Photo: 123RF
The marketers of ultra-processed foods have taken a leaf out of the tobacco industry’s playbook to make their foods more addictive
It’s not a secret how bad ultra-processed foods (or UPFs) are for our health.
Not only do they come with a long list of ingredients, many of which are numbers not names, but they also come with a long list of serious health risks.
Obesity, heart disease, depression and cancer are just a few examples of the many conditions that have been linked to eating high amounts of UPFs.
So why is it so hard to give them up?
Senior Research Fellow in Population Health at the University of Auckland Dr Kelly Garton says we can look to another industry with a long history of addiction issues for the answer.
“Evidence has shown that many ultra-processed foods companies, particularly in the US, borrowed strategies that they learnt from the tobacco industry to engineer these products to optimise the doses of those elements and optimise the speed of delivery to drive an addictive response.”
New research from the University of Auckland has revealed some of the ways in which companies design and market these foods – all with the motive of making us come back for more.
The research explains how UPFs play into human biology and nature to get us hooked and not let go.
“They’re really designed to heighten the reward signals that we experience when we’re eating them. They give really fast delivery of ingredients that reinforce these feelings and they’re made to drive compulsive eating so once you start it’s hard to stop.
“And then they disrupt the body’s signalling. For example, signalling that we have had enough, that we are full in a way that disrupts our ability to regulate our appetite,” says Garton.
One way that companies design these foods to be addictive is through strong combinations of different macronutrients, in particular refined carbohydrates and fats, to help us reach the maximum ‘bliss points’.
“They’re delivered quickly in the body because industrial processing breaks down the food matrix. So, it strips things like fibre, protein and water from the products and those are things that normally slow down our digestion. So, we get a quick hit of reward that then fades quickly so that leads to us wanting more, sort of creating that addictive response.”
Even the sound is enticing.
Photo: Unsplash / Emiliano Vittoriosi
But not only is it the way these foods make us feel that entices us to indulge in our desires, it’s also the sound.
“The sound of the crunch that you get from biting into a potato chip, that has been heavily researched by a company and optimised to get a sound that really gives us sort of a dopamine hit or reward hit of what we’re expecting to consume.”
It’s no surprise that these foods are consistently in our trolleys. Seventy percent of packaged foods that sit on our supermarket shelves are ultra processed and in the last three decades New Zealand’s imports of UPFs have gone up from an average of 16 kilograms per person to over 100.
Garton says that she’s “tired of hearing the narrative of personal responsibility and personal blame”.
“[This research] proves that having a diet in ultra-processed foods is not because of weak will power or ‘we just have to educate people better and they’ll make better choices’. No, it’s a system that is designed to make us consume more than we would otherwise and to make us continue to eat more.
“This really needs to be disrupted.”
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