Transcription
60 Minutes overtime.
This week on 60 Minutes, we report on ultrarocessed foods. Those plastic wrapped, ready to eat items that line our grocery store shelves.
The United States has been exposed to something that our biology was never intended to handle: energy dense, highly palatable, rapidly absorbable, ultrarocessed foods that have altered our metabolism and have resulted in the greatest increase in chronic disease in our history. Type two diabetes, pre-diabetes, hypertension, abnormal lipids, fatty liver, heart attacks, stroke, heart failure.
David Kesler is the former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, and in the 1990s, he helped to expose the tactics that the tobacco industry was using. David Kesler is now turning his attention to ultrarocessed foods with highly processed ingredients like corn syrup and malttodextrin that Kesler says are making us sick and making us eat more. They target the brain reward circuits to keep us coming back for more. They, they trigger overeating. They deprive us of any sense of fullness.
Well, we have a national eating disorder. Um, and we know that because it's making us sick.
The granddaddy. Oreos.
We spoke with Michael Pollen, who is a food author, and he has been warning about factory processed foods for decades now.
Heart disease, stroke, diabetes, even dementia are linked to a bad diet. You know, 70% of Americans are either overweight or obese. So, it seems pretty clear there's something wrong with the way we eat. And all of those diseases you mentioned can be tied into our diet.
Yes, they can.
And there is a very interesting recent study that addresses this.
The most interesting significant study brought people to a a location where they had to live for a month, and for two weeks, uh, people had ultrarocessed food. They could have as much as they wanted, and the other group could have whole foods. And what he found is after two weeks, the people on the ultrarocessed food, they were eating 500 more calories a day. He hypothesized that it's energy dense. Every bite you're getting a lot more calories.
Pollen told us that many of these foods have been stripped of fiber, which makes us not feel so full and want to eat more.
There's a set of nutrients we evolve to love. Sugar is a great example. It's quick energy. So, we evolved to seek it out and to love it. And as long as it was rare and special, it wasn't a problem. But with the um, ubiquity of sweeteners now, u many of them derived from corn. Um, we, sugar is like the cheapest commodity going. You pick up a jar of canned tomato sauce, you will find sugar in it. Either high fructose corn syrup or one of the many forms in which sugar comes. And if you look for these labels, you will find it.
The Consumer Brands Association told us that the companies they represent innovate to meet consumer demand and adhere to FDA science and risk-based evaluation of ingredients before and after they are in the marketplace.
In 2009, Pollen wrote a bestseller called Food Rules: An Eaters Manual. It offers tips for maintaining a healthy diet. It's been turned into an illustrated version. One, eat food, not too much, mostly plants.
Yeah, that's my dietary guidelines.
And I wouldn't change, I wouldn't change anything. You know, if you can't pronounce the ingredients, it's not food.
Um.
Yeah. Something a third grader couldn't pronounce.
Right?
Don't eat anything you see advertised on television.
Yeah. So, the real food doesn't have a budget. Broccoli doesn't have an ad budget, whereas PepsiCo or, you know, Frito, you know, they have these huge ad budgets.
Changed your diet since you started?
Pollen told us if we embrace whole foods, the health benefits will follow.
What's the biggest, best change people could make?
One would be shopping the outside of the supermarket more than the inside. That's where the produce is. That's where the fresh food, the dairy is. It's all arranged on this outer loop. The stuff in the middle is the stuff that gets you into trouble. So, shop the perimeter. Have a home-cooked meal. You know, if you don't do it ever, have, do it once a week. If you do it once a week, do it twice a week.
A big question mark for many people is that these foods are just so convenient. You're able to feed your family for not so much money, and it's easy to prepare. So, asking people to give these up is a big ask. We have to make healthy food more affordable um without.
And how do we do that?
Well, we have to figure out a way to subsidize the healthiest calories coming off of the farm. And we should have a food policy. Does it contribute to the health of our population? Does it contribute to the health of the environment? If it doesn't, it's a bad policy. If it simply makes food cheap um, but achieves none of those other goals, it's, it's totally inadequate.