“Every day from breakfast to dinner you are consuming something that was engineered to be overconsumed,” says Monteiro. What all the foods share, Monteiro says, is that they are designed to displace freshly prepared dishes and keep you coming back for more, and more, and more. Or it might contain high levels of fat, sugar, and salt in combinations that aren’t usually found in whole foods. It could contain additives designed to make it hyper-palatable, or preservatives that help it stay stable at room temperature. It might be made using “industrial processes” like extrusion, interesterification, carbonation, hydrogenation, molding, or prefrying. There are a bunch of reasons why a product might fall into the ultra-processed category. And then there are ultra-processed foods. Then come processed culinary ingredients (oils, butter, and sugar), and after that processed foods (tinned vegetables, smoked meats, freshly baked bread, and simple cheeses)-substances to be used carefully as part of a healthy diet. Least worrisome are minimally processed foods, such as fruits, vegetables, and unprocessed meats. Monteiro created a new food classification system-called NOVA-that breaks things down into four categories. “We are proposing a new theory to understand the relationship between diet and health,” Monteiro says. It was the whole system: how the food was processed, how quickly we ate it, and the way it was sold and marketed. It wasn’t just ingredients that made a food unhealthy, Monteiro thought. But Monteiro wanted a new way of categorizing food that emphasized how products were made, not just what was in them. For more than a century, nutrition science has focused on nutrients: Eat less saturated fat, avoid excess sugar, get enough vitamin C, and so on. He thought that something fundamental had shifted in our food system, and scientists needed a new way to talk about it. But the nutritionist wasn’t satisfied with that explanation. If people eat too much unhealthy food, they put on more weight. By the late 2000s, his country was suffering with the exact opposite problem.Īt a glance, Monteiro’s findings seem obvious. When Monteiro first qualified as a doctor in 1972, he’d worried that Brazilians weren’t getting enough to eat. The share of biscuits and soft drinks in Brazilians’ shopping baskets had tripled and quintupled, respectively, since the first household survey in 1974. People were swapping traditional foods-rice, beans, and vegetables-for prepackaged bread, sweets, sausages, and other snacks. Brazilians hadn’t really cut down on fat, salt, and sugar-they were just consuming these nutrients in an entirely new form. If people were buying less fat and sugar, why were they getting bigger? The answer was right there in the data. Between 19 the proportion of Brazilian adults who were overweight or obese more than doubled. Despite this, people were piling on the pounds. In more recent surveys, Monteiro noticed, Brazilians were buying way less oil, sugar, and salt than they had in the past. The nutritionist had been poring over three decades’ worth of data from surveys that asked grocery shoppers to note down every item they bought. In the late 2000s, Carlos Monteiro noticed something strange about the food that Brazilian people were eating.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |