The Truth About Seed Oils and Ultra-Processed Foods

In mid-October, The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health hosted a media briefing to examine the health implications of seed oils and ultra-processed foods, topics that are generating increased public attention. 

Seed oils, such as canola, soybean, and sunflower, are a major source of essential fatty acids in diets worldwide and are often the subject of conflicting information. Ultra-processed foods account for more than half of daily calories consumed in the US but have been linked to obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and other conditions.

Dr. Julia Wolfson, Associate Professor with the International Health Department at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, discusses her research related to the effects of these foods on our bodies, and whether government policy under the Trump administration is a net-positive or negative for public health. Dr. Wolfson speaks with Carol Massar and Tim Stenovec on Bloomberg Businessweek Daily.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio news.

Speaker 2 (00:08):
You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Masser and
Tim Stenoveek on Bloomberg Radio.

Speaker 3 (00:15):
Americans get more than half of their daily calories from
ultraprocessed foods with salty sugary items. More than half. This
is according to a government study that was released back
in August. This government study ran from two thousand and
one twenty twenty one to twenty twenty three, and it
said that about sixty two percent of childhood diets come
from highly processed foods think burgers, pastries, snacks, and pizza.

(00:37):
This according to the US Centers for Disease Control and
Preventions Nutrition study. The same foods have a similar grip
on adults, making up about fifty three percent of the
calories that they consumed.

Speaker 2 (00:48):
That's a lot.

Speaker 3 (00:48):
Yeah. The question I have is whether or not Health
and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy can actually make
some headway on this. He said that the US food
supply is poisoning children. It's a question that I'll post to.
Doctor Julia Wolfson, Associate of US ARE in the International
Health Department at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School, of Public Health.
The research focuses on how ultra process food affects our
bodies the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health that

(01:10):
is supported by Michael Our Bloomberg, founder and majority owner
of Bloomberg LP, parent company of Bloomberg TV and Radio.
Doctor Wilson, good to have you back with us. It's
been about a year since we last spoke. I just
want to start with the definition of ultra process foods.
I was kind of surprised to see pizza and burgers
on that list. How do you define it?

Speaker 4 (01:27):
Yeah, so thanks for having me back.

Speaker 5 (01:29):
And ultra process foods are defined by the list of
ingredients that are included in them. So these are foods
and beverages that are industrial produced using processes that you
wouldn't have in a home kitchen and ingredients that you
also wouldn't have in a home kitchen. So these are
industrial produced products used by processing techniques like extrusion fractioning,

(01:53):
where you break down the pieces of the food into
different things and then put it back together again. And
they contain things like additives, emulsifiers, sweeteners, thickeners, artificial flavors
and colorings, and other kinds of substances again that you wouldn't.

Speaker 4 (02:11):
Use in a home kitchen.

Speaker 5 (02:12):
And so the most common definition we have is called
the Nova classification system, which actually uses the ingredient list
on a product to look for these kinds of ingredients
that signal that a food or beverage has been through
this industrial processed thing.

Speaker 1 (02:29):
So if we turn around, which I think increasingly we
have a population that is doing that, and especially I've
got a daughter who's twenty two, younger generation looking at stuff.
But if there are a ton of ingredients and ingredients
you don't understand.

Speaker 2 (02:44):
Should you assume that that's ultra processed.

Speaker 5 (02:47):
Yeah, that is what we recommend as the way to
know if a food or beverage you're considering purchasing or
eating is ultra processed.

Speaker 4 (02:55):
You flip over that package and if you look at
that ingredient.

Speaker 5 (02:58):
List and you see even one but certainly a bunch
of ingredients where you think, I don't know what that is.
That's not something I would cook with. I don't even
know how to pronounce that. That's a signal that's an
ultraprocessed food.

Speaker 1 (03:10):
So do we fix it by just infusing everything with protein?
And then it's all Okay, so.

Speaker 3 (03:15):
It's still ultra processed, like like even a.

Speaker 2 (03:18):
Protein Are you picking on the pop tart?

Speaker 3 (03:20):
Yeah, protein pack a cop tart. We talked about this
on our editorial call this morning. Sounds great, protein, doctor,
I'm gonna let you weigh in.

Speaker 5 (03:29):
Yeah, So I mean thinking about what our That's a
strategy the food industry uses maybe to signal that something
is healthier for us by you know, saying, oh, this
is protein rich or whole grain rich, or this has
vitamins or minerals, right, But if it still has these
other ingredients, it's still an ultraprocessed food. And so you know,
the addition of you know, other nutrients that we might

(03:52):
think are beneficial does not change that food into something
that is not an ultra processed food.

Speaker 4 (03:58):
It's still ultra process.

Speaker 3 (04:00):
So just really shocking to see sixty two percent of
childhood diets come from highly processed foods. That was wild
to see. But at the same time, I'm thinking about
my own family and how difficult it is to get
my kids who are six and two to eat food
that we would consider not ultra processed. What is the
best way to do that? What are strategies that work
for kids. I think a lot of parents struggle with this.

Speaker 5 (04:23):
Yeah, I mean, I think it's a struggle for all
of us, right, you know, it's not just kids, it's
adults as well.

Speaker 4 (04:27):
You know, it's over half of adult diets.

Speaker 5 (04:30):
And I think there's a lot of reasons for that,
and it's you know, our taste preferences are shaped very early,
and there's a lot of marketing, particularly the children, for
these products.

Speaker 4 (04:40):
And they're easier to they're easier to grab and go.

Speaker 5 (04:43):
There a lot of them are ready to eat, and
you know, they're snacks. They save time, and a lot
of them are more affordable too, so that's something to consider.
I think it is the more snacks that you can
have out that are not processed, that.

Speaker 4 (04:58):
Are easy to grab and go.

Speaker 5 (05:00):
That is one strategy to help kids have more say
fresh fruits and vegetables to snack on, or healthy snacks
that are made ahead so that they can reach for easily.
But again that is extra work for parents and sometimes
extra cost for parents as well. So there are really
good and intractable reasons why these foods comprise so much

(05:21):
of our diets, and particularly our children's diets.

Speaker 1 (05:24):
We're talking with doctor Julia Wolfson, Associate Professor, International Health
Department at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Speaker 2 (05:30):
We're going to come back to her in just a moment.

Speaker 1 (05:32):
The headline crossing the Bloomberg Terminal coming from the Prime
Minister of Hungary, Victor Orban, who has been meeting with
President Trump at the White House, and the Prime Minister
of Hungary saying that Hungary wins US sanctions exemption on
Russian energy. And we know that there have been some
stiff sanctions against Russian energy as a result of the

(05:56):
Russian invasion and war against Hungary, so it looks like
Hungary getting an exemption there.

Speaker 3 (06:02):
Earlier, our team reported that President Trump signaled an openness
to exempting Hungary from sanctions on purchases of Russian energy
as he hosted Prime Minister Victor Orbin.

Speaker 1 (06:11):
All right, so let's get back to a guest talking
with doctor Julia Wolfson, Associate professor over at the Johns
Hopkins Bloomberg School of pub Public Health. Excuse me, she's
in the International Health department. So you know what's interesting.
The stat that Tim mentioned from the US Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention, their nutrition survey, when they talked

(06:31):
about highly processed food, they said pizza.

Speaker 3 (06:33):
So this is not the pizza that you get and
I get on Friday nights.

Speaker 2 (06:37):
That's what I want to ask you.

Speaker 1 (06:38):
So, like, I go to a place where I know
they are making their homemade crust from special.

Speaker 3 (06:46):
Weed and featured in the New York Times, you know, and.

Speaker 2 (06:49):
It's no, no, no, I hear, you're having fun.

Speaker 1 (06:51):
But but I mean it's like, you know, fresh tomatoes,
fresh basil. I guess maybe there's obviously some like homemade cheese,
but like what, like, how do we distinguish really really
bad processed food versus stuff that maybe isn't so bad.

Speaker 5 (07:09):
Yeah, I think that you know, that kind of pizza
that you're describing, or let's think about bread, even pizza
or bread that might make at home, Like you're combining
wheat and you know, flour and salt and yeast, and
you know you have your fresh tomato sauce.

Speaker 4 (07:23):
That's not an ultraprocessed food.

Speaker 5 (07:25):
So that but that is not the majority of the
pizza that people are eating. So when we talk about
things like pizza, it really could be those frozen pizzas
that you get in the grocery store or maybe more
mass produced pizzas that are made at scale and therefore
have some sorts of preservatives or other kinds of ingredients
that you know, change the say, the softness of the

(07:46):
dough or something like that.

Speaker 4 (07:48):
Those are the ultra process things.

Speaker 5 (07:50):
So not all ultra processed foods, though, are equally concerning.
I would say, you know, I mentioned bread, So you know,
the bread that we might make by ourselves at home,
like if we were some of the people who started
making sour oat bread during COVID, for example, Yeah, that's
not ut processed.

Speaker 4 (08:09):
Bread you might get at the bakery in.

Speaker 5 (08:11):
Your neighborhood that is made by scratch is not ultra processed.
But most of the bread that we see on our
supermarket shelves is ultra process that sliced bread that you
see and so, but that includes even whole wheat bread.
So you know, there are some ultraprocessed products that are
by definition ultra process because they might contain right thoselifuyers

(08:35):
or things that turn them into that product, but they
might still be some are less of a concern than others.

Speaker 3 (08:41):
I would say, So, just in the last two minutes
that we have with you, that health and even service.
As Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Junior has vowed to go
after these food companies so Americans do eat healthier. Thus far,
how is he doing well?

Speaker 5 (08:54):
I mean, I think it's good that he's focusing on
this as an issue. I think there are, as I mentioned,
you know, there's a lot of reasons why we eat
these foods, and one of them, a big one is
they're more affordable. They tend to be more affordable than
scratch ingredients. They save time, and they're more accessible.

Speaker 4 (09:12):
And so.

Speaker 5 (09:15):
I think some of the policies of the administration, say
cutting or even eliminating snap benefits is not helpful for
people to be able to avoid ultraprocessed foods. But thinking
about labeling or getting ultra process foods out of schools
in a way that also balances with giving schools the
resources they need to source and prepare less processed foods

(09:38):
would be a step in the right direction.

Speaker 1 (09:39):
Why do we just real quickly thirty forty seconds here,
why do we have so much ultraprocessed food? Is it
about keeping shelf life or like what is it? Or
is it just cheaper mass production food?

Speaker 2 (09:50):
I don't know, just quickly.

Speaker 4 (09:52):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (09:52):
I mean it's the majority of the foods in our
grocery store shelves, right. They make foods more shelf stable,
they are oftentimes more affordable, and they're in high demand
because they save people time and they save people.

Speaker 4 (10:03):
Mental energy as well.

Speaker 5 (10:04):
You know, it's a lot easier to say, have a
frozen dinner than it is to make all the components
of the frozen dinner yourself.

Speaker 4 (10:11):
So there's demand for it.

Speaker 5 (10:13):
And you know, they've really dominated our food supply for
decades now, so it will be really difficult to make
that switch at a large scale, but it's worth considering
how we can do it. Well.

Speaker 2 (10:23):
Last quick question twenty five seconds. Can we eat too
much protein?

Speaker 5 (10:27):
I think it is possible to eat too much protein,
and Americans do eat a lot of protein, so we
are not suffering from a shortage of protein in the
US as a whole.

Speaker 1 (10:38):
That's what my dad, O Bettie said, Everything in moderation, like,
it's pretty logical. Just do that. What.

Speaker 3 (10:43):
Yeah, even ultra process foods, even French fries, yes, no, no,
not processed.

Speaker 5 (10:47):
No.

Speaker 2 (10:48):
Doctor Julia Wilson so appreciate it.

Speaker 1 (10:50):
Associate Professor in the International Health Department at the Johns
Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Speaker 4 (10:55):
This is boombrang