#462: Gyorgy Scrinis, PhD – Ultra-Processed Foods, Nutritionism and Current Food Systems

Sigma Nutrition Radio

Danny Lennon

Sigma, Dietetics, Evidencebased, Nutrition, Training, Health & Fitness, Science, Diet, Fitness, Evidence, Bodybuilding, Health

4.8 • 626 Ratings

🗓️ 29 November 2022

⏱️ 70 minutes

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Summary

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About this episode:

Over the past decade, the increasing uptake and acceptance of the Nova food processing classification system has placed focus on one of the categories in Nova; ultra-processed foods (UPFs). Ultra-processed foods (UPFs) are products created from deconstructed (and recombined) food components, usually with the goal of creating a highly palatable, convenient, and profitable product. This typically means such products are high in nutrients of content (e.g. sugar, sodium, saturated fat, etc.). But in addition, they have other characteristics that may make them detrimental to health, particularly when they replace unprocessed or minimally processed foods in the diet.

There is now clear evidence showing that when such products make up a large proportion of the diet, such a dietary pattern has negative health effects. However, there are still many unanswered questions and many debates within nutrition science about how to best classify UPFs, to what degree they need to be limited, whether some can be beneficial, and what to do with policy going forward.

To offer one perspective on this issue, Associate Professor of Food Politics and Policy at the University of Melbourne, Dr. Gyorgy Scrinis, is on the podcast to discuss his work in the area.

While we have discussed the problem of reductionism in nutrition science previously on the podcast, Dr. Scrinis’ use of the term ‘reductionism’ does differ a bit from the way others use the term. For example, he suggests that nutrition science has been too reductive even at the food-level and dietary-pattern level.

His work on ultra-processed foods and the Nova classification system has attempted to understand the technological and corporate character of ultra-processed foods, the power of food corporations, and how food corporations shape and capture nutrition science for the purposes of promoting and defending their products.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to Sigma Nutrition Radio. This is episode 462 of the podcast. You are very welcome. My name is Danny Lennon,
0:24.1	and today we are going to be talking all about the concept of nutritionism and ultra-processed
0:30.7	foods. My guest today is Dr. Georgi Skrinnis, who is an associate professor of food politics and policy
0:37.3	at the University of
0:38.5	Melbourne in Australia. And over the years, his research has examined the politics, policy,
0:44.0	and philosophy of food and nutrition. And he has placed that lens onto the field of nutrition
0:51.7	science, onto topics like ultra-processed foods, dietary advice,
0:56.5	food security, functional foods, food labeling, and a list of other things. And he brings quite a
1:03.1	unique perspective given that his background is as a social scientist, not a nutrition scientist.
1:08.5	So hopefully this proves to be a very useful conversation and also
1:13.6	maybe adds a different perspective to topics that has been discussed on the podcast before.
1:18.6	Where there are some similarities, those of you who regularly listen to the podcast will have heard us maybe mention
1:23.6	nutritionism or nutritional reductionism, particularly if you listened to episodes with
1:29.4	Anthony Faraday, for example, or David Jacobs, as well as others. And this nutritionism is a term
1:38.2	that Dr. Scrinnis wrote a book about a number of years ago, and it has some distinct differences to how we've
1:45.7	referred to reductionism in nutrition in maybe previous episodes of the podcast. So lots of
1:51.4	interesting nuance to that. And then in particular, we are going to focus much of the conversation
1:57.1	around ultra-processed foods. And this is an area that's obviously very big in
2:02.5	nutrition science right now, as well as public health policy. But it lends itself well to looking
2:07.5	at this broader concept of nutritionism as it ties in things like the role of food corporations
2:13.4	that produce these foods and how the context in which they are consumed is having an impact on our health.
2:22.3	And ultra-processed foods is interesting to consider because there is still open questions and debate in nutrition science circles about how best to classify them.
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