Ultra-Processed Foods (Part 4)

**Michael Greger** (0:00)
We have lots of choices to make about our diet. Add to that doing the right thing when it comes to treating a chronic disease, fighting a virus, or losing weight. And suddenly, our nutrition choices can seem almost overwhelming. Well, I'm here to help. Welcome to the Nutrition Facts Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Michael Greger.
Today we continue our series on ultra-processed foods, and we start with a story on the health effects of the mineral oils, and phthalates, and bisphenols leaching from packaging materials. Looking at a food label, we can see that many ultra-processed foods are high in salt, sugar, and calories, and low in nutrition, and may contain food additives with questionable safety. Missing from the label are contaminants from processing, as well as contaminants that migrate into the food from the packaging materials. Bisphenols like BPA, plastics compounds like phthalates and microplastics, as well as mineral oils. Evidently, the mineral oils come from the printing inks from recycled newspapers used in paperboard packaging, which can then migrate into the food and then accumulate in human tissues to levels that have been found to be harmful in a certain strain of rats.
But the relevance to humans has been questioned, since apparently we can't even extrapolate the results from that strain of rats to another strain of rats.
Plastic materials that contact our food may contain thousands of different molecules, in which more than 300 have been considered as potentially risky, including phthalates, which along with bisphenols may have hormone-modulating effects, have people switch from packaged foods to fresh foods for even just a few days, and evidence of exposure to the measure of bisphenols and phthalates based on urine samples drops significantly. The packaging is certainly not limited to ultra-processed foods. If we look at the association between the consumption of ultra-processed foods and how many phthalates and bisphenols are flowing through our system, researchers found higher levels of 4-thalates and BPF associated with higher consumption of ultra-processed foods, but there was a lack of association with the most common ones, DEHP and BPA, and an inverse association for BPS, meaning the more ultra-processed one's diet, the lower the exposure. This makes sense since in the food supply, BPS has only been found in meat, most of which is considered minimally processed, with two exceptions. Basically, with BPA, which is used to line cans, only about half these products are ultra-processed compared to modally processed. In terms of phthalates in our diet, the highest levels of DEHP per serving were found in poultry.
So, if we look at dietary intake and phthalate body burden, DEHP levels were associated with the consumption of poultry, presumably most of which was minimally processed. That helps explain why eating vegetarian for a few days can also lead to significant decreases in phthalate exposure, though presumably they also cut down on ultra-processed foodies during that time.
Although phthalates are best known as hormone disruptors, associated with potential testicular toxicity, ovarian toxicity, and endometriosis, there is also concern about kidney toxicity, nerve damage, liver damage, and heart damage. Exposure to BPA, the best study of bisphenol, is associated with congenital abnormalities, diabetes, polycystic, ovary syndrome, obesity, and cardiovascular disease. At first we didn't think the migration of BPA into foods was high enough to exceed safety levels, but then oopsie, we realized there is significant evidence of potential harm from levels of BPAs in food well below current regulations and well below levels consumers have been regularly exposed to. Yet, we continue to produce millions of tons of this stuff, so it's no surprise that nearly 90% of us have traced levels of the stuff flowing through us on a day-to-day basis. But it depends on what we eat. Randomized people eat a serving of canned soup every day for five days, and see a thousand percent rise in BPA levels compared to eating soup every day made from fresh ingredients. In this case, the soup was ultra-processed, but it's more about what the cans were lined with. Here's a non-exhaustive list of brands that do not use BPA in their canned goods. So yes, we can look for BPA-free on the label, just like we can check labels to see if some ultra-processed products have low in added sugar, salt, and saturated fat. And we can also scan the ingredients list for additives. We now know they'd be harmful, but do you see the problem? Many were considered harmless until they weren't, like the BPA and Aspartame stories, and the artificial colors and flavors that were in the food supply for decades before they were banned. Remember when the food industry thought partially hydrogenated oils were a good idea? Let's replace saturated fats with trans fats. Although many countries now restrict their use, trans fats may continue to kill up to half a million people around the world each year. Of course, excess saturated fat is probably also killing hundreds of thousands a year. But the point is that trans fats from partially hydrogenated vegetable oil killed people for decades before there were any limits on it. The FDA didn't ban trans fats until more than 25 years after the first solid evidence emerged that it increased the risk of heart disease. From the time we knew until the time it was banned, every one of those years trans fats were killing up to 50,000 Americans each year. That's quite the death toll that can be laid at the feet of the ultra-processed food industry.