I love the United States of America (the nation and its ideals and history on balance, not the government).
In my personal life, I defend its most laudable aspects vigorously when it’s attacked abroad, which happens almost exclusively by self-styled “progressive” millennial Europeans, especially self-hating Germans and Britons, who believe themselves to be enlightened so as to be morally elevated above the fray.
With that caveat established, it’s with great regret that I look from afar at what has become of the United States in recent years, on multiple fronts, with the physical proportions of Americans at the top of the list.
Related: Emory Researchers Blame Black Diabetes Epidemic on White Supremacy
The sheer ratio of morbidly obese children to metabolically healthy children, which has only gotten worse since I left in 2016, shocks the conscience.
With the exception of Mexico, which also has a serious weight problem, the kids I’ve seen just aren’t nearly as fat abroad — although they’re getting markedly fatter in nearly all instances as formerly agrarian nations become more industrialized.
To the extent the children of the Third World are following in the footprints of their Western peers by ballooning into blimps, it’s in no small part the consequence of the exportation of sleazy fast-food chains like KFC and McDonald’s and other “ultra-processed” foods, the consumption of which must of the Third World views as a status symbol (whereas, conversely, these same entities are largely regarded as feeding troughs for poors in the United States).
(For anyone interested, these are themes that I explore at length in my expat memoir, "Broken English Teacher: Notes From Exile.”)
All that to say: diet is by far the top contributor to chronic disease. This is an indisputable fact that should be so obvious as to require no citation.
And the modern developed world’s is, to put it mildly, not good.
Via U.S. Right to Know (emphasis added):
“Ultra-processed food” describes food products that have been created or altered from their natural state with added sugars or artificial sweeteners, salt, additives, preservatives, or other chemicals. Added sweeteners in particular, including high-fructose corn syrup, sucralose, and aspartame, are common in ultra-processed food.
They also often contain additives and preservatives, like food dyes (including Red 40, Yellow 5, and titanium dioxide), sodium benzoate, sodium nitrate and sodium nitrite, brominated vegetable oil (BVO), potassium bromate, butylated hydroxyanisole (BHA), and butylated hydroxytoluene (BHT).
The potential adverse health effects of each of these common ingredients in ultra-processed foods — which often exist side-by-side on food labels by the dozens — could fill volumes on their own.
For the sake of brevity, let’s focus on just one.
High-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) was Frankensteined into existence by the multinational agricultural industry (an industrial outgrowth of the Industrial Revolution that mechanized and corporatized agriculture, not to be confused with the noble farmers and ranchers of posterity), specifically the Clinton Corn Processing Company, in 1967.
The FDA eventually slapped the “generally recognized as safe” label on it several years later (sound familiar?) and it was off to the races.
Because of the scalable nature of HFCS production and its relatively low production costs, it slowly made its way into virtually every processed food item produced by the industry.
Continuing via U.S. Right to Know:
Common ultra-processed groceries include cookies, sodas and energy drinks, fruit-flavored yogurts, margarine, packaged pastries, plant-based meats and milks, canned soups, frozen meals, sweetened breakfast cereals, granola and energy bars, hot dogs, deli meats, and potato chips.
Brands like Nestlé, PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, Unilever, Frito-Lay, Kraft Heinz, and Kellogg’s are among the world’s largest manufacturers of ultra-processed foods.
Objective analysis of American dietary habits shows quantitative increases in the consumption of “ultra-processed foods” and concurrent decreases in minimally processed food consumption, formerly called “food” over time.
Via The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition (AJCN) (emphasis added):
Adjusting for changes in population characteristics, the consumption of ultra-processed foods increased among all US adults from 2001-2002 to 2017-2018 (from 53.5 to 57.0 %kcal; P-trend < 0.001). The trend was consistent among all sociodemographic subgroups, except Hispanics, in stratified analyses. In contrast, the consumption of minimally processed foods decreased significantly over the study period (from 32.7 to 27.4 %kcal; P-trend < 0.001) and across all sociodemographic strata. The consumption of processed culinary ingredients increased from 3.9 to 5.4 %kcal (P-trend < 0.001), whereas the intake of processed foods remained stable at ∼10 %kcal throughout the study period (P-trend = 0.052).
Returning to HFCS, it’s not merely the fact that HFCS is a concentrated, synthetic carbohydrate devoid of any fiber (or any other nutrition) otherwise found in sugar-containing whole foods like fruits, which function to buffer processing in the digestive tract (which means the HFCS, unlike the fruit in sugar, goes straight into the bloodstream, skyrocketing blood sugar levels); it’s also the type of artificial sugar, fructose, and its response or lack thereof to insulin.
Via PLOS One (emphasis added):
Obesity has increased dramatically in recent decades, a phenomenon widely associated with the so-called ‘western diet’: energy-dense, highly palatable foods with high fat and sugar content. More recently, there has been an interest in the possible contribution of high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) to the rise in obesity. Used widely in nearly all commercial foods, from bread to beverages, HFCS consumption has risen in parallel with increasing body weights and rates of obesity. While evidence suggests links between increased sugar consumption and the rising prevalence of obesity and metabolic disorder, the contribution of HFCS per se, because of its higher fructose content, has been controversial with arguments for and against HFCS constituting a specific liability beyond increased sugar consumption generally.
HFCS-55, containing 55% fructose, 42% glucose, and 3% other saccharides, is primarily used in liquid product. Fructose, including HFCS with its higher fructose content, is more lipogenic compared to other sugars and is metabolized differently. Where glucose can enter the cells through GLUT4 (various tissues), GLUT3 (neurons), GLUT2 (homeostasis though uptake in intestine), and GLUT1 (astrocytes and insulin-independent), fructose primarily uses GLUT5, which is not found in pancreatic beta cells, is specific for fructose, and not responsive to insulin. GLUT2 also transports fructose non-selectively, though this low-affinity transporter is involved in transport primarily in the liver, intestine and kidneys.
“Not responsive to insulin” means that circulating fructose in the blood does not get shuttled into the cells by insulin in the same fashion as other natural forms of sugar, resulting in prolonged elevated blood sugar — not a good thing, as any diabetic can attest to.
The clinical studies on the obesogenic and metabolism-killing effects of HFCS in mammals (human and non-human) are legion.
Via Pharmacology Biochemistry and Behavior (emphasis added):
Rats maintained on a diet rich in HFCS for 6 or 7 months show abnormal weight gain, increased circulating [triglycerides] and augmented fat deposition. All of these factors indicate obesity. Thus, over consumption of HFCS could very well be a major factor in the “obesity epidemic,” which correlates with the upsurge in the use of HFCS.
Maybe at some point I’ll get around to the other “ultra-processed” food ingredients listed at the top of this article, like Red 40 or brominated vegetable oil.
Suffice it for now to say, as George Carlin once did in another context, “it’s all bad for ya.”
