A so-called nutritionist, hustling her way to a TIME magazine profile in the Social Justice™ niche of #bodypositivity (a lucrative scam if you can get the food industry to bankroll your nonsense) has some damning condemnation for proponents of whole foods.
Wilson describes herself in her Twitter bio as a “Queer. Black. Fat-positive dietitian.” (pronouns listed), so we can know we should definitely take her nutrition advice seriously.
Related: The Atlantic Spreads Pseudoscientific Myth That Ice Cream Is Healthy
Via Time (emphasis added):
Jessica Wilson is passionate about the pupusas from Costco. Not just because they’re tasty, but also because they’ve helped the California-based registered dietitian fight back against the mounting war on ultra-processed foods.
It all started in the summer of 2023, when author and infectious-disease physician Dr. Chris van Tulleken was promoting his book, Ultra-Processed People. While writing it, van Tulleken spent a month eating mostly foods like chips, soda, bagged bread, frozen food, and cereal. “What happened to me is exactly what the research says would happen to everyone,” van Tulleken says: he felt worse, he gained weight, his hormone levels went crazy, and before-and-after MRI scans showed signs of changes in his brain. As van Tulleken saw it, the experiment highlighted the “terrible emergency” of society’s love affair with ultra-processed foods.
Wilson, who specializes in working with clients from marginalized groups, was irked. She felt that van Tulleken’s experiment was over-sensationalized and that the news coverage of it shamed people who regularly eat processed foods—in other words, the vast majority of Americans, particularly the millions who are food insecure or have limited access to fresh food; they also tend to be lower income and people of color. Wilson felt the buzz ignored this “food apartheid,” as well as the massive diversity of foods that can be considered ultra-processed: a category that includes everything from vegan meat replacements and nondairy milks to potato chips and candy. “How can this entire category of foods be something we’re supposed to avoid?” Wilson wondered.
So pointing out scientifically verifiable facts, like that unprocessed food is better than processed food, is an act of “shaming” “marginalized” “communities,” which I’m sure this lady would like to see outlawed as a hate crime.
Continuing:
So she did her own experiment. Like van Tulleken, Wilson for a month got 80% of her daily calories from highly processed foods, not much more than the average American. She swapped her morning eggs for soy chorizo and replaced her thrown-together lunches—sometimes as simple as beans with avocado and hot sauce—with Trader Joe’s ready-to-eat tamales. She snacked on cashew-milk yogurt with jam. For dinner she’d have one of her beloved Costco pupusas, or maybe chicken sausage with veggies and Tater-Tots. She wasn’t subsisting on Fritos, but these were also decidedly not whole foods.
A weird thing happened. Wilson found that she had more energy and less anxiety. She didn’t need as much coffee to get through the day and felt more motivated. She felt better eating an ultra-processed diet than she had before, a change she attributes to taking in more calories by eating full meals, instead of haphazard combinations of whole-food ingredients.
No evidence, no citations — she just “felt better” eating like a trash compactor.
Relatedly, Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, the Biden White House’s nutrition advisor, in 2022, released a “Food Compass©,” according to which Lucky Charms are healthier than chicken.
It subsequently came out that the “doctor,” if that’s what we must call him rather than “big ag propagandist,” has had his university work funded by the following interests:
- Making the Case for a National Institute of Nutrition (Rockefeller Foundation)
- Defining Healthful Balance Carbohydrates (Nestle Global Headquarters S.A.)
- Global Dietary Database 2 (Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation)
