Ultraprocessed Food: Addictive, Toxic, and Ready for Regulation
1
Department of Pediatrics, University of California, San Francisco, CA 94143, USA
2
Institute for Health Policy Studies, University of California, San Francisco, CA 94143, USA
3
Department of Research, Touro University-California, Vallejo, CA 94592, USA
Nutrients 2020, 12(11), 3401; https://doi.org/10.3390/nu12113401
Received: 27 September 2020
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Revised: 19 October 2020
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Accepted: 23 October 2020
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Published: 5 November 2020
(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Clinical Utility of Food Addiction and Eating Addiction)
Past public health crises (e.g., tobacco, alcohol, opioids, cholera, human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), lead, pollution, venereal disease, even coronavirus (COVID-19) have been met with interventions targeted both at the individual and all of society. While the healthcare community is very aware that the global pandemic of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) has its origins in our Western ultraprocessed food diet, society has been slow to initiate any interventions other than public education, which has been ineffective, in part due to food industry interference. This article provides the rationale for such public health interventions, by compiling the evidence that added sugar, and by proxy the ultraprocessed food category, meets the four criteria set by the public health community as necessary and sufficient for regulation—abuse, toxicity, ubiquity, and externalities (How does your consumption affect me?). To their credit, some countries have recently heeded this science and have instituted sugar taxation policies to help ameliorate NCDs within their borders. This article also supplies scientific counters to food industry talking points, and sample intervention strategies, in order to guide both scientists and policy makers in instituting further appropriate public health measures to quell this pandemic.
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Keywords:
processed food; nutrition; non-communicable disease; metabolic syndrome; diabetes; addiction; policy
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited
MDPI and ACS Style
Lustig, R.H. Ultraprocessed Food: Addictive, Toxic, and Ready for Regulation. Nutrients 2020, 12, 3401. https://doi.org/10.3390/nu12113401
AMA Style
Lustig RH. Ultraprocessed Food: Addictive, Toxic, and Ready for Regulation. Nutrients. 2020; 12(11):3401. https://doi.org/10.3390/nu12113401
Chicago/Turabian StyleLustig, Robert H. 2020. "Ultraprocessed Food: Addictive, Toxic, and Ready for Regulation" Nutrients 12, no. 11: 3401. https://doi.org/10.3390/nu12113401
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