The chemicals in the food supply

It's probably worse than you think.

Photo by Fahim mohammed on Unsplash

When I lived in Washington DC, my husband and his European friends would sometimes swap stories of how much weight they gained after moving to America, weight they only lost when they became fastidious about their diets in a way they never had to be back home in Italy, or France, or Germany. They’d often ask what it was about the U.S. food supply that caused them to spontaneously get fat.

Part of the answer might be the chemical additives that have been authorized for use in food over the last half-century, as I write in an oped today for The New York Times:

In the United States, an estimated 10,000 additives are allowed in the food we eat — including flavors, emulsifiers, pesticides, preservatives, ingredients in packaging and, yes, dyes. These chemicals are used in many of the ultraprocessed foods that now comprise most of the calories Americans consume.

Europe, by contrast, takes a more precautionary approach. You can read the article here.

The Make America Healthy Again movement, led by U.S. health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is correctly zeroing in on this problem. But let’s not lose sight of the big picture: the food environment is toxic because of more than just food additives. Junk food is cheap, ubiquitous, and heavily advertised, while healthy food, relatively hard to come by. So while removing and replacing some synthetic chemicals in food, as Kennedy says he’ll work with industry to do, is a step in the right direction, it’s unlikely to make a dent in rising rates of chronic diseases, like obesity and type-2 diabetes.

What’s more, there’s so much we have yet to understand about how the food environment sickens us. We know that behind many chronic diseases are interactions between genes and environments. But while we’ve sequenced the human genome, we have hardly begun to explore the particulars of how food environments drive illness.

I explore the additives issue — its history, and scope — and lots more about food environments with scientist Kevin Hall in our forthcoming book, Food Intelligence. The book comes out in September (and is already available now for pre-order). More on that soon.

In other good news, I’m thrilled to share that I’ve joined the Times as a contributing opinion writer!

Take care,

Julia