Should We Eat More Processed Foods? | Debate | Intelligence Squared U.S.

[Music] good morning everybody um well what better way to start today than waking up to a nice breakfast and then having a lovely debate right afterwards uh and i just have to say wow uh a room full of food scientists uh and with all of you here i'm tempted to start out with a quick poll by applause to get you to clap an answer to this question how many of you here actually had breakfast this morning all right a sizable number of you if we had time for it i would really like to keep going with that question and asking who had what and who consumed anything that we might call ultra processed because that's what this debate is going to be about it's yes or no to this question should we eat more processed food and it is a pleasure for us at intelligent square to be here before this group the annual gathering of the institute of food technologists you are people who know food you know the tech behind food processing and of course that is a broad term so let's define a little bit what we're talking about in this debate we are not talking about food that gets minimal processing we're not talking about pasteurization or freezing or chopping or chilling uh orange juice is not going to be considered processed because it has to get squeezed even though that is a process but we're also not going to be hearing anybody making a case for so-called junk food nobody is here to defend chips and lollipops because that is really an easy one instead the ultra processed food that we're going to be talking about is food made up of numerous ingredients combined by ever advancing technology so that it will taste good and look good and deliver nutrition and fit in a package and be convenient and last a long time and most importantly it is intended to play a solid role in our overall diets the debaters are here to make the case for and against having those foods in our diets as say a net social good or not and importantly they are here to persuade you that they are making a strong case and that means we want to know where you will stand on this question before the debating even begins and so for that reason we're going to ask you to vote to tell us how you would answer the question before you actually hear the arguments being made we're going to ask you to do that by using your phone and going to iq i'm sorry ift.org debate that's ift.org debate and there you will be prompted to answer yes to the question or no to the question or to tell us that at this point you are undecided uh we're going to keep that vote open for a few more minutes and what we're looking for is to find out which side changes the most minds and one other thing i want to say about the culture of intelligence squared and what we attempt to do we really try to make the case that there's such a thing as good argument that people can disagree civilly and with respect for one another uh and to that end also what i'd like to encourage you to feel free to do is to applaud points that you like you know that you hear made during during the debate this program is going to live on as a podcast it's going to be broadcast on public radio it's going to be on youtube and we want the audience that hears that to know that you were all here that these debaters were trying to persuade you so please give voice to points that you like the opposite not so much so we're not looking for booing and hissing uh so if you hear something you don't like you know you might want to let out a sort of sorrowful groan or a sardonic chuckle something like that but uh you really we really want to keep it positive so one more time please go to vote ift.org debate ift.org debate vote yes no or undecided and while you're doing that i would like to ask you to meet our debaters first arguing that we should eat more processed foods and joining us remotely amy webb futurist and author of the genesis machine let's please welcome her hi everyone and amy's partner let's welcome to the stage michael gibney professor of food and nutrition and former president nutrition society [Applause] and opposing them arguing on the other side that we should not eat more processed foods here is marion nestle academic and author of food politics please welcome marion to the stage [Applause] and her partner is kevin hall nutrition and metabolism scientist for the national institutes of health kevin hall welcome to the stage [Applause] so our debate will go in three rounds and the first round will be opening statements by each debater in turn they each get three minutes and up first to argue yes to the question should we eat more processed food we're going to go first to amy webb again is joining us remotely amy it's your turn thank you so much good morning everyone i'm so sorry i can't be there with you in person for this important debate i'm on my last day of quarantine i want to start by saying words matter in the past few years we've experienced mind-warping soul-crushing amounts of change uh you know soul-crushing amount of change in inflation political upheaval new open discussions about gender and sexuality and a global pandemic that just won't seem to end the amount of change at this level it results in a massive amount of new data and as a result of that neurological overload our brains don't like all of this new data our brains crave structure uh they crave order so we default to labels labels are what help us create order out of chaos to resolve the messiness but labels obscure nuance and labels help to inflame cognitive biases if we've learned nothing over the past couple of years we've seen this happen time and time again throughout all areas of our society labels validate our cherished beliefs even if those beliefs are wrong labels help us find our tribes which then amplify those cherished beliefs and generate echo chambers from which it can be very challenging to escape we forget that labels are constructs and that they leave little room for context and interpretation today we're going to be talking about ultra processed or highly processed foods and we need to be really careful about those labels because words matter there's a labeling system in place called nova it was developed in brazil there are four categories group one refers to unprocessed natural foods these are edible parts of plants and animals the idea is we're cooking these things at home we've sourced them locally and they're wholesome group four foods that's what we're talking about today these are ultra processed that sounds ominous that label these are packaged snacks these are reconstituted meat products these are frozen foods these are what very much sounds like a demonic food group when we talk about foods using these labels our brains immediately make a value judgment group four is irresponsible and unforgivable but if we zoom out and challenge our cherished beliefs that's why we're having this debate after all there are three compelling reasons to say yes the first has to do with classification i've got whole grain bread in my kitchen it's mostly seeds i bought it in a store now technically this is classified as ultra processed but it is full of great nutrients it's low in fat it's high in complex carbohydrates athletes rely on this bread as a nutritious source of food this bread is contraband according to this label at the same grocery store where i bought the bread there's a bakery and at that bakery they make delicious brioche that is from scratch that is minimally processed and it's nutritionally void it gives me a headache it gives me stomachaches there are other reasons to vote yes for this that have to do with interpretation and application which we'll get into during the the discussion and during the closing remarks but i just want you to keep in mind that but labels matter if we think about processed foods and we can expand our definitions of course we should vote yes for this for this resolution to vote no would be to deny us optionality thank you amy webb our next debater is arguing no to the question and that is marion nestle marion the floor is yours hello it's an honor and a privilege to be here um i think that ultra-processed foods are the most important nutrition concept to come along since vitamins and i say this because i talk about this from a public health standpoint i'm interested in public health obesity and overweight are the most important public health nutrition problem in america today the cdc says that 74 of american adults are overweight or obese and 40 percent meeting the criteria for obesity and we need to look at what that's about and one of the things it's about is eating more calories obesity rates started to increase in 1980 and between 1980 and 2000 the number of calories in the food supply increased by nearly a thousand it went from about 3 000 calories to 4000 calories a day and people began eating more calories and we need to look at why and part of the reason for that was that the uh what was that corporations had to respond to the shareholder value movement which was a movement that required corporations to make returns to stockholders their very first priority the food industry got hit hard by that because of the 4 000 calorie a day problem it's hard to sell food in that kind of environment so food companies began making new products that were irresistible delicious inexpensive to produce and extremely profitable what's important to understand about ultra-processed foods is that they are a very specific category of of foods and this specific category by now has been associated in at least a thousand experiments uh since 2009 when the concept was developed at least a thousand experiments some of them very well done some of them systematic reviews and meta-analyses have demonstrated a very close association of consumption of ultra-processed foods with obesity which as we know is a risk factor for type 2 diabetes coronary heart disease morbidity mortality and these days covet 19. so a major public health priority is to reduce intake of ultra-processed foods not eliminate them entirely but reduce them this is a challenge to the food industry and i recognize that it is um but you're not i realize that you're not a public health agency but you need to take this concept seriously we need to reduce intake of ultra-processed foods thank you thank you marion nessel so you've heard the first two opening statements and now we go on to the third arguing yes and answer to the question should we eat more processed foods here is michael gibney michael give me ladies and gentlemen uh good morning ladies and gentlemen it's nice to be here they tell me that i shouldn't eat low-fat spreads or margarines that are high in fat and low in trans because they're ultra processed they contain additives where i come from these products have lowered blood cholesterol by 50 and made a very significant contribution to reducing cardiovascular disease they also tell me the commercial toddler food is ultra processed we shouldn't feed it to our children and we'll ask them later why because i don't understand the people who promote ultra-processed foods always talk about natural well let me give you some examples of how natural is not always great in the united states you fortify your flour with folic acid you don't add the folate that's in present in foods in the breakfast foods you had this morning because that folate is very poorly absorbed so what the brave scientists did was they took a folate from plant foods and they lobbed off two little molecules they invented a thing called folic acid it's rapidly absorbed rapidly transformed into the um effective metabolite and it has reduced the incidence of spina bifida by 50 percent spina bifida is a disease that confines people to wheelchairs doubly incontinent so that's that's a that's a win-win now our health of our our heart and our brains requires omega-3 fats and these are derived from fatty fish the fatty fish dine on marine algae but with declining fish stops the environment couldn't sustain a global supply of these fatty acids so instead the smart engineers took the algae out of the marine or out of the oceans grew them in big bioprocessing units feed the output to farmed fish and hey presto problem again solved now turning to food additives they tell me that lecithin is found in these spreadable fats is bad for my gut it will erode the lining of the gut a recent french study said showed that from industrially prepared foods the intake of lecithin is 50 milligrams now ladies and gentlemen one hand's egg one hand's egg contains three times that amount i had two eggs for breakfast and i feel good um i just want to finish by saying that the future will demand plant-based foods more and more and a recent study looked at the the proportion of ultra-processed foods in the diets of omnivores flexivores vegetarians and vegans and they found that as you moved upwards in the groups uh consuming most plant-based foods ultra-processed foods went up very simply just like you can't make an omelet without cracking eggs you can't make plant-based foods without processing processing engineering and processing aids thank you thank you michael gibney and our final debater will be arguing no in answer to the question should we eat more processed foods please welcome kevin hall thanks very much you know if this debate had been held five years ago i probably would have been arguing for the other side you see i'd spent my career at the national institutes of health studying the effects of different nutrients on the human body things like swapping carbs versus fat how that affects people with obesity and then i heard about this new categorization of foods called the nova categorization system that basically said nutrients you guys are living in the dark ages that's not interesting that's not important anymore it's really about the purpose and extent of processing and i thought that was nonsense it was anti-science it seemed like to me you know of course it's about nutrition right nutrition and nutrients like duh those things are related and so you know i asked the folks i'm particularly interested in obesity what is it that you think about these ultra processed foods that's causing obesity and they said well it's the salt the sugar and the fat and the low amounts of fiber i said aha you just named a bunch of nutrients you can't have it both ways the debate is over well you know scientists can't be satisfied with just a win on a rhetorical debate one of the things that we could actually do is design an experiment and so that's what i did uh we with my colleagues at the nih we designed an experiment where we brought in 20 men and women to live with us at the nih clinical center for a month we designed two diets that were matched for the salt the sugar the fat the fiber the carbs we asked people we randomized them to two groups one group started a very highly ultra processed food that was matched for the salt the sugar the fat and the fiber and another group ate a diet that had zero percent ultra processed food basically ask them eat as much or as little as you want and after two weeks we swapped them and basically the idea was if it was about the nutrients then there should be no difference in how many calories these people ate and i would be right once again however i was drastically wrong when these people were eating the ultra processed diet despite being matched for these nutrients of concern they ate 500 calories per day more they gained weight and they gained body fat whereas when they were eating the other diet the unprocessed diet they were losing weight and losing body fat so now we don't know what the mechanism of that is and as a scientist i'm happy to be proven wrong the science showed that there is something about these ultra-processed foods that cause people to overeat and gain weight now we're trying to figure out what is the mechanism because this category of ultra-processed food is very wide and if we can figure out what the mechanisms are then we can give some information about how to avoid them how to reformulate potentially ultra-processed foods but right now we simply eat too much thank you kevin hall and that concludes our first round of this intelligence squared u.s debate where the question is should we be eating more processed food now we move on to round two and round two is more of a free-willing discussion among the debaters and i i just want to say what i think we've heard in the opening statement is one side arguing that there's something about processing of food that makes it bad for people particularly on the foot with a focus on nutrition obesity you didn't mention addiction but i think that's also part of the argument if you had had more time um and the other side saying that that's nonsense and that it's there's a uh unfair uh associations being made with the term processing and ultra processing and that in fact processing can bring benefit to food particularly nutritious benefit i want to go to amy webb on that point um amy your your opponents don't i'm not hearing your opponents dispute the argument that uh ultra-processed food can be sort of juiced with uh with nutrients to improve uh to improve their health benefit the weight the nutrient benefit the way that you mentioned you saw in the bread that uh that you like but there are they're not arguing that that's not true they're arguing that the other stuff that happens when food is processed to make it taste good uh added sugar added fat uh potentially other additives although michael challenges that but they're saying it's the other stuff that happens during processing that builds their case for the dangers of processed ultra processed foods what's your response to that so i was about to say i'm a social scientist and uh i also run experiments and i can tell you um that when you run studies you've got a control group and then you're testing for a narrow set of other outcomes and what's missing is the knock-on effect so let me continue with two examples i sort of two of the three examples from the beginning um in favor of why we need to broaden our thinking here um the second one had to do with interpretation milk is a dairy product that's a group one food that is something we interpret as wholesome and good and you can locally source it it supports local economies but what if wholesome minimally processed foods are actually just as bad for us as what you heard from that experiment countless studies have proven that dairy products are actually not good for many people causes inflammation in fact there are ample studies showing that in women certain bacteria strains found in natural organic yogurt are shown to increase the growth of uterine fibroids which are benign growths but but horrific um they cause complications with pregnancy excessive bleeding they can be very painful and lead to hysterectomy now if you were to run a study and you were trying to figure the outcomes based on calorie or based on choice this is a variable that you would miss and so again we start to miscategorize or mislabel things but the other point had to do with the application i'm an endurance athlete i'm a long-distance cyclist and i have to be very careful about what i put into my body i have to stay hydrated you know i can't stop for a nutritious home-cooked meal on mile 50 during a long ride i rely on ultra-processed foods to perform at my peak i eat gel it's designed to quickly absorb into my bloodstream there are natural flavorings you know it's it's fine for vegetarians and literally right now the tour de france is happening the world's most elite athletes are literally fueled by ultra processed food i live a privileged life and i can choose to eat gel but there are billions of people around the world where nutritionism and food scarcity is a real issue here um so added nutrients things that are shelf stable you know uh foods that can withstand supply chain interruptions interruptions that food in the form of a cereal is a lifeline let me break in on you amy to come back to marion i i didn't hear marion in response to my question about the the negative impact of some of the stuff that's done during processing but i'd like you to pick up to that in other words added sugar added fat etcetera again i heard amy making history yeah i mean i think we have a definitional problem here my understanding of my interpretation of ultra-processed foods is that these are foods that are industrially produced um well the gel i'm thinking i'm sorry the gel would be industrially produced i think and and the bread that amy's talking about is large-scale production so i don't think we're having too much of a definitional problem well i think we are actually but the um the point is that the amount of evidence that links consumption of ultra process as opposed to other kinds of processed foods to poor health outcomes is really pretty overwhelming by this time it may be that these are correlational studies and they don't prove causation which is why kevin hall's experiment is so important but there's something about these foods that causes people to eat more gain weight develop type 2 diabetes and all of these other conditions we cannot ignore this literature it is extraordinarily large and consistent and when you have a large consistent body of research like that you have to pay attention to it and that's i think why we think that there's something about ultra processed foods that we would be better off eating fewer of um so michael give me let me take it to you i you you made a brief statement i think in defense of margarine and i happened to do a little research on what goes into margarine so there is dairy product in margarine skim milk but also salt water oil derived from a plant plus emulsifiers lesser than which you mentioned in flavoring and color additives there could be other nutritional inputs like omega-3 and then there are process they go through processes called hydrogenation agitation pre-crystallization crystallization then it's tempered then it's ready to go as amy said in the beginning that sort of is that's the picture of horror for a lot of people when they want to portray uh processed food as a bad thing that there's something it seems like something very unnatural is being visited upon those ingredients what's your defensive margarine in more detail well and it meant let's assume that it's up against butter well people forget that we have a regulatory system that has operated for uh over a century now and which doesn't allow us add things to foods which are dangerous for us and when it happens as i will mention when it happens and it does happen they are removed or transformed so i would have to say that everything you put into your mouth has a risk benefit to it and the question is if these margarines lower serum cholesterol do they are they good and yes yeah the answer is very much so but could i comment on something that was said earlier wrong sure this idea that nova is the only classification of ultra processed food is rubbish [Applause] marion marion did say that you shouldn't ignore the literature well they're ignoring it because there are three other categories university of north carolina's category the institute of food information council's category and the european prospective investigation into cancer category one study took all of these and used a single database from spain a very comprehensive and famous database and they asked the question let's recode this database according to each of these four definitions and they did and they asked the question what's the impact on ultra process food on health it was like snowflakes nova showed an effect of ultra fast food and obesity none of the others did university of north carolina found an effect on blood pressure none of the others did and in every single metabolite they looked at there was disagreement now they can say they're picking nova because it's the most studied it's the most popular that's just not science that's not what's done okay kevin i want to move on to a different topic rather than debate the definition of nova right now um because amy made a point that's a more a more global point about what she was driving towards was that the one of the benefits of processed food is that essentially to put it simply it's going to help feed the world that there are places where the food that this food being cheap uh calorie dense etc may be the difference between eating and not eating for certain populations uh and i want you to take on that argument no i'm i don't think anyone up here is arguing the fact that you know the food system that we have now which has generated according to nova in the u.s you know more than 50 of the calories that are available has gone a long way to addressing many of the problems of nutrition um that were you know really highlighted in the beginning of the 20th century provide an ample supply of calories and protein and micronutrients and vitamins to a population to sustain them there's no argument about that it's convenient it's cheap it's labor-saving there's all sorts of very positive aspects about ultra-processed foods see i maybe i should be on the other side of the fence but i don't go too far in yeah but what i think you can't ignore is that there are some unintended consequences when we have you know 4 000 calories per day available in our food supply in the u.s we actually have wasted more food in recent years than we have eaten it's it's insane okay let me let me take it to amy hey so amy we we did we did explore your point and your opponents to some degree conceded part of your point but you you again have not addressed the issue that they talk about the stuff that's doing you know causing to danger obesity uh certain food addiction uh problems of sugar salt fat yes yeah it strikes me that my opponents want to have a debate about the future of the fast food industry and how they're marketing their products to people i don't i don't think that i don't think that's fair to what they're saying i think you would make that argument about potentially i'm not sure would you say that about peanut butter and margarine things like that that butter is better and the less ingredients in peanut butter is better well i mean the margarine example is a really interesting example right because we had a whole period of time where you know ultra-processed margarine which is still ultra processed introduced trans fats into the food supply but that was corrected decades yeah together but but i want to i want to give amy a chance to answer this question i just want to clarify you are not just arguing against fast foods and like of course not okay so amy they're not arguing that may be true but unfortunately the way that that the contours of this debate are pushing into obesity and addiction and quite frankly nobody ever talks about being addicted to the gels that that i eat on a long distance ride we have to broaden this conversation to make it more nuanced and we cannot hang us our opposition to ultra processed foods on mergering on you know a few things that that have been proven to be bad for us over time there is a wealth of data and evidence supporting the fact that ultra processed foods in the right circumstances and conditions are actually quite good for us they're good for local economies they're good for our bodies and they are they are good for the public to obscure all of the other data and evidence that are out there because of a few experiments that are easy for us to conceptualize i think is really giving short shrift to our potential futures you're a roomful of researchers we have scientists that are looking into new ways to sustain us and we are going to need optionality given what's happening with geopolitics climate change and instability within our global supply chains quite frankly i'm not sure why we're even arguing this point right now to me it's very clear that the world benefits from having more ultra-processed foods when we think about them in the right ways okay that sounds like perfectly teed up for a response from marion yes the food industry benefits from ultra-processed foods because they're among the most profitable foods on the market what we have from kevin hall's experiment is evidence that these foods encourage people to eat more than they should and this is now a national problem of public health importance with three quarters of american adults overweight by cdc standards we really need to look at this this is an enormous problem for our society and if eating fewer processed foods is a way to approach that i think we ought to look at that really seriously michael well i i think the the the opposition are being a little disingenuous with the facts in kevin's study the people were offered foods with exactly the same calories but they had to pick from the array of food in front of them because it's what's called ad-lib feeding well the ones on the ultra-processed food by chance picked energy dense foods so they had a much higher energy density than the control group now i admire kevin's work he's a good friend he's trying another experiment and the best of luck to him it's very very hard to do but the facts are energy density is probably a factor in in in in this regard if i could just ask one question why would toddler commercial target of food be banned that's effectively what nova is saying now you can what what wrap words around this baby commercial toddler foods not baby food infant formula toddlers you know the stuff you made in plastic jars or gogurts and things like that 12 months older sorry no brand names i apologize for that why is that being banned so a couple of points michael um i think that rationalizing and explaining the effects is one thing and then the observations are another so we can all sit down and say oh here's the reasons why we obtain the results that we obtained in our study but we actually have to do an additional experiment to prove it and so what we're left with we're left with a concept that ultra processed foods as a category a very broad category too broad in my opinion have some deleterious health consequences when you define them by the nova categorization system there's no doubt about that now we have to figure out what the mechanisms are all right so we can pick individual food items and ask the question how can they possibly be bad and we can have a rhetorical debate about how they might may or may not be bad on their own but we actually have to do a study we actually have to do the science to try to figure out what it is about these foods that's bad use that science to help reformulate products in order to make them better for us there's oh and you don't want to throw the baby out with the bath water there's all of these positive attributes i went over about ultra processed foods and we don't want to go back to the days where you know one member of our family was sitting at home cooking for the rest of the of the family for the rest of uh for a huge portion of their day so we need processed foods and we need ultra processed foods but we don't need to eat more of them amy um marian's a couple of times made the point that uh for her part of what troubles her about the current arrangement in the world of ultra processed foods is that um it's it's uh manufacturing distribution advertising is controlled by multinational corporations whose interests are not the same as the people who are eating the food i would like you to take on that argument absolutely and i can see that point in very limited circumstances the truth is that it's a big wide world out there there are plenty of global food manufacturers some of them make products designed to that are designed to continue to build its market share but there are plenty of products again i call back to this bread that you know that i've got that's very much not designed to be addictive it is challenging to eat but it's nutrient dense um and it's a wonderful alternative to what else i might have and again this is why i opened with with an argument about words and labels we have a global food challenge we have an impending global water challenge so if we allow ourselves to be so reductive to point fingers at the typical agricultural companies or the typical industrial food manufacturers and and demonize them without allowing ourselves more contours in the debate we are you know doing actual irreparable harm to our futures there is no way to get around that so absolutely there are products that fit her definition but there are also myriad products not to mention many many companies that are going in a different direction or offer alternative types of products so this is really about opening our minds to alternative possibilities for our futures which we will need i i want to just take the challenge to the other side are you opening your minds to alternative possibilities are you are you failing to do that um can you go for mary you want me sure you need to answer that um i agree with everything that's been said there's processed foods have their place in society but to ignore the body of evidence that links this specific classification of foods with poor health outcome it seems to me is to be to be ignoring something that shouldn't be ignored and whether we like it or not this concept of ultra-processed foods has opened up a way of experimentation that has given us a lot of evidence about the effects of food on health and it's evidence i think we cannot ignore all right that concludes round two of our intelligence squared us debate thanks to our debaters for that and now we move on to round three and those will be closing statements by each debater they will be getting two minutes for that and speaking first in answering yes to the question should we eat more processed foods here again is michael gibney thank you very much first of all i'd like to thank my partners for a very interesting debate um michael pollan the well-known american food writer once wrote that you should never eat anything your granny wouldn't recognize well between my two grannies they raised 17 children one on a carpenter's wage in the slums of dublin one on a shepherd's wage on a little cottage in the mountains their diet was monotonous boring and so on if they got a day pass out of heaven and came down to earth to my local supermarket they would believe there was a second heaven now this idea of hankering after the past is uh what i call a it's a pastime of what i call the high priest of nutrition that tell us and how to run our lives and the idea that we'd all sit down together and eat meal is a good idea but the reality is that society has put blocks in our way time is a big issue not just absolute time like long commutes and so forth but relative times like scheduling the ins and outs and coming and goings of a complex family that have different tastes so convenience is a terribly important part of the modern food supply now i have said that we are facing a future with challenges challenges with increasing our increasing global population in the western world increasing aging population challenges to the supply lines food insecurity and so forth and if we're going to tackle those as as well as climate change we are going to have to innovate and in terms of climate change that's going to make more and more plant-based foods and i think we have to have confidence there in our regulatory system and confidence that we can do it i'd like to end with a quote from charles darwin it's not the strongest of the species that survives nor is it the most intelligent it is the one that adopts best to change thank you [Applause] next up and arguing no in answer to the question should we eat more processed food making his closing statement kevin hall so i'm going to continue to spend your tax dollars at the national institutes of health trying to figure out what it is about the ultra-processed foods and the diets that we give to people in these very controlled environments what it is that causes people to overeat and gain weight spontaneously without trying to do so that's going to take many years to try to figure this out and i hope that the results of our research are going to help folks like you reformulate and make foods that are not going to have these negative health consequences of course even if we figure out just the calorie intake side of things doesn't negate the fact that ultra-processed foods have been associated with a variety of other diseases and it might be completely independent or it might be just a knock-on follow-on but we're going to do our best to figure this out one of my debaters on the other side suggested that words really matter and i agree and so let's look at the words in the resolution of this that we're debating here the question is should we a nation that is already over consuming most of our calories coming from ultra processed foods eat more i mean just logic suggests given the situation that we find ourselves in you cannot vote otherwise than to suggest that this is an answer is no it does not mean we are demonizing ultra-processed foods in doing so that's just logic you have to vote no we already eat too much ultra processed foods we eat too many calories and to vote otherwise it's just a logic thank you kevin hall and speaking next from her remote location uh and arguing on the yes side of the question here again is amy webb thank you everyone and i again want to thank our opponents for a spirited debate i want to tell you a quick story about my dad my dad is 80. he lives alone actually not too far away from where all of you are in chicago when the pandemic started he lost his support network in quarantine his friend groups were gone the restaurants had closed that impacted his nutrition he has a whole bunch of very serious medical issues which means that he has to have a specialized diet thankfully mercifully i found a delivery service that creates pre-prepared frozen meals they are delivered once a week and they fit the various criteria and definitions regardless of which model that you're looking at for highly processed foods now these particular frozen meals uh low in sodium uh low glycemic index low in fat and somehow still pretty tasty essentially these are the same meals that my father would have gotten inside of a hospital under doctor's care my point is this is exactly what a doctor would have prescribed in another setting but when we label a meal as ultra processed or created by an industrial manufacturer something about it feels wrong you've heard me say over and over again that words matter the easiest way to create order out of deep uncertainty and all of the change that we're facing is to pick a few villains the big you know food manufacturing companies the the big retailers the big agricultural companies you know and a few positive examples to support those claims but that's incredibly reductive you just heard my opponent talk about logic well what's harder here is flexible thinking you heard my debate partner quote darwin those who who survive are the ones who are most adaptable to change ultra-processed foods it's a huge category some of it's bad some of it is the result of evidence-based research back food science and innovation and investment into emerging food technologies should we eat more ultra-processed food when we think about things in a logical way the obvious answer can be nothing other than yes thank you amy webb and our closing word the last word goes to um uh marion nessl making her closing statement on the no side of the question should we eat more processed foods well obviously i think no ultra-processed foods the most important concept to come along in nutrition in a long time and i think that kevin hall's experiment is the most important nutrition experiment to have been done in decades the 500 calorie difference that he found is extraordinary usually diet studies show a difference of 50 calories if that many and those are considered to be good i'll give one example i wrote a book called soda politics in 2015 and i wrote it as an advocacy manual for how to reduce consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages but i got i certainly did not write it as a diet manual uh but i got letters afterwards saying i read your book i stopped drinking sodas i lost 10 pounds i read your book i stopped drinking sodas i lost 20 pounds 40 pounds the record was 80 pounds cutting down on ultra-processed foods has a really good chance of helping us control what is an important public health problem and i think we need to eat less of them i realize that this is a challenge to the food industry and i hope that it's one you will take on really seriously thank you thank you mary nestle and thank you to all of our debaters for the spirited debate and now it's time to learn where you are on this question after hearing all of the arguments we'd like to ask you to vote a second time please do that by again going to your cell phone and scanning the qr code that's in your program or go to ift.org debate to cast your second vote and you will find instructions are on the screen and also in your programs and what we are looking to see is how many people actually uh changed their minds in the course of the debate who who was persuaded so i'm going to have the results in just a moment or two but i i you know this this felt like a conversation that could have gone on for another uh uh several days and uh and so it since we have a few minutes i just wanted to uh um to continue it um something that did not come up actually what i think i heard happening in this debate is the side that was arguing for more processed foods was saying let's have more good processed foods on the side again saying let's have fewer bad processed foods and that seemed to develop the middle ground but um it was the more question that kevin raised at the end um and i want to take that to you amy as you're a futurist you know we didn't talk a lot about what your career is but you you look down the road and talk about technology and um uh innovation and where things are going and problems that can be solved and and so more sort of suggests i i think in a futuristic world uh it came up plant-based foods um lab-grown meat for example which i guess everybody would consider would everybody consider a lab-grown meat highly processed yeah but where would you fit that into this conversation amy sure so um i realize futurist is kind of a silly sounding job title my background is game theory and economics so i use data and build models and do lots of deep research to figure out plausible alternatives um when i think of the word more i'm thinking about optionality so different types of you heard my partner talk about bioreactors this is a way of not just creating plant-based proteins but actually cellular meat-based proteins take cells from a chicken incubate them in a bioreactor without any of the additives that we currently have in the commercial meat supply system today and out comes edible tissue that is by orders of magnitude better than what we have access to right now there is a future in which more forms of culture processed foods um actually accomplish the same goals as that locally sourced locally grown food that is more sustainable better for the environment and actually more you know nutrition dense so part of the challenge here is from my point of view i get very worried when we immediately ultra process sounds really scary and there's so many examples of how these types of labels have led to what i would consider terrorism um in farms in the food supplies we have to get past this and have a more nuanced conversation and these labeling systems the classification systems which aren't aligned to begin with you know we've seen problems with that in the fields of artificial intelligence synthetic biology you know automation we could go on and on so i i understand why they exist but i think we also need to you know acknowledge that they can be incredibly problematic because we're doing this long-term planning for the future uh i'd just like to hear the other side respond to the part of your argument where you said that um a sort of uh lab-grown need would have benefits for the environment and that really didn't become the big part of the conversation that we had overall the issue of ultra processing ultra processed foods in the environment but would one of you want to take on the issue of labrador and meat do you consider that a good direction to move things in if we can do it um i'd say the jury is still out on the environmental impact uh these studies are being done i want to see the science on it there's plenty of science and even the word lab grown i think is a dangerous area you know territory to weigh into because it connotes images and ideas that that i don't think are useful um so there's actually ample work done not by big bioreactor but all all different types of researchers from all around the world it's a it's a more reasonable way once we can achieve scale to produce uh protein that's arguably better for the resources that that otherwise would be consumed it's better for the animals it's better for us it's just different yeah um kevin did you want to yeah i mean i think that part of the the key there is arguably right so we actually have to do the science to figure this out and what we've observed is that there are a lot of unintended consequences of you know genuine legitimate efforts to improve foods that we produce and we have to actually do the science to figure out if there are unintended consequences but michael your argument is the regulatory process is there to catch these issues sorry your argument would be that the regulatory process is there to keep an eye over this yeah and it's worked fairly well if you think of acrylamide we don't have it as a problem anymore uh trans fats are gone uh bsc has been dealt with i'd share the european committee on that on that issue um there are lots of examples of problems that came we dealt with and they're gone and that will continue to happen that's why we have a strong regulatory system all right i have the final results so just to remind you we asked you to vote before you heard the arguments and again after you heard the arguments and we're interested to look at is which side uh was able to change more people's minds so here are our numbers on the first vote uh and on the question should we eat more processed foods 52 percent of you here at the ift conference said yes 28 said no and 20 were undecided so again the number that we're looking at is that change uh between the first and the second vote in the second vote the team arguing yes for the motion what their vote went from 52 to 52 held absolutely steady flat zero uh let's look at the other side their first vote was 28 and their second vote was 33 so they gained five percentage points they got five percent of you to change their minds so uh congratulations on that but i want to say this is not over um we we keep this is this is just the vote here at the live audience today at the ift conference but we are keeping this vote open uh for millions of listeners on radio and on podcasts and online who will also have a chance to vote and weigh in on this incredible debate one more time i want to thank uh the institute of food technologists for having us here at intelligent squared again i really want to thank these four debaters for the way you did this i want to thank all of you for attending and voting and applauding so thanks i'm john donovan and we'll see you next time you

Channel: Open to Debate

Views: 3,393

Keywords: Intelligence Squared, IQ2, IQ2US, Intelligence Squared U.S., debate, live debate, I2, nyc, politics, conservative, liberal

Id: hNEHJQjwBR0

Length: 52min 7sec (3127 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 05 2022