Interrupting today’s scheduled post with another Rapid Response (RR). For anyone new around here, a RR is a commentary published online in response to a scientific study that has been published in a journal, and gone through the peer-review process. The RR is written as an expert comment or reaction to the published article, usually dissenting, but critically, has not gone through peer review.
On CIHAS, a RR is a quick and dirty retort to whatever has been going on in the world of food, nutrition, and feeding kids.
And although Kids Eat in Color has been giving me plenty of fodder - to the point I think I am being trolled - I did promise to lay off. Completely unrelated: I’m still taking last minute Qs for next week's Dear Laura. Submit your (unrelated) questions here.
Today we’re here to talk about a new depth of food related fear mongering: ‘addiction’ to ultra-Processed foods (UPFs).
By way of an introduction, I’ve covered both issues separately already. I talked about the contrived concept of ‘food addiction’, specifically sugar addiction, last year when I covered sugar related myths. This year I unpacked what we do and don’t know about ultra-processed foods in a 3-part series (available here). And just last week published a primer I wrote for them on UPFs - this is helpful for anyone who just wants the gist of why the narrative surrounding UPFs is super unhelpful, without going down a 12, 000 word rabbit hole with me. Anyway, we can thank Vittles editor Jonathan Nunn for sending me the newspaper article that inspired today’s rant - before which I was blissfully unaware of this nightmare hellscape.
On the 9th of October, the British Medical Journal, (or BMJ) published an ‘analysis’ titled: Social, Clinical, and Policy Implications of Ultra-Processed Food Addiction. This, apparently, was newsworthy - being picked up by The Guardian and The New York Post, among others - despite not containing an iota of new or newsworthy information. The authors were not reporting a new scientific breakthrough. There was no gargantuan leap forward in our understanding of nutritional sciences. Fuck; they weren’t even reporting on a new study. As far as scientific publishing goes - an analysis is about as far from evidence as we can get.
It’s an opinion piece.
An Op-Ed. But make it science.
A screenshot of the recent BMJ ‘analysis’ paper published on 9th October
Now don’t get me wrong, analyses (??)1can be important for fostering scientific debate and for communicating what leaders in the field believe is the current state of the evidence (even if I think they’re full of shit). It's basically a way for scientists to have conversations with each other, and perhaps clinicians working on the ground too.
So, how did a fairly unremarkable analysis piece become headline news?
It basically comes down to a compelling narrative driven by sensationalised science journalism, combined with media-savvy celebrity-scientists.
Let’s talk about this first piece: unscrupulous, sensationalised, and frankly biassed journalism.
