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The Plant Centered and Thriving Podcast
Welcome! If you're looking for plant-based inspiration, you've come to the right place! This podcast is here so you don’t have to feel alone on your plant-based journey. You'll hear from individuals who have taken the leap to go plant-based, why they did it, the struggles they faced, their words of wisdom for you, and how they're thriving now.
The Plant Centered and Thriving Podcast
Podcast Finale: Navigating the US Food System with Mel Weinstein: How to Make Healthy Choices Amidst Ultra-Processed Temptations
"We have the freedom to choose what we eat."
Mel Weinstein, joins me today to dissect the truth behind ultra-processed foods. His expertise, captured in his written work and podcast, aims to demystify the additives that shape America's fast-food empire and our grocery store shelves.
Have you ever wondered what goes into your favorite packaged snacks that make them so irresistible? We examine why these concoctions captivate our taste buds and how they're engineered to do so, often at the cost of our health. The revelation of the commercial food industry's motive to prioritize shelf stability and uniformity over nutrition underscores the urgency of making informed choices. The curtain is pulled back to reveal some shocking facts about our food system in the US.
Resources from this Episode:
"Fast Food Ingredients Revealed" Book
"Could ultra-processed foods be the new 'silent killer'?" Article
FDA Substances List
If you want to connect with Mel, visit the following:
Website: FoodLabelsRevealed.Com
Podcast: Food Labels Revealed
Facebook: Prophet of Processed Food
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Plant Centered Nutrition Essential Resources:
Welcome to the Plant-Centered and Thriving Podcast. I'm your host, ashley Kitchens. I'm a plant-based registered dietitian and virtual nutrition mentor. I was raised on an Angus cattle farm, grew up with a lot of GI issues and used the power of plant-based eating to promote healing. Here you'll find inspiration, ideas and encouragement for your own plant-based journey. I'm so thrilled you're here today. Let's get started. Welcome to the show Plant-Centered Listener. My name is Ashley and I am your host today.
Speaker 1:And today's episode, or at least the intro, is going to be a little bit different from what you're used to, because this intro comes with an enthusiastic and a heavy heart that I share. Some important news about our podcast moving forward as we go into this episode. It also marks a pause, a moment of reflection and a hiatus for our beloved show. So first I want to talk about the why, the reason behind our decision when I say our, I mean Katie, who's my amazing co-host and I's decision to take a break. Life as it has it, you know, it has its way of doing its own thing and it has pulled me and my amazing team in different directions. The demand of other areas in my life and business are calling for a bit more attention, leading me to simplify my life and business operations, which means taking a pause with the podcast. Also, my lovely podcast editor and co-host, katie, is pursuing other passions and we both fully support this new chapter. I'm very excited for her.
Speaker 1:Looking back, I will say I am incredibly overwhelmed with pride for how far this podcast has come, and I have you to thank for it. We've had almost 300,000 downloads. This is our 164th episode and we've had listeners in 142 countries all across the world, which is amazing. These numbers are more than just stats. They are a testament to the dream we turned into reality almost three years ago and the amazing community that we've built together. And again I just want to thank you. Each download truly marks a story. We've shared a conversation about the transformative power of plant-based eating and the lives that they've touched and changed, and I am just so incredibly grateful. The future of the podcast is uncertain at this time. I'm not sure when or if we'll be back on the airwaves, on the show, in your earbuds.
Speaker 1:This space was born out of a dream. I really had thought about starting this podcast for years and it finally happened about three years ago. And we have celebrated so many milestones over the past three years and, primarily, just being able to share success stories of people who have changed their lives with plant-based eating. So I'm immensely proud and forever grateful, and to you, our listener, I hope these stories have inspired you as much as they have inspired me. Your support, your engagement and the community we've created together has been the heartbeat of this show and again, I'm just so, so thankful. Saying thank you really just doesn't quite capture the depth of my gratitude, but from the bottom of my heart, thank you for tuning in, for sharing these episodes and for being part of this incredible journey. Although we're pressing pause for now, the stories, the conversations and the impact we've made continue to resonate. I encourage you to revisit past episodes, share them with friends and family and to continue the conversation about the power of plant-based living in whatever way feels best to you. In closing, this really is not goodbye, because you know where to find me I'm on social media but it's more of a see you later, at least for now, with the podcast, the world is filled with stories that need to be told and voices that need to be heard, and I hope, in one way or another, we can continue to all be a part of those narratives and I hope, in one way or another, we can continue to all be a part of those narratives. So with today's episode, I've actually been excited to share this episode with you for probably a month now.
Speaker 1:If you like to nerd out over nutrition, this episode is for you. I want to introduce you to Mel Weinstein, who has a master's in organic chemistry. Mel Weinstein, who has a master's in organic chemistry. He is a former chemistry educator and retired research analytical chemist for a global food ingredient company. Are your ears perking up? Do you know which direction we're going in? Mel's mission is to share knowledge that he has gained over the past 20 plus years about the commercial food industry.
Speaker 1:Research continues to show that the rising rates of chronic diseases like type two diabetes, heart disease and other lifestyle diseases is linked to many things, including the overconsumption of ultra processed foods, which are often comprised of synthetic additives. At the end of 2022, mel published a book called Fast Food Ingredients Revealed what are you eating? This book arose from topics discussed on his monthly podcast called Food Labels Revealed, which first aired in 2016. The book that he wrote is really the first of its kind. It delves into the basic ingredients found in the menu items of three iconic American fast food restaurants, which is pretty fascinating. These ingredients are categorized by their degree of industrialization and how, far from quote nature or natural, the food has evolved. The book also discusses how some countries which the US is not one of them, and how they are using front of package labeling to help their citizens make healthier food choices.
Speaker 1:We talk about what an ultra processed food actually is. We talk about the Food and Drug Administration's role in approving or denying new additives, which I found particularly mind blowing. We also talk about what does natural flavors actually mean on an ingredients list, because I know that you've had that question. I still have that question. I'm like, okay, well, what actually is this? And so much more. So I hope you find this episode as fascinating as I did. I really want you to take care and keep making a difference and never underestimate the power of a plant-based lifestyle to change the world. Please join me in welcoming Mel to the show. Mel, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for being here today.
Speaker 2:I will enjoy this interview a lot. I like to talk about this stuff.
Speaker 1:Yes, yes, I know you're a perfect person to talk about this, so I'm curious, just to kind of get us started, mel, after really a couple decades as an analytical chemist in food ingredients and a multitude of things, what really sparked your curiosity about the impact of all the processed foods processed foods, industrial foods, I guess, in general on our health?
Speaker 2:Well, it took a long time for me to concentrate on that. You know, when I was younger I didn't give a hoot about what I ate, you know, as long as it tasted good. I had a big sweet tooth. I enjoyed lots of different candies and desserts and things like that. So as I was growing up there was nothing to kind of point me in that direction. But once I decided to become a chemistry major and then I became a chemistry teacher, I got started to get more interested in what was actually in foods and I wound up actually teaching a couple of classes that dealt with that subject in terms of consumer chemistry, and those are the kinds of questions that were raised in those courses what's in our environment, what's in the kitchen, what's in the foods that come from commercial companies? So I did develop an interest, probably in my mid-20s, in that area and then, after I stopped teaching, I taught for about 10 years and I went into industry as an analytical chemist and did that, as you mentioned, for 20 years.
Speaker 2:Here I found myself confronted with the actual ingredients that were going into commercial foods, because the company I worked for it's called Tate Lyle, out of England. It did not make any foods that were sold directly to consumers. They prepared additives from primarily corn and soybeans that were sold to the commercial food companies to put into their foods. So on that end of it, I definitely saw the industrial side of food preparation and particularly a host. You know dozens, if not hundreds, of additives that went into commercial foods. So it was at that point I started to ask questions Okay, what were these things? Were they impacting our health? Should I be avoiding them? So that's really when my interest in what winds up in commercial foods developed.
Speaker 2:So I was probably at that point in my 40s. So it took a long time, you know, for me to start asking questions about what winds up in commercial foods. And then it was even later when I started my podcast, which was in 2016,. It's called Food Labels Revealed. That I started digging deeper into questions of okay, how does the consumption of a diet rich in commercial foods, particularly ultra processed foods, affect our health? And then, a couple of years ago 2022, I was working on my book, which is called Fast Food Ingredients Revealed. And that's when I started digging deeper in terms of researching what were the notable health issues associated with eating diets that's very high in ultra-processed foods and I came across dozens of research studies taken together really pointed to the hazards associated with consuming a diet like that and I put that at the end of my book in a chapter that kind of summarized some of the most recent and important studies that have been done.
Speaker 1:And I appreciate that there's more and more research coming out showing the effects of eating a diet high in ultra processed foods on our health and amongst many other things. So it's just kind of neat to see that that research is coming out more and more and more and hopefully we learn some things from it in the meantime.
Speaker 2:Can I share with you just a recent article that I came across?
Speaker 1:Please yes.
Speaker 2:And this is dated February 20th of this year, so very current. I'll just read you the title and the summary, because I think it's really pointing directly to what we're talking about here. So this is out of Florida Atlantic University. The title is Could Ultra Processed Foods Be the New Silent Killer? Are now found in nearly 60% of the average adult's diet and nearly 70% of children's diets in the US. An emerging health hazard is the unprecedented consumption of these ultra-processed foods in the standard American diet. This may be the new silent killer, as was unrecognized high blood pressure in previous decades. Wow, I thought that was kind of telling.
Speaker 1:Yes, very telling, very timely too. I'm actually curious, mel, if you wouldn't mind defining what ultra-processed foods are, because we know those are a bit different from mechanically processed foods. Just so that we're all aware of what those are.
Speaker 2:The word ultra-processed actually is fairly new. It goes back, I think, to around 2009. There was a professor out of the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil His name is Monteiro Carlos Monteiro, and he's done a lot of research into the effects of industrial foods on human health, and so he coined that word and now everybody uses it. Right, it didn't take all that long for that to become just very common in our language. And it's an important word, because if you just talk about processed foods, to me the word processed is very generic. It doesn't have a whole lot of meaning, because you could take a piece of fruit, let's say, and give it a good washing, clean off the dirt, make it presentable to somebody who wants to eat it, and that's really a processed food. Yes, it's lightly processed, but it's really important to distinguish foods that have very little processing versus ones that have a lot of processing. So that's where the word ultra-processed comes in. Dr Montero actually developed a classification system called NOVA that's N-O-V-A which became kind of the classic way to classify different foods in terms of their processing and has been adopted primarily by European countries to basically judge a food in terms of the degree of processing that it has. So there's like four categories, which I won't go into because we probably don't have the time, but they range from basically unprocessed all the way through. The last one would be ultra processed. So it goes from what we would consider, you know, friendly, healthy foods, to foods that we probably either shouldn't be eating or eat very, very little of. And so and that's what these studies I mentioned before are addressing is the amount of ultra-processed foods that people have in their diets. And what has been found is that the higher the percentage of ultra-processed foods in the diet, the higher the risk of lifestyle diseases, Such things as heart disease, stroke, diabetes, obesity, metabolic diseases and so on and so on.
Speaker 2:Now, what is an ultra-processed food? As Dr Montero defined it? It's basically a food that starts out natural, okay, and then, through the wonders of food science and food technology, that food gets broken down into components, and those components may be industrially modified. Then they are reincorporated into a commercial food product so they no longer look like, smell like, act like, you know, the foods that came from the original plants, let's say. So that is an ultra-processed foods, and a good example would be a potato chip. A good example would be a potato chip.
Speaker 2:Think about what a potato goes through to become a potato chip.
Speaker 2:So it starts as a natural food, right Potato. Out of the ground, it gets cleaned up, it gets cut up, it gets sliced up into small pieces, so then it can go into a fryer to become a potato chip. But in that process the potato is having additives added to it for flavor, for appearance, for preservation, and then there's all kinds of fat added to it, right and salt, and so it becomes a highly modified form of the potato which is now ultra-processed, stratified form of the potato which is now ultra-processed. And that is an extreme change from its original form, which most people would agree was probably pretty healthy. You know, just to eat a potato, just throw a potato in water and boil it and then eat. It is a pretty healthy food to eat. But ultra-processed foods eliminate a lot of the nutritional quality of the food and in fact may alter the food to the extent where not only is it less nutritious, but now it's a health challenge if you eat that kind of food as a large part of your diet.
Speaker 1:That's fascinating. I love the potato chip example because you said it's highly modifiable, and even the word that came to mind after you said that is it's also highly palatable. So it's just something that is so easy to eat versus a potato. You get pretty full eating a baked potato.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, that's the thing about food science it's not always doing things that are beneficial to humankind.
Speaker 2:And what you just mentioned, the idea of hyper palatability, that the food scientists who are making these ultra-processed foods are very, very aware of how to modify a food to make it taste so good that people are going to get kind of hooked to it.
Speaker 2:And I certainly admit to having that issue as I was growing up and I mean I didn't come across the word hyper palatability until probably in the last 10 years, so I didn't know what was going on either for most of my life, that I was being, you know, encouraged to eat these foods and by eating them I wanted to eat more of them. And by eating more of them I was endangering, you know, my health in the long run Not a pleasant thing to think aboutangering. You know, health in the long run Not a pleasant thing to think about. But you know, knowledge is power. So as you become more and more familiar with how food is manipulated and changed for commercial interests, then you can begin to understand well, maybe I shouldn't be eating a lot of that or none of it, you know, maybe I should be eating foods in their nutritious, whole forms uncontaminated by lots of different chemicals, and we haven't even talked about additives yet.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yes, I was actually curious to ask you about additives because obviously we know that additives serve their function, they serve a place in our food system. But I'm kind of curious your opinion on them and how they're sort of justified by the food industry in a way.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, additives, there's good ones and there's bad ones. Here's a key thing to keep in mind Most food companies not all food companies, but most food companies, particularly the big ones are not making foods to help our health, you know, to make sure that we're eating nutritiously, that there's nothing going to be harmful in these foods to our health. Their main concern is to sell food right. It's a commercial interest. It's strictly, for many of these companies, a capitalist endeavor where they have if they're public companies, they have shareholders. So their job essentially, is to make very successful commercial foods and this includes many of the products we see in grocery stores as well as the fast food restaurants that are out there, and they're going to make a product that meets certain expectations. In the case of let's take a fast food restaurant like McDonald's, okay, what's important to them is to make something that tastes delicious, it looks good, it smells good, it tastes great, and the other thing that you want to keep in mind is uniformity. Okay, that's a big deal, because if you're a McDonald's executive, you want to make sure that whatever is sold in a McDonald's restaurant appears the same to everybody everywhere you go into a McDonald's anywhere in the country or the world. You know what you're going to get, so you need to mass produce it. Number one, number two you want that food product to be stable, so you're going to add whatever it takes to the food, such as preservatives, to make sure that that food doesn't change over time. It lasts as long as it can last, and so that's where additives come in. That can last, and so that's where additives come in. The additives are there to create a consistent product. It's a big deal.
Speaker 2:Most people don't realize the amount of food science that goes into the preparation of these commercial foods. I mean, we're talking hundreds and hundreds of chemists and food scientists and food technologists who, through their creativity, are able to invent these foods that didn't exist in the past, using additives, chemicals that never existed in the past. Think about the modern food industry, commercial food industry. It's only been around for a couple of hundred years, and you know we have been around for a half a million years, right? So it's relatively new that all of these chemicals that didn't exist several hundred years ago are now circulating in our food system, and so it's a real concern. A lot of people are getting concerned about what these chemicals are doing ultimately.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, and I actually think about that a lot with sodas. I have people in my life who like to have a couple sodas a day and I think about the people behind creating those sodas are brilliant because they are creating those sodas so that you just keep coming back and you keep coming back to the same one, because those diehard soda drinkers I mean they're, you know either hardcore Pepsi or hardcore Coke you know that type of thing they're dedicated.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yes, very.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, I'm actually curious, mel too. Do you have an estimate on how many food additives currently exist in our food supply?
Speaker 2:Okay, I have a rough estimate it's really hard to put your finger on it Something like 9,000 to 10,000 additives that are approved for use in the American food system, and that number is going to vary because there are food additives that come and go. You know they may be popular and useful early on, but then they get replaced by something else. But they're still on the list, as far as possible food additives that could wind up in commercial foods. Now it's difficult to really pin that number down because, as far as I know, there is no single resource that you can go to that shows you the whole list of food additives that are used. You know what their names are, what their properties are, where they are used, which is kind of amazing when you think about it.
Speaker 2:But not even our government has such a list. If you go to the FDA's website, Food and Drug Administration, there is a page called Substances Added to Food Inventory Substances Added to Food Inventory. But if you look at that list it only has less than 4,000 entries. So, as I said, there's like 9,000 to 10,000. So that's only a fraction of what may possibly be in commercial foods. That's only a fraction of what may possibly be in commercial foods and so if anybody out there in your audience, is aware of a single resource that lists every food additive.
Speaker 2:I'd like to hear about it, Because in my experience I have not come across that yet.
Speaker 1:Could you just maybe list a couple of common food additives that we might see when we're at the grocery store?
Speaker 2:Oh gosh, where do I start?
Speaker 2:While I was doing my research, I got curious about the question are the food additives that we see in the foods that we buy in grocery stores, big box stores, convenience stores are those food ingredients also used by the fast food industry?
Speaker 2:And so I started looking at whatever fast food restaurants actually revealed, what was in their foods, started looking at the additives and overall, it turns out that most of the additives that are in fast foods are the same ones that you see on food labels in the commercial foods and stores. And so, in terms of some of the common ones and this gets to be a difficult question to answer, and it's one of my pet peeves is that the government, through the FDA, food and Drug Administration allows for some vague terms to be used on food labels, and everybody knows about these but maybe haven't thought about them too much, and so there are specific names that I can give you, but there's also very generic names that don't give you a whole lot of information, which is kind of a problem. So, as far as food attitudes that you maybe would see on food labels and this is one I used to have to deal with when I was a working chemist. Have you seen the word maltodextrin?
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Maltodextrins. That's actually not a single ingredient, it's a mixture, it's a word that covers a bunch of similarly related chemicals, and maltodextrins are essentially starch molecules, and starch can come from a number of different sources. Right, you can have cornstarch, wheat starch, rice starch and so on. This is starch that has been partially broken down, either chemically or using enzymes, to some intermediate form. Now, if you take starch and you break it all the way down, you get dextrose or glucose, right? Okay, so maltodextrins are some form that's kind of partly in between the original starch and the sugar dextrose, and so they essentially represent a range of sweetness and a range of texture between starch and glucose.
Speaker 2:So if you could have a sweet maltodextrin, or you could have a not very sweet or non-sweet maltodextrin, so they tend to be used sometimes for sweetness, but oftentimes as texturizers. They produce a certain texture in the food product. That creates, you know, the desirable mouthfeel as you're eating that food, and it's a very complicated area. And well, what I was saying before when you see maltodextrin listed on the label, it doesn't tell you specifically what you're eating. So it's a range of substances that fall into a category, and so it's a little deceptive there Another deceptive term that you often see. Well, actually two of them are kind of related. You see natural flavors or you may see artificial flavors.
Speaker 1:Okay, oh, yes, I feel like I see that all the time.
Speaker 2:All the time it's in the top five. So natural flavors. What does that mean? Well, that could be hundreds or thousands of different substances. All you know is the word natural means that these flavors were derived from some natural source. So it could be plants, it could be animals, it could even be microbial. So it's not much information, and if you're somebody who is maybe sensitive to one of those flavors, you may have an allergy or some other kind of sensitivity to it. You're not going to know it. So that's a pet peeve of mine as well that the Food and Drug Administration allows food manufacturers to use that kind of terminology on food labels, and the same is true for color. There's natural colors and there's synthetic colors. So it is a little bit of information, but it's not complete information that shows up on the label.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm curious, with your insider perspective, how you would sort of describe the FDA's role in the regulatory process for additives. I mean, it seems a little confusing, especially when they're allowing things like natural flavors where, like you said, it could be 100,000 different things put into this one little, these two little words on the ingredient label.
Speaker 2:Right, right. Well, it's not always bad. I think the FDA is a great agency in the federal government in that they do play a role to safeguard our food supply, and if it wasn't for an agency like that, it'd be the Wild West Okay. So, yeah, there are issues with it, but they are responsible for making sure that additives that are used in commercial foods are safe. Now you have to use quotation marks around safe. You know what do you mean by safe. Well, generally, what they determine as safe is they decide on a. If a food additive is approved, they determine at what level that food or, excuse me, that additive can be used in food so that it doesn't have adverse effects. So they determine, like a, what is the upper limit? You know it may be a parts per million thing. You know you can use this additive up to 100 parts per million in a food and, based on testing that's been done, you know we consider that safe for human consumption. You know. So they set limits, okay, on these food additives. So that's important, so that any manufacturer has to follow those rules in order to use whatever additive they want in the food that they're making. So that's an important function in the food that they're making. So that's an important function of the FDA.
Speaker 2:Now what gets problematic is and I don't know if you want a little bit of history here, but back in the 1950s okay, this is following World War II there was a great explosion in in food technology and food science and all kinds of new commercial foods were being produced, with new methodologies and factories. And as a consequence, after World War II not that there weren't any before there was, but there were a lot more new chemicals got introduced, all right. So through the 1950s it was building, building, building. There are people. Some people became concerned about that approach, the legislators, and so government officials and leaders in the in the federal government began to look into this matter. Okay, is this a legitimate concern? Should we be worried about what shows up in our foods and how it's affecting our health? And so that movement kind of built through the 50s.
Speaker 2:Another thing that added fuel to that was the fear of cancer. Okay, because cancer started to show up more and more, kind of paralleling the development of the commercial food system, right, and as a consequence, questions about okay, are there things in the food system possibly contributing or causing people getting cancer? And so there was a food act in the late 1950s called the Delaney Act that addressed that specifically. They basically said if there is any scientific evidence to indicate that a food additive may cause cancer in humans, it's to be pulled from the food system. I mean no argument there. You know, if the evidence is there, it's going to be, we're going to take it off the list. Okay.
Speaker 2:So at the same time that was happening this is around 1958, food additives law was passed. It basically said we acknowledge that there are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of food additives in the food system at this point in time, but we're going to draw a line, okay. And they created a list called GRAS G-R-A-S, which stands for Generally Recognized as Safe. And they said okay, I'm talking about the federal government, and the FDA and associated agencies said that at this point in time we recognize that these chemicals have been in the food system a long time. We are going to sort of make the assumption that if a chemical like baking soda, for example like baking soda for example, has been used for 50, 100 years and we haven't seen any adverse health problems associated with it, we're going to automatically say it's okay to use that in all future food products. So that's where the generally recognized as safe comes in. At that time there were probably don't quote me, but somewhere in the neighborhood of 600, 800 of these substances that got on the automatically approved list, so that food manufacturers didn't have to second guess whether they were allowed to use it or not. If it was on the list, you're fine, okay.
Speaker 2:Now the question then arose okay, what about all the new chemicals that are now that were being used in foods after 1958? What's going to be done about those? Well, I mean, the average consumer might think, okay, so a new food ingredient comes along. It gets information about this food ingredient, gets sent to the FDA. The FDA takes the food additive and through their expertise and laboratory capabilities, they do research on this additive, put it through all kinds of tests, see whether it does what it's supposed to do, see if it's safe and determine what a safe level is if it is safe, a level that shouldn't be exceeded. And then they come back to the manufacturer after they've done all this work and said, ok, this looks like a good ingredient. We determine that it's safe and that it's doing what it's supposed to do. It is now approved that it's safe and that it's doing what it's supposed to do. It is now approved.
Speaker 2:Okay, the vast majority of food entities are not approved like that. Okay, probably more than 90%, maybe more than 95%. So the shocking fact is that the FDA, early on in the late fs, early 60s, realized they didn't have the manpower, they didn't have the money, they didn't have the facilities to keep up, you know, with all the new food additives that the food industry was coming up with. So they then decided, okay, we can't do all this work, but we still want to make sure that the American population is protected, right? So they decided that they would expand the meaning of this grass list and basically turned it back to the manufacturers. So you have this new food additive, additive X, that you're wanting to include in food manufacturing.
Speaker 2:The onus to show that this food additive does what it's supposed to do and is safe is on you. Okay, so it's not the FDA, for the most part, that does the testing and the termination. It's food companies. Now, the food companies might have their own laboratories and personnel to do that, or they may hire that out to a consulting company, and that company does it and creates all of the data and the report to submit to the FDA to show that this is a good additive. Now, this happens dozens of times a year and you can actually go to the FDA website and they'll show you a list of all the applications for new food ingredients.
Speaker 2:And so what the FDA does through their scientific expertise, they will review the data submitted by the food manufacturer and they will make the determination, if it meets their expectations, as to what needed to be properly done to certify this new ingredient, and they will essentially make one of three decisions.
Speaker 2:They will say, hey, everything looks great, you've done your homework, we're going to accept this data, and so, essentially, they'll rubber stamp the usage of that additive. Or they may say we don't agree with you, your data doesn't look good, we don't think this ingredient is either doing the job it should, or people should be consuming it in food, and so it gets rejected, okay, and then the company's got to go back and try again. Or a third thing might be well, you've done a pretty good job here and most of it looks good, but there's a few things that we have questions on and and you need to go back and and and clarify that information. So that's essentially what the process is today, uh for how a food additive gets approved. Essentially, it's the responsibility of the people who make it.
Speaker 1:Wow, I didn't, didn't really know all of that, and so it's a little more concerning than I was anticipating.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah it is. It puts a whole extra layer on whether these things should be consumed or not.
Speaker 1:Right, yeah, absolutely. So I'm curious, just to kind of like wrap us up with you having seen the industry really from the inside out in a way, what changes would you like to see in the way food additives are maybe managed or regulated?
Speaker 2:Okay, in writing my book. Here's basically what I concluded. As individuals you and I, everybody listening it's really hard to get all the information that we would need to decide whether eating a commercial food is going to be good for us or not. It's just too much information. No single individual is going to be able to keep track of that, and new things, as I said, are being added all the time. Okay, so what do we do? I think it should be the responsibility of the government to inform us what we should be eating and what we shouldn't be eating, or at least give us some information that will help us make that decision for ourselves.
Speaker 2:Now the federal government and state governments you know they've done things over the years. You know, ever since the early 1900s, there's been laws passed basically telling food manufacturers here's what you need to do if you want to put a food out there in the marketplace. So that's how we got the information we see on food packaging, where a company has got to be truthful in terms of telling us what's in their foods. They have to put other information on the packages, such as contact information and so on. So if anybody has a question, we can contact that company and then we have the special food labels, and this didn't happen until relatively recently, like in the 90s, where there was a requirement for companies to have an ingredient list on every package right, which listed all the ingredients that were in the food, from the ones present in the highest amount to the ones in the lowest amount, as you know. And then there was the nutrition facts label came along, you know. So here is a whole bunch of information, and that label is loaded with lots of information about nutrition. So if you learn how to use it, you will be very informed. So it's another way to let the public know about the quality of the food that they're purchasing.
Speaker 2:I think the government should go two steps further, and other countries are doing this, primarily ones in Europe. Even our neighbor of Mexico is doing this. Now the US government, through the FDA and USDA. They're talking about it All right.
Speaker 2:So here are the two things that I think should be required of all food manufacturers there should be front of package labeling, and there should be two things that are on the front of every commercial food. One of them should be some kind of label that tells you nutritionally, at a glance, whether this food is considered high quality or low quality. And so you might see on the front of a pack, let's say, bag of potato chips, a label that has maybe letters A through E or numbers one through five and it depends upon how they're done, when may be the best or five may be the worst, but a number at a glance that'll tell you this is considered to be a highly nutritious food or, at the other end of the scale, a very low nutritious food. So now a consumer doesn't have to turn the package over and look real carefully at the food facts label and figure that out for themselves, and figure that out for themselves. Some other highly responsible scientific group has already made that determination for you for every food that you would be buying at the store. So that's the first thing.
Speaker 2:Now the second thing is beginning to happen in some places there should be another label that tells you how processed that food Okay, is it lightly processed or is it primarily ultra processed and everything in between. So you'll have another scale you know, a to E or 1 to 5, that will tell you that information. And now you've got two very important pieces of information where, in a few seconds, you can look at that front of package labeling and decide for yourself is this the kind of food I want to eat to benefit my long-term health? So that's essentially where I'd like to see things going. Yes, it's great to educate ourselves individually, learn about food additives, their names and which ones may be bad for us, which ones are okay.
Speaker 2:But that's a lot of work for most people and we lead busy lives and, quite frankly, most people are not going to make the effort to do that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, it's just one less thing that we have to do as the consumer and as ultra processed foods become more and more prevalent you know they're packing our grocery stores it seems like they're overflowing sometimes with packaged foods. I feel like this is something that could be potentially just really easy for the consumer to glance at and not really have to give a second thought and, like you said, instead of having to look at the label, read all the ingredients, question what even are natural flavors in this packaged food that I'm about to buy all of those things. So I was actually kind of wondering, you know, what advice you might have for the listener who might want to make healthier choices when it comes to all to processed foods.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, that's something that's coming. It's down the road, so it's not something that's going to be available to us probably anytime soon in this country. So the other thing we can do is just protect ourselves. I mean, we have the freedom to choose what we eat we eat. So if this is a concern to you about the availability and the amount of ultra-processed foods that we consume in our diet, well, we have the option not to consume them. Now, maybe easier said than done, but you can make decisions for yourself as far as cutting back or eliminating those kinds of foods from our diet, so we can eat a whole foods type of diet that has very little or none in terms of these additives in them. We can choose to eat organic so we're not exposed to environmental toxins that also will affect our health, and so there are decisions we can make for ourselves if we are ultimately concerned.
Speaker 2:The problem with eating these foods is that most people are not going to keel over dead the next day after eating some fast food.
Speaker 2:It's the kind of effects that take a long time to develop. A lot of these studies that I mentioned before they take place over 5, 10, 15 years, you know to see if there are any effects from eating those kinds of diets. So we don't get immediate feedback most of the time, unless we're food poisoned, you know, and probably most people at some point have experienced that, so they know what that's like. But as far as the high consumption of ultra processed foods and all the food additives that wind up in them, we're not going to know how they affect our health until much, much later in life, and even then we're not going to be able to know for sure. Well, it was all those potato chips and ice cream and all this stuff that I ate 20 years ago that is causing me to have autoimmune disease, you know, or heart disease and stuff like that. So it's very difficult to trace, you know, once we come down with an illness. So the easiest thing to do is try to avoid anything that's going to contribute to it in the long run.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that's a great way to end it, because I know a lot of the listeners here are very passionate about more whole food, plant-based eating. So I feel like this was a great conversation to have and for you, the listener, if you're curious to continue this conversation or learn more about this topic, we included Mel's book, his podcast website and Facebook group as links in the show notes so you can easily access those and get in contact with more of this information, which is fascinating. I feel like we could talk another hour because I didn't even get through half my questions. So well, Mel, thank you so much for sharing your knowledge with us. I really appreciate you and I thank you so much for tuning in today as well.
Speaker 2:Great talking with you, Ashley. Appreciate being on your show.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for listening to the Plant-Centered and Thriving podcast today. If you found this episode inspiring, please share it with a friend or post it on social media and tag me so I can personally say thank you. Until next time, keep thriving.
