In 2015, the FDA banned artificial trans fats from food on the grounds that it caused heart disease, another chronic illness linked to diet. There is recent precedent for using our food safety laws to regulate chronic food illness. Congress revealed its intent in a 1958 amendment that provides that no food additive shall be deemed safe if it is found to induce cancer, a chronic illness, when ingested by humans or animals. Our regulatory agencies clearly have the legal authority to take on this threat to public health. This is an important finding, because it raises the possibility that it’s the additives and processing-not just the percentage of fat or sugar in a diet-that make us sick. When the same people were later assigned to eat the minimally processed diet, they lost weight. While on the ultra-processed diet, people ate an additional 500 calories per day and began to rapidly gain weight. Investigators thought weight gain would be the same in both groups, since nutrient composition was equivalent. In a recent study conducted by the National Institutes of Health to discover the cause of sharp increases in obesity in the U.S., volunteers were randomly assigned to either eat minimally processed foods or ultra-processed foods matched for daily nutrients like carbohydrates, sodium, fat, and sugar. Mounting evidence suggests that ultra-processed foods are causing much of this harm. All told, the economic cost of nutrition-related chronic diseases has been estimated at $16 trillion over the period from 2011 to 2020. In other words, these hospitalizations could have been prevented if the patient didn’t have these diseases. For instance, two-thirds of severe COVID cases resulting in hospitalization have been attributed to four diet-caused diseases: obesity, diabetes, hypertension, and heart failure. In addition to deaths, poor diet causes tremendous suffering. That’s right: there are more deaths each year from our food than all the combat deaths from the Revolutionary War through the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. That toll is higher than all our combat deaths in every war in American history-combined. This would be a paradigm shift - but it is also common sense: FDA and USDA must make at least as much effort preventing chronic food illness as they do acute food illness.Ībout 678,000 Americans die each year from chronic food illness. Department of Agriculture to use their authority under federal law to protect us from these highly processed foods. Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. From heat-and-eat meals such as frozen pizza to sweetened breakfast cereals, ultra-processed foods are industrial formulations of ingredients from substances extracted from foods or synthesized in laboratories. In recent years, evidence has mounted that these chronic illnesses are caused by deleterious substances in ultra-processed foods. By contrast, 1,600 Americans die every day from chronic food illness, such as obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and cancer. It’s important to protect people from these harms, but let’s also put them in perspective: These regulated contaminants kill an estimated 1,400 Americans per year. Editor’s note: This article was first published by Harvard Public Health magazine and is reprinted here with permission.įederal food law is clear: It bans “any poisonous or deleterious substance which may render injurious to health.”įor decades, regulators have used that provision mostly to crack down on food contaminated with toxic chemicals or microbes such as Listeria and Salmonella that can make us acutely ill.
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