A friend who recently moved to France for work has been telling me what a treat it is to eat food that isn’t as ultraprocessed as it is in the United States.
“Ultraprocessed foods are industrial creations made with little — if any — whole foods that often contain large amounts of added sugar and salt,” says preventive cardiologist Dr. Stephen Devries, adding in an American Medical Association primer that ultraprocessed foods “are typically infused with artificial colors and additives.”
“Research has shown that diets high in ultraprocessed foods are linked to more than 30 health conditions,” the primer says.
Now The New York Times is reporting that people taking the weight-loss drugs Ozempic, Wegovy, Zepboun and others have reported losing interest in ultraprocessed foods. Some people on the drugs say that many packaged snacks they once loved now taste bad, the Times says.
So Big Food is scrambling to research the impact of the drugs on their brands — and figure out how to adjust. “The whole field is still a little stunned,” says Ashley Gearhardt, a food-addiction researcher and psychology professor at the University of Michigan.
There is little the industry hasn’t tried over the years to keep eaters eating, the Times says.
Big Food researched the way the brain’s reward system reacts to sugar and salt, using it to keep products tickling the “bliss point,” the height of delight.
And “fortunately for the industry, people tend to want as much fat as they can get,” says the Times. Scientists can engineer fats to melt at just the right temperature in the mouth, sparking the release of dopamine while creating an impression of “vanishing caloric density.”
"So a Cheeto, disintegrating innocently on the tongue, tells us it contains fewer calories than it does,” says the Times.
When they discovered that noisier chips induced people to eat more of them, snack engineers increased the crunch. And they amplified the intensity of artificial sweeteners to hundreds of times beyond sugar’s natural flavor.
“In the chemosensory world,” says Dan Wesson, the director of the Florida Chemical Senses Institute, referring to the science of how chemicals provoke sensations, “almost anything is possible.”
“Given Big Food’s track record, it’s likely that the companies will succeed at finding products Ozempic users now crave,” says the Times.
How to avoid ultraprocessed foods?
“Looking at a nutrition label will give you an idea if a food is ultraprocessed,” says family physician Neha Sachdev, director of clinical engagement and equitable care at the AMA. “If you don’t recognize many of the ingredients listed, that can be a sign that there was a lot of processing involved.”
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