Is anything safe to eat?

Annoyed by scientists telling him that a great deal of ultra-processed food is not "unhealthy" by any reasonable standard, Chris van Tulleken has created a new system under which 99% of ultra-processed food is unhealthy. The only problem is that it makes nearly everything else unhealthy too.  

 

He and his co-authors, who include his sister-in-law Dolly, have created a new set of criteria based on dietary guidelines. The system is straightforward. If the government says sugar should not contribute more than 5 per cent of a person’s daily calorie intake, any product which contains more than 5 per cent of its calories from sugar is inherently unhealthy. Similarly, if the government says people should not get more than 35 per cent of their calories from fat, a product which contains 100 calories is unhealthy if more than 35 of those calories come from fat.

This makes a lot of sense and seems a perfectly logical way to define unhealthy food if you were born yesterday. For everyone else, it is blindingly obvious that people sometimes eat savoury food and sometimes eat sweet food and what matters is the total consumption of each nutrient over the course of the day. This is, of course, the whole problem with focusing on individual food items rather than on the overall diet, but the problem is exacerbated by this kind of dim literal-mindedness. 

 

Read the rest in The Critic. 

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