In recent times, there is much talk about ultra-processed foods, one of the great boycotters of a healthy diet and, therefore, of our health. These food products also have a negative impact on the environment. They are bad for you and bad for the planet .
To start, let’s refresh a bit about what an ultra-processed food is. The dietician-nutritionist and food technologist, Aitor Sánchez, explains it perfectly in his latest book Your diet can save the planet , just published by Paidós. “Ultra-processed foods are those that are defined by having in their composition mostly sugar, refined flours, poor quality oils, salt or additives that substitute some of the functions of these ingredients .” Therefore, they are ultra-processed: industrial pastries, cookies, ice cream, soft drinks, fried and salty snacks, sweets of all kinds and, although it may seem surprising, some baby foods.
Ultra-processed foods are highly palatable, that is, they taste good, they are very rich and, therefore, they are a bane, because they hook. Once you open the package of chocolate chip cookies it is difficult to resist eating it whole, or almost. And a bag of potato chips? More of the same, only in a salty version.
The alarm that has been unleashed around this “food” is not unjustified and it is that its consumption is associated with non-communicable diseases such as overweight and obesity; they can increase the risk of cardiovascular disease and even cancer .
So far the nutritional part, but what about the environmental? Do they negatively impact our planet? “So that you can have industrial pastries at € 3 per kilo, so that you can have such cheap croissants, you need hyper-cheap raw materials. These raw materials come from different places and with very, very aggressive production methods . We are talking about refined flours that come from different places with monocultures, palm oil or poor quality oils that are also cultivated with bad agricultural practices, sugar, which is also generated with monocultures . It is like putting all these agricultural practices together in a cheap dough to make biscuits or to make industrial pastries “, Sánchez tells us, and specifies even more:” They have a high impact at the production method level , they do not have many emissions at the computational level. global, that is, that impact is not seen from CO2 emissions into the atmosphere because they are not so high. You can see more because of the deforestation production model that it has generated ”.
In Your diet can save the planet (Paidós), the nutritionist makes it clear that not all large companies use bad practices but it is more common that the environment is less respected when it comes to prioritizing very low prices or the very high volumes of ingredients that are often delocalized such as refined flours, poor quality oils, such as refined palm oil, sugar … Precisely the ultra-processed ones have a large profit margin since they last a long time without going bad and are cheap .
“In the vast majority of cases that a violation of the environmental conditions of an ingredient has been uncovered to produce a cheap raw material, behind it was a supplier of large transnational companies with a catalog of ultra-processed products,” says Sánchez in the book.
How to put our grain of sand in this situation? As simple as getting away from this type of food . With this we will unknowingly stop contributing to the destruction of many habitats in the other part of the world. As the nutritionist points out, if we go ‘local and seasonal’, adding fresh products to the cart, “it is much more complicated that we are contributing to the deforestation of our tropical forests, to the destruction of a seabed , to the loss of biodiversity or the exploitation of the working conditions of the communities of other countries ”.
