Michael Pollan on Ultra-Processed Foods, RFK Jr., and more
A Q&A about how UPFs shape our health, the economics driving their abundance, and why breaking free from them might require more than just consumer choice.
Through no fault of my parents, I grew up, in-part, on ultra-processed foods (UPFs). Those Oreo-thin 100-calorie snack-packs were the norm at rec league softball practices. Chicken nuggets? A staple. I craved these foods — which as a child of the early 2000s were incessantly marketed on Disney and Nickelodeon.
Today, UPFs constitute anywhere from 60 to 90 percent of the average American diet. On social media, videos abound of athletic people consuming nutrient-dense powders and bars. Scarce are hard-boiled eggs or apples.
As UPFs have become more and more of a hot-button issue — especially with the rise of RFK Jr. to the national stage — I sat down with Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma and producer of Food Inc. to find out what exactly “ultra-processed” means and how all of this comes back to the Corn Belt.
Note: this interview has been edited for clarity.
Nina: Can you explain what ultra-processed foods are to me like I’m five?
Michael: Ultra-processed foods are foods that you can't make at home. You have to get a factory in order to make them. And they contain ingredients that if you looked in your pantry, or your parents’ pantry, you won't find them. They're long chemical names. They're not normal food. This food usually comes in a package. It's not fresh, it has a long shelf life. If you were blind and experiencing it through taste alone, you could notice that it would probably be really sweet or really salty.
These foods, and even the term “UPF” has just been in the news a lot lately, and it's something that you've been working on for years.
It’s fairly new. When I wrote The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and I haven't looked in the index, but I'll bet you see “processed food,” but you won’t see “ultra-processed food.” It’s a term that was introduced by a Brazilian epidemiologist named Carlos Monteiro. I've been in contact with him for several years. In fact, I visited with him when I was in Sao Paulo about 10 years ago. He has really put the term on the map. And he did this through some really interesting science. He was trying to figure out why there had been a sudden increase in obesity and diabetes in Brazil. And he assumed, when you look at what are called the “disappearance numbers,” the numbers government keeps about total amount of different nutrients consumed, that he would see an uptick in either sugar or fat consumption in Brazil. And he didn't. And that really surprised him. How could people be getting fatter and more diabetic if they weren't eating more sugar?
And he began to see that the macronutrients (carbohydrates, fat and protein) in the Brazilian diet had not shifted very much, but the ways in which they were being delivered had. People were drinking more sodas. They were eating more processed foods, and less traditional diets. The traditional diets still had plenty of fat and lots of sugar. It's not like they were going from a Mediterranean diet, this was a traditional Brazilian diet. They were moving more toward sweetened yogurts and packaged chips and packaged cakes and all that kind of stuff.
And I saw that when I was in Brazil. We went into one of the favelas, and there are women there who have this deal with Danone. Danone gives them a cart and lots of expired food, and they sell it on credit. In other words, Danone will advance them money, and this is how they make money. The companies are infiltrating themselves into the favelas with great success.
Anyway, this was the idea [Monteiro] put forward: it's not the nutrients we're consuming, it's the forms in which we're delivering them. And he called it ultra-processed food so we could make a distinction between whole food, processed food, and ultra-processed food. Processed food might be white flour. It's still an ingredient you cook with. It has been changed from its natural state, but it's not yet ultra-processed. Ultra-processed would be a whole meal made from that white flour, such as a prepared pasta or ravioli. It was an idea that was greeted with some skepticism by nutritionists in the U.S., who tended to believe that it's the nutrients, stupid, that’s how we should think about food.
But then this guy, Kevin Hall at the NIH, a metabolism researcher there, did a study because he was skeptical of the idea, and he tried to test it. And this is a famous study that was published a couple years ago where people were given two meals, an unlimited amount, and they could consume all they want. One was ultra-processed. One was whole foods. They ended up eating more than 500 extra calories a day on the ultra-processed diet. It didn't explain the mechanism, why you would eat more, but the fact that the food is engineered to make you eat more might be part of it. So that's basically it. Marion Nestle said that this is the most important piece of nutrition research in the last decade or two. And I think she’s right.
There are the obvious reasons why ultra-processed foods are harmful, like the food to calorie ratio, etc. I remember at one point we had a very brief conversation about how UPFs might impact our mental health, and some of these more complex ideas that are being researched.
These are hypotheses. One of the interesting things about ultra-processed food is that it's readily absorbed in the body. It's so refined and there's so little fiber, so a lot of it is absorbed in the small intestine, and it doesn't feed the large intestine, which is where the microbiome mostly lives. If we've learned anything recently about microbiology it’s that our diet needs to feed the microbiome as well as our bodies, because they produce lots of metabolites that are very important for everything from mental health to stress reduction and reducing inflammation. It’s a very inflammatory diet. I think that's part of it. I also think the fact that it tends to have high levels of sugar and salt, which are both necessary to preserve this stuff. It's incredibly clean. It's very sanitary food, which may be a mixed blessing. We don't know as much about that. I think the fact that it is so low in fiber may turn out to be an important part of the answer to the question.
My newsletter is called Corn Belt Confidential, like Kitchen Confidential. Customers kind of have this illusion of choice, which you've written about a lot, when they're in the grocery store. How do things like corn, which as you said, is heavily subsidized, and soybeans, and industry consolidation, shape what we are eating?
Well, talk to any food startup entrepreneur, and one of the things you'll hear from them is it's really hard to get shelf space. You think you have choice when you go into the supermarket, but a lot of choices have been made for you. Corporations that sell bread or soda or beer, they own the shelf space. They pay rent on that shelf space, and they decide what gets shown. So if you have some interesting new, let's say, healthy food, and it's not owned by one of the big food companies, you may never have an opportunity to learn about it unless you go to more of a mom-and-pop store.
Concentration has led to an elimination of choice. It looks like a lot of choices, because the same company might have 1000 SKUs. They have lots of products, but if you dig a little deeper, you find that there's only three or four companies that own all the cakes, all the beer, all the microbreweries. The way they get shelf space is by selling out to Anheuser-Busch. You have to suspend disbelief to think of the supermarket as an arena of free choice. It's much more manipulated than that.
How do you see us getting out of this UPF rut, if we're so used to it? How would you get a consumer to switch from, say, post-workout having a protein bar to having a hard-boiled egg? What would need to change?
Well, I think a couple things. One is public education. I think that's very important. I don't think this conversation about UPFs has penetrated the whole society yet, by any means, it's still a pretty elite conversation. People do have a sense of junk food. That conversation has been around for a while, and they understand when they pick up a bag of potato chips rather than an apple that they're doing something that might not be so great for their health.
I think the other thing, frankly, is taxation. I think that ultra-processed food is remarkably cheap considering its intricacy and engineering. But these are products made with, as you well know, commodity corn and soy, which generally are marketed below cost for various reasons of overproduction and subsidy.
A lot of the American food system has been about answering, how do we creatively get rid of the excess corn and soy that we're producing in states like Iowa? And that gave us ethanol, which is another terrible contribution to the environment. It gave us processed food. There’s been so much ingenuity that has gone into, what else can we do with these kernels of corn?
A lot of our food system is subsidized. Make no mistake. Feedlot meat is heavily subsidized in all sorts of indirect ways. The fact you don't have to clean up your waste is a huge subsidy. Or the government will pay for your methane digester. All these are kinds of giveaways.
I think ultra-processed foods, someday, might be taxed like cigarettes. It's not out of the question. Other countries have explored this idea, and it's very interesting to look at South America, where they've really tried to limit processed food consumption with warning labels, and we're about to get front-of-pack labels, supposedly. They've been promised for a long time. I'm sure they're the subject of intense negotiation. It'd be very interesting to see what a Trump administration does about that, because they'll be torn between their deregulatory zeal and RFK Jr.'s authority over all matters health. A promise to RFK Jr., by the way, that's likely to be broken.
We are speaking on Election Day. What might change in the conversation based on the outcome?
The FDA has this set of front-of-pack labels ready to go. I did have a conversation with someone at the FDA who's involved, and his message was, don't get your hopes up too high, in effect. I'm not quoting that. It’s a start in the right direction. There's been a lot of back and forth within the industry. I think, actually, the most interesting question is, if Trump is elected, will the voice of RFK Jr., on the one hand, and the voice of Trump himself as someone who doesn't like government regulation, which voice will prevail? One voice has a lot of money behind it. Look at Project 2025, that's all about less regulation of the food system.
I'm guessing that RFK Jr. will have his heart broken.
Who knows if these things will happen? But right now, it doesn't matter, right? That rhetoric is enough.
Let's say the exit polls turn up some support for this agenda and people actually cite it. Then you've got a new political issue on the agenda and that would be a positive contribution from RFK Jr. I do think the Democrats, by failing to talk about food and health and just how dysfunctional the food system is, have left a potentially powerful issue just sitting there.
Those are all my official questions for you. But is there anything that I didn't ask you about that you'd like to add?
No, though that’s always a good question to ask at the end of an interview.
Disclosure: Pollan is my former writing professor.
Since this interview was conducted, Donald Trump was elected president of the United States. It goes without saying that journalism is a career that has never been easy, but will become more difficult under an administration largely hostile to the media. When I was 16, I covered Trump rallies as a reporter for my high school newspaper. I learned a lot about the importance of continuing to pursue the hard work even when it may put you in the direct line of hatred. Now, more than ever, I’m committed to doing that work.
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Great work!
Never ever lose your principles. Hold everyone accountable and allow no one to pass. Echo chamber bullshit is the vehicle that usher us to this Third World shit hole. Criticize it do not participate or condone it!