New documentary shines a light on ultra-processed foods
Filmmakers Robert Kenner and Melissa Robledo are back with ‘Food, Inc. 2,’ which argues that additives from Big Food are manipulating our brains.
By Joe Berkowitz
Many of the food industry’s problems can perhaps be summed up by the humble buttered-popcorn jelly bean. Love or hate this sweet treat, its 1989 introduction was a chewy harbinger of food scientists’ ability to make any food taste like any other food. If a sugary candy could send savory signals to the brain, what else was possible?
A lot, it turns out. Flavor technology has evolved rapidly in recent years. Forget about candy that smacks of toasty popcorn; lab-grown meat is now practically indistinguishable from the real thing. But as much as advances in bioengineering have leveled up the veggie burger beyond belief, among myriad other breakthroughs, they’ve also let loose a deluge of so-called health foods that might not be so healthy in the long run. The new documentary Food, Inc. 2, which is now playing in select theaters and available for rent on streaming platforms, argues that when a product’s calorie or fat count appears too good to be true, your brain and body may suffer from the deception.
Food, Inc., which came out in 2008, used corporate farming as a launchpad for exploring all manner of unethical practices in the modern food industry. Although some in the industry argued that the film offered only a one-sided interpretation, the Oscar-nominated documentary resonated so deeply with audiences, it nearly derailed filmmakers Robert Kenner and Melissa Robledo’s careers. Rather than move on to another project right away, the pair found themselves occupying dais-side seats on a never-ending rotation of food panels.
“There was a total explosion of interest that caught us by surprise, frankly,” says Kenner.
That explosion was accompanied by massive shifts in the culinary landscape. In the years after the film came out, the then-burgeoning Food Movement galvanized interest in environmental, nutritional, and labor concerns; the number of farmers markets spiked; and so did healthy alternatives in grocery stores. Also happening soon after: Wide adoption of the phrase “ultra-processed foods,” even as these foods continued to proliferate on store shelves.
Although Food, Inc. 2, like its predecessor, takes a shotgun-spray approach to covering several troubling topics, it spends a significant chunk of its runtime on ultra-processed foods—and how the additives within them are rewiring consumers’ metabolisms.
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, regular processed foods are those in which the nature of an agricultural product has been adjusted, either through heating, freezing, juicing—or many other alterations that are not inherently unhealthy. Meanwhile, ultra-processed foods, which have been getting a lot of bad press lately, are those that are so thoroughly divorced from the real foods that go into them, and riddled with unpronounceable additives, consumers might never guess what those foods were. A more succinct way to explain the distinction, though, as relayed in Food, Inc. 2, is that corn on the cob is unprocessed, canned corn is processed, and corn chips are ultra-processed.
On their own, the occasional hot dog, French fry, or Cheeto shouldn’t be too concerning for health-conscious eaters. However, Americans on average, consume ultra-processed foods for 58% of their total energy intake, compared to 17% in Italy. That’s a lot of chips and Oreos! The problem, though, stretches far beyond the many ultra-processed foods that are straightforwardly not healthy, the filmmakers argue. Where things get truly murky is in the ultra-processed foods that use additives to trick your brain into believing it’s tasting something it isn’t—and messing with its natural ability to sense nutrients.
[Photo: River Road, Participant and Magnolia Pictures]
“This was never a problem, historically,” says Mark Schatzker, a food journalist who worked on Food, Inc. 2. “Two hundred years ago, if something tasted sweet, it had sugar, and this was a reliable indication of simple carbohydrate calories. But now, there’s just an arsenal of additives—artificial and so-called natural flavors, fat replacers, and non-nutritive sweeteners—and this isn’t what the brain was designed for. It’s food that tells a lie.”
Schatzker’s main area of interest lies in the sensory aspects of food, which he unpacks in his books, The Dorito Effect and The End of Craving. Kenner and Robledo met the author while researching their film and ended up relying on him—both behind the scenes and onscreen—to help translate some of Food, Inc. 2’s more dense scientific concepts in a manner that is, well, more digestible. His work came to their attention through Yale professor Dana Small, whose experiment on fake sugar, which appears in the film, offers a crystal-clear distillation of how the brain and the body interact with food.
Small has a history of studying how the brain processes food reward. In 2001, she conducted what she believes is the first neuroimaging study of feeding in humans, monitoring the response to chocolate in areas of the brain that represent pleasure of eating. In the documentary, she claims Pepsi was interested in this research, and approached her many years later about finding a way to decrease calories in a sugar-sweetened beverage, without compromising reward. Small fed her volunteers a series of equally sweet beverages with different caloric content, and observed how their brains expressed food reward.
Her team expected that the most caloric beverage—the one with a 75-calorie taste and 150 delivered calories—would be the consensus favorite. That honor, however, fell to the middle-sweet, middle-calorie beverage—the one with a 75-calorie taste and 75 delivered calories. Through follow-up studies, Small discovered that when sweetness matched calories, the subject’s body metabolized that energy; but when something was too sweet for the amount of actual calories present—or not sweet enough—the mismatch ended up blunting their body’s natural metabolic ability. In the latter case, those calories weren’t being turned into fuel, but instead potentially accruing into fat.
Go paid at the $5 a month level, and we will send you both the PDF and e-Pub versions of “Government” - The Biggest Scam in History… Exposed! and a coupon code for 10% off anything in the Government-Scam.com/Store.
Go paid at the $50 a year level, and we will send you a free paperback edition of Etienne’s book “Government” - The Biggest Scam in History… Exposed! OR a 64GB Liberator flash drive if you live in the US. If you are international, we will give you a $10 credit towards shipping if you agree to pay the remainder.
Support us at the $250 Founding Member Level and get a signed high-resolution hardcover of “Government” + Liberator flash drive + Larken Rose’s The Most Dangerous Superstition + Art of Liberty Foundation Stickers delivered anywhere in the world. Our only option for signed copies besides catching Etienne @ an event.