55% of American Calories Come From Ultra Processed Foods

Every once in a while, a piece of information so stunning comes across my desk that I have to sit back and really process what's being said. A new report has come out from the National Center of Health Statistics that says 55% of Americans calories eaten over the age of 1 is Ultra-Processed Foods.

It goes on to reveal that kids aged 1 to 18 eat a whopping 61.9% of their calories from UPFs and adults over 19 clock in at 53%. It also says low-income people eat more UPFs than higher income people and there's no measurable difference between men and women.

What's going on here? We have clearly taken our culture in a direction that isn't healthy and has caused problems that are growing and becoming extremely difficult to deal with as a society. We have already looked at sudies that show UPFs are linked to 30 different metabolic problems like cancer and Diabetes.

The most eye-opening book I've ever read on the subject was Salt, Sugar, Fat by Michael Moss where he went over how the tobacco companies, once they saw the writing on the wall about tobacco use going down, moved over to the processed food companies. They had teams of scientists working on ways to make food addictive and were willing to remove almost anything nutritional from our food in order to get us hooked.

They did this in a couple ways.

Stomach Space

They intentionally removed fiber from food to make it dissolve quickly in our stomachs. They wanted you to eat food that made us hungry again as quickly as possible so you constantly had to snack in order to feel satisfied. This is why the typical American diet is breakfast, snack, lunch, snack, dinner, snack before bed. No one feels full so people have to constantly eat.

Dopamine Hits

The next thing they did was engineering food that makes you happy. That rush of blood sugar that comes from eating food that instantly dissolves makes us feel good. Sugar was hard to come by in our evolutionary past, you either needed to fight bees to get honey or eat fruit that only ripened about 2 months out of the year. Sweet foods were universally safe to eat so we evolved to really enjoy them, They also helped us put on weight for the hard winter to come. Now scientists have taken those facts and engineered food that make us happy and cause us to gain weight but there's never a winter of small amounts of food to bring the weight back off. We just constantly get fatter.

Cheap Food

Since the Nixon administration we have subsidized crops like wheat and corn so we can produce UPFs for far cheaper than whole foods. We are paying tax money to make food cheaper, then paying more in welfare benefits to feed our people, then paying more to provide healthcare for all the problems UPFs produce. This is an issue that will eventually bankrupt our country.

So what do we do with this information. While I applaud MAHA for the work they are doing on a societal level, you need to take ownership of your diet for yourself. Stop eating these UPFs and switch over to a diet of whole foods, mostly meat. This is the only way to be able to deal with the problems these foods are causing and take control over your own health.