How processed and preserved foods have changed our tastes and waists over time
Recently, research has driven a more nuanced understanding of what’s behind over-eating, and shifting blame away from individuals’ “lack of will power” and more so onto food companies that highly process and engineer food to cause the same chemical reaction as substances like alcohol, drugs and tobacco. Shutterstock
By Erica Hensley and Jerry Mitchell
Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting
For years, retired pharmacist Judy Wolverton Palmer was addicted to peanut butter, digging into any jar she could find.
Judy Wolverton Palmer’s health problems began to vanish after she stopped eating sugar, gluten, dairy and beef. Courtesy of Judy Wolverton Palmer
She battled both weight and health issues, including chronic pain, skin issues, prediabetes, asthma and gastrointestinal problems.
Despite that, she remained fit, said the 63-year-old retired Mississippi native, who now lives in Lebanon, Tennessee. “I was able to hike six miles in the Rocky Mountains.” But that exercise came to a halt when her childhood asthma roared back in 2011, she said, and the other chronic illnesses — several fueled by the content of her food — worsened. “My husband would drop me off at the door of the hospital because I couldn’t walk from the parking lot.”
When a co-worker suggested it might be something she was eating, she saw a specialist in functional medicine. Tested for food allergies, she discovered she was allergic to sugar, gluten, dairy and beef.
She ditched all of them and went on a keto diet. Within three weeks, she had lost a dozen pounds. Within months, she had lost 50 pounds. “My health did a 180,” she said.
Her health problems began to vanish, her blood sugar levels fell into the normal range, and the prediabetes she had battled for two decades went away, she said.
She and many others suffer from food addictions because these ultra-processed foods activate hunger, she said. “Sugar and carbs like those in junk food light up the brain like cocaine or heroin.”
She now knows that this is exactly why the food industry adds sugar to things that don’t need it, such as ketchup and peanut butter. These days, she lives a low-carb lifestyle and uses natural peanut butter, which contains no sugar. As a result, she no longer dives into jars or craves carbs, she said. “I feel so much better.”
Though the term “food addiction” is still debated by scholars, research is increasingly catching up with, and aiming to reduce the stigma of, what was once only blamed as over-eating and often only relegated to evening church basement confessions at Weight Watchers meetings.
Folks are increasingly openly discussing Oreo addiction, seven-cans-a-day Diet Coke habits and how they have no self-control over pumpkin-spice flavors this time of year.
Over the past few years, research has driven a more nuanced understanding of what’s behind over-eating, and shifting blame away from individuals’ “lack of will power” and more so onto food companies’ that highly process and engineer food to cause the same chemical reaction, and addictive-like behavior, as substances like alcohol, drugs and tobacco.
After governments and physicians linked lung cancer to smoking, tobacco companies shelled out billions.
But with the twin epidemics of obesity and diabetes costing the U.S. $327 billion a year — more than cigarette smoking — experts are asking why the makers of the junk food and fast food that helped fuel these epidemics are getting off scot-free.
“In many ways to the brain, addiction is addiction. You can craft a drug to try to make it as addictive as you can and sure enough people use more and more of it,” said Lisa Renzi-Hammond, who researches cognitive and neurological development at the University of Georgia’s College of Public Health.
Lisa Renzi-Hammond Courtesy of the University of Georgia
“Food is no different. You can craft a food to appeal to our brain's desire for salts, sugar and fats — things that once upon a time promoted our survival. And the more you do, not surprisingly, the more people will eat. And they have gotten pretty good at it.”
Both smoking and eating hinge on behavior, and importantly experts say, brain chemistry changes, similar to substance use disorders, like drug, tobacco and alcohol addiction.
To our brains, the salt in a potato chip can be just as addictive as the nicotine in tobacco, and dosed and dispensed in ways to keep us coming back, says Renzi-Hammond.
Overall, Americans’ diets are filled with more ultra-processed food, such as frozen pizzas, breakfast cereals and energy drinks, than never before. And new research shows the trends are quickly escalating.
If that weren’t enough bad news, portion sizes have tripled since the 1950s, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And with it, calorie counts for side dishes have grown by a quarter in just the last three decades.
“Our food technology and food science has gotten incredibly good at making not very appetizing things taste like the best thing you've ever eaten. And over time, loading those things up with sugars and salts and things that are sort of intrinsically rewarding to our biology has created a generation of people who get more than one reward from eating those foods,” said Renzi-Hammond. “They get the really simple tastes that, you know, are instantly rewarding and then they get the convenience of time spent doing other things on a hectic day.”
From preservation to addiction
Over the last century, salt’s main use of keeping foods fresh for longer has passed the point of preservation. Alternative sugars have taken the place of table sugar in “diet” and “calorie-free” foods, marketed toward those trying to lose weight, that are jam-packed with other ingredients that actually increase hunger and cravings, stagnating, at best, and reversing, at worst, healthy weight goals.
For most of human history, famine was the status quo — nothing like our modern food choices. And our brains still use this standard. “Tastes of food signal certain important pieces of information to our brain,” Renzi-Hammond said. For example, when we taste sugar, our brain reacts positively: “‘That is energy, that will fuel your metabolism,’ so we are very well programmed to like sugar for very basic evolutionary reasons,” she said.
The same goes for salt. “It used to be currency, it was such a rare commodity, but so absolutely necessary for survival,” she said. “So our brains are really programmed to like these things because liking them for the vast majority of human history has meant surviving.”
Today, with the confluence of convenience, price and food engineering, humans are ingesting more salt and sugar than ever before. And the negative health effects have followed and become cyclical, says Dr. Rick deShazo, former chair of the Department of Medicine at University of Mississippi Medical Center, who now teaches at the University of Alabama’s medical school.
“It’s all a vicious cycle of socio-economic factors, including poverty and low health literacy, which lead to obesity, which leads to diabetes and heart disease, which leads back to poverty,” deShazo said. “The problem generates its own continuum because of the disability that is generated by the obesity.”
Multiple producers and agencies supply the Lexington Food Pantry on Oct. 27, 2021, in Lexington, Miss., with goods to distribute monthly to residents of Holmes County. Sarah Warnock/MCIR
And within that generation cycle, our eating and drinking habits have created their own biological feedback loop, according to a new study from the Journal of the American Medical Society. When folks who are trying to lose weight reach for a diet soda, they might instead be triggering additional cravings, instead of satiating them.
Sugar substitutes in diet sodas — often marketed as a healthier alternative — might actually drive further high-calorie cravings and cause folks to eat more processed food, especially women with obesity, the study found. Like substance use disorders with drugs and alcohol, not all food ingredients trigger the same responses, and some folks are more susceptible. Highly processed foods, by design, tend to have more addictive-like qualities.
Similarly, salt consumption is so high in the U.S. that the Food and Drug Administration recently penned federal goals to reduce consumption by 12%. Currently, Americans consume 3,400 mg of sodium per day — almost all of it from packaged and processed foods, not the salt shaker at home — which far outpaces the national nutrition standard of 2,300 mg a day, about a teaspoon of salt.
And for processed meats — everything from sandwich meat to raw packaged chicken — the U.S. uses more sodium than nearly every other country, only behind China. Too much salt itself can lead to dangerous chronic conditions, like high blood pressure and heart disease. But, too, salt is often the vehicle for higher carb and fat intake, such as potato chips, processed meats and canned food.
“We need to get to a place as a nation where we not only react to health scares but work hard to prevent them. That requires thinking about the food we eat – or, better put, the food we don’t. With FDA’s new recommendations, we get one step closer to improving health outcomes,” said Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra in a press statement about the targets.
The new FDA goals take specific note of children, whose food-related health effects have come into stark relief over the last decade. The number of new Type 2 diabetes cases among adolescents has nearly doubled since 2001 and those numbers are expected to quadruple by 2050.
More than 95% of 2- to 13-year-olds get more salt than they should, according to the FDA. But because most of that comes from packaged, processed and restaurant foods, kids and even parents often aren’t aware of how much they’re consuming. So, experts say, the onus is on the producers.
Dr. Tobe Momah, family practitioner at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, says childhood obesity is multi-pronged, but it all comes back to education and early intervention.
Dr. Tobe Momah Courtesy of UMMC
“It’s economical, it’s psychological, it’s social, it’s medical and it’s physiological,” he said, noting that in Hinds County where he practices, 20% of residents are food-insecure. He adds that many of his adolescent patients live with their grandparents, who often have their own health issues and don’t have the bandwidth to ensure healthy eating habits.
Health literacy is a big barrier to reducing obesity and improving health outcomes, and often doctors don’t have the time to dig into behavior change with patients, or they use language that’s hard to understand, Momah says.
“We need to tell them in a clear, understandable way. In medicine, we make our discussions very esoteric and we tell them about labels and calorie count,” he said. “But you have to bring education to the bare minimum,” he said, adding that he tells his patients — often directly to the children — plainly, just avoid sodas, juice and fried food.
He says a lot of this lack of health literacy comes down to time, and how doctors are paid.
“For years the medical community has been in a shell because they give you 15 minutes to see a patient and you're supposed to address everything in that time. By the time the patient is settled and ready to open up, it’s time to go.” To change that, he says the federal government and insurance companies need to reward quality, not quantity. Though the Affordable Care Act began the transition from fee-for-service to value-based care, the old model still dominates medical reimbursements.
“I'm an advocate of talking to them one-on-one eyeball to eyeball. I'm an advocate of writing it down on a piece of paper. I'm an advocate of asking them before they leave, if they have any questions,” Momah said. “It all comes down to education, education, education.”
Dr. Janet Woodcock
Official portrait
Even if education and diet changes take time, producers could immediately make a major dent in salt intake. “Changes across the overall food supply will make it easier to access lower-sodium options and reduce intake even in the absence of behavior change,” said Dr. Janet Woodcock, acting commissioner of the FDA, about the new targets.
But the recommendations are just that — voluntary — though experts say it’s a step in the right direction and similar targets have helped reduce salt intake in the U.K.
Nutrition expert Renzi-Hammond agrees, and says consumers have more power than they often realize and can use their dollars to push companies to be responsive.
But she adds, access is everything. In places without healthy food options — like the 20% of Mississippi that qualifies as food insecure, the most of any state — that autonomy and empowerment to force healthy change can often dry up.
“If you live in a place where you don't have access to readily available, reasonably priced food … for a lot of people, food is whatever is sold at the gas station and it is by default going to be heavily processed.”
Drugstores have a bigger corner of the food market than grocers like Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods, and for many constitute their closest access to a food store. But despite their one-stop-shop convenience, these places don’t have fresh food. In 2017, CVS held a 3.9% share of the grocery market and Walgreens had 2.4%, according to The Guardian, compared to Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s, which had 1.4% and 1% respectively.
Renzi-Hammond goes further to say what we get for convenience are more “abdomen fillers” than actual food. Food — that provides nutrition — shouldn’t have a ton of ingredients, she says, or even a label. Not only are we not getting necessary nutrition and raising our risk for chronic health problems, like heart disease and diabetes, we’re also getting stuck on a dangerous loop.
“If you pluck a tomato from the vine, you don't see a little tag hanging from it that says this is made for 50% artificial tomato products,” she said.
At the intersection of food insecurity and convenience dictating our food choices, our brains are changing to crave even more, creating a cycle that’s hard to break, experts warn.
Volunteers with Lexington Food Pantry distribute supplies Oct. 27, 2021, in Lexington, Miss., provided by Mississippi Food Network to residents of Holmes County. The pantry’s mission is to improve the health and wellbeing of residents of Lexington and surrounding communities by providing access to healthy food, nutrition, and cooking education. Sarah Warnock/MCIR
Dr. Momah, at UMMC, reiterates that expanding healthy eating options and educating the public have to take priority to change obesity trends. “Repetition brings remembrance, and that can be harder with kids, but I still encourage us to give it our best shot because if we don’t, we’ll have an epidemic of pandemic proportions with children in the next 20 years,” he said. “We know the cost and medical implications of obesity, and every medical problem has its roots in obesity.”
“Our food safety net in the U.S. saves an awful lot of lives every year, but I think we can do better — I think that we can start thinking about the quality of the nutrients as well,” Renzi-Hammond said, adding the onus is on educators, health care providers and companies to do better. But she also points to the government that subsidized more than $55 billion SNAP benefits in 2019.
“The fact that we have a food safety net at all is really great. But, think of how much money we're willing to spend on a new bomber. If that were directed toward providing every American with high quality food, what a thing that would be.”
Email Jerry.Mitchell@MississippiCIR.org.
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This story was produced by the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting and funded in part by the Fund for Investigative Journalism. It was also produced in partnership with the Community Foundation for Mississippi’s local news collaborative, which is independently funded in part by Microsoft Corp. The collaborative includes MCIR, the Clarion Ledger, the Jackson Advocate, Jackson State University, Mississippi Public Broadcasting and Mississippi Today.
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