food] usually combined with additives.”
Specifically, ultraprocessed foods usually contain multiple ingredients and are manufactured through a multitude of industrial processes. They are designed to be convenient (eaten as is, straight out of the package, or simply reheated), cheap, and hyperpalatable.
Their other key characteristics are sophisticated and attention-getting packaging, aggressive marketing – especially to children and adolescents, health claims that focus on particular ingredients (“high in protein”; “now with added calcium” and the like), high profitability, and branding and ownership by transnational corporations.
Examples of ultraprocessed food include:
- Carbonated drinks;
- Sweet or savoury packaged snacks such as chips;
- Ice-cream;
- Confectionery such as chocolate and sweets;
- Mass-produced packaged breads and buns;
- Margarines and spreads;
- Cookies and biscuits, pastries, cakes, and cake mixes;
- Ready-to-eat breakfast ‘cereals’;
- ‘Cereal’ and ‘energy’ bars;
- ‘Energy’ drinks;
- Milk drinks, ‘fruit’ yoghurts and ‘fruit’ drinks;
- Cocoa drinks such as Milo;
- Meat and chicken extracts and ‘instant’ sauces;
- Infant formulas, follow-on milks, and other baby food products;
- ‘Health’ and ‘slimming’ products such as powdered or ‘fortified’ meal and dish substitutes;
- Pre-prepared pies and pasta and pizza dishes;
- Fries;
- Poultry and fish ‘nuggets’ and ‘sticks’, sausages, burgers, hot dogs, and other reconstituted meat products; and
- Powdered and packaged ‘instant’ soups, noodles and desserts.
Or in other words, the foods that make up the bulk of what I see in the average shopping trolley… especially in families with children and teenagers!
As I mentioned in my article 99% of Aussie kids don’t eat enough vegetables – and their parents aren’t much better, the average Australian derives one-third of their daily energy intake from ultraprocessed foods, but among teenagers, it’s more than 40%.
And that’s a huge worry, because if eating ultraprocessed food in middle age can shorten your life expectancy, what is eating this stuff from an early age going to do to the health and longevity potential of our kids?
While the carefully-designed packaging and sophisticated marketing of these food products is cynically intended to hook kids’ attention at an early age, when they lack the discernment to distinguish between marketing hype and reality (mind you, plenty of adults still seem to struggle with this), the most addictive and destructive characteristic of ultraprocessed foods is their hyperpalatability.
What on earth is hyperpalatability? It’s a set of characteristics in food – primarily, concentrations of sugar, fat, and salt that are beyond those found in any whole, natural food – that essentially overrides our innate ability to recognise when we’ve had enough, and stop eating.
Hypopalatable foods actively discourage overeating. The secret of my friend Andrew ‘Spudfit’ Taylor’s success on his all-potato diet was that plain boiled potatoes aren’t that exciting… and that’s why he chose them to help him overcome his food addiction. He simply had no desire to eat more potatoes than were required to meet his energy needs. Vegetables in general are hypopalatable, when prepared simply and without seasoning – no matter how much you enjoy broccoli, you’re never tempted to eat 3 heads of it in one sitting.
Palatable foods occur in nature, are more energy-dense than hypopalatable foods and are tasty enough to make us want to moderately overeat them because in the food energy-poor setting of our ancestors, laying down a little extra body fat in seasons of abundance would help you survive seasons of scarcity. They do this by causing the release of brain chemicals that generate feelings of pleasure and reward. However, we have a complex range of mechanisms, called the ‘lipostat’, that help our brains sense how much body fat we’ve accumulated, so that our appetite will naturally decline and spontaneous activity will increase once we’ve packed on too many pounds.
Hyperpalatable foods are not found in nature, and by overstimulating the pleasure centres of the brain, they disable the mechanisms which normally allow us to experience ‘satiety’ – the sense of fullness or satisfaction that we get after we’ve eaten sufficient kilojoules and micronutrients – as well as sabotaging the lipostat.
As a result, hyperpalatable foods drive us to seriously overeat on them whenever they are available, sometimes even to the point of feeling physically ill, and to keep on overeating them no matter how much weight we gain (and how much health, vitality and self-respect we lose) from this unintended overconsumption.
Now does the nagging fear “I will never find any other sources of pleasure or satisfaction in my life to replace these foods that are undermining my health” make more sense to you? That’s the desperate cry of a brain that has been utterly hijacked by ultraprocessed foods.
Rescuing that hijacked brain takes time and work. There are three key components:
- Removing all hyperpalatable foods from the diet. The notion that these foods are ‘treats’ and that you ‘deserve’ them because you’ve worked hard/sweated at the gym/been under a lot of stress/whatever excuse you care to think of, is simply a false narrative that has been implanted in our collective unconscious by powerful multinational corporations who have their bottom line, not our health and happiness, in mind. There is simply no good reason to put anything in your mouth that undermines your health and well-being. Think about it – for how long did you feel good after you ate your last mouthful of ice cream? Did that packet of chips really make you feel better about your life? Did the fast food meal fix your broken relationship or make your boss less of a jerk? Of course not. All we’re doing when we eat these foods is anaesthetising our pain and distracting ourselves from what we actually need to do to improve our lives and reclaim our health.
- Commencing every meal with a large serving of hypopalatable foods, such as vegetables, prepared as simply as possible – for example, a platter of vegetable crudités, a salad with a dash of lemon juice or vinegar, or a plate of steamed vegetables, served without any sauce of salt. Less enticing than what you currently eat? Absolutely – that’s the point! After taking the edge off your appetite with your hypopalatable starter, you can follow up with more palatable foods such as seasoned rice and beans, baked vegetables or soup. I promise you that these foods will taste absolutely amazing after eating hypopalatable foods, because those foods set your ‘pleasure thermostat’ at a fairly low level, but you’ll have much less of a tendency to even moderately overeat the more palatable foods.
- Providing a healthy stimulus to the pleasure centres in your brain. Andrew Taylor brilliantly sums this up with his mantra,
“Keep your food boring, and your life interesting.”
Our brains are wired to derive untold pleasure from physical activity, social connection, intimacy in all its forms, and perhaps most importantly, from purpose-driven activities. I can’t sum this last point up any better than the formula for fulfilment that Tom Bilyeu shared on the Rich Roll podcast:
“Work your ass off to get very good at something that you care deeply about, that allows you to serve not only yourself but other people [and/or, I would suggest, animals or the environment].”
When our bodies receive the nourishing food, restorative sleep and appropriate activity that they need, our relationships are healthy and nourishing, and we feel ‘on purpose’ in our lives, there’s simply no need for the false fix of hyperpalatable foods.
If you put your efforts into having a life worth living, sooner or later you’ll discover that there are no foods worth dying for.
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