Welcome to Part 1 of our two-parter on Ultra Processed Foods! Virginia is chatting with Laura Thomas, PhD, a Registered Nutritionist who specializes in responsive feeding and anti-diet, body affirming nutrition. Her work centers on helping parents and families end inter-generation dieting and body shame, and work towards a greater sense of embodiment and ease in their relationship with food. She runs the Substack and podcast Can I Have Another Snack?, and is the author of two books; Just Eat It and How to Just Eat It.

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Disclaimer: Virginia is a journalist and human with a lot of informed opinions. Virginia is not a nutritionist, therapist, doctor, or any kind of health care provider. The conversation you're about to hear and all of the advice and opinions she gives are just for entertainment, information, and education purposes only. None of this is a substitute for individual medical or mental health advice.

BUTTER & OTHER LINKS

Laura's three part series on UPFs

Virginia on processed foods here and there

labor rights violations for Amy’s workers

FAT TALK is out! Order your signed copy from Virginia's favorite independent bookstore, Split Rock Books (they ship anywhere in the US!). Or order it from your independent bookstore, or from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Target, or Kobo or anywhere else you like to buy books. You can also order the audio book from Libro.fm or Audible.

CREDITS

The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith. Follow Virginia on Instagram or Twitter. Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing. The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe. Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell. Tommy Harron is our audio engineer. Thanks for listening and for supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism!

Episode 101 Transcript

Laura

I am a Registered nutritionist. I’m based in London, I did live in the States for a while, which is why I’ve got this super messed up accent. All your listeners will be like, where is she from? I grew up in Scotland, lived in the States, and now live in London.

I split my time between clinical work, which is focused on family nutrition—I do a lot of work around responsive feeding in kids who have feeding differences, working with families where they’re just stressed about mealtimes with their kids, and also helping parents sort through their own stuff with food and body image. And then I also run a Substack called Can I Have Another Snack? which takes up a lot of time, as I know you know. 

Virginia

Yes. So I basically begged you to come on the podcast to talk about your three part series about ultra processed foods. This is one of those topics I get so many questions about.

I’ve reported it out a little bit here and there. And I definitely feel, just as a person in the trenches feeding kids, that I have figured out my own values around this, which is helpful and we may get into talking about that. But I’m not a dietitian or nutritionist. I haven’t done a deep dive of the literature. So when I saw you were doing this series, I was like, thank you, Laura!

So everybody, your homework is to go read all three pieces and subscribe to Can I Have Another Snack?. But just as a starting point:Laura, what is an ultra processed food? And why is it so hard for us to agree on that definition?

Laura

I don’t think we can talk about the definition of an ultra processed food without talking about the NOVA classification system. There are a few different classification systems that have attempted to try and nail down what exactly an ultra processed food is. But what has been most widely accepted in the literature and what we’re seeing a lot of the studies and the headlines coming out about now is something called the NOVA classification system that was developed in 2009 by this Brazilian dude called Carlos Monteiro. NOVA really annoyingly does not stand for anything, it’s not an acronym. That really fucks me up.

Carlos is nutrition researcher, he and his team came up with a system whereby he defines four different levels of food processing. So I’m going to walk you through the four different groups. 

Group 1 is called “unprocessed foods.” This includes anything from a plant, an animal, or a fungus. So that could be fruits and vegetables. It’s eggs and meat. It can be grains, like oats or rice or wheat. It can be chilled or frozen fruits and vegetables without salt or oil added. Basically, it’s any raw ingredient that you could buy from the supermarket or that you could pull straight out of the ground or pick from a tree, that kind of thing.

Virginia

So, oats but not oatmeal or oat bars? Like, just the oats.

Laura

Exactly that, but that’s an important clarification.

Then within this unprocessed foods category, there’s this minimally processed subcategory, which are things that are pickled or fermented from those raw ingredients. So, that’s group one.

Virginia

I feel like they’re already finding weird loopholes that pickled things are part of group one, but okay, keep going.

Laura

Honestly, it’s a minefield.

Group 2 are processed culinary ingredients. So these are ingredients that are derived from group one. It can be oils, from like olives or sunflower. It can be salt, spices, herbs, lard, butter, honey, maple syrup, that kind of stuff. They’re kind of like extracts or derived from those group one, minimally processed or unprocessed foods.

Virginia

Got it.

Laura

Group 3, you can think of as group one plus group two, mixed together. And these are called processed foods. It can be anything from fresh bread that you buy at a bakery to cheese that has been fermented and goes through the whole conversion from milk into cheese.

But also, it includes virtually anything you make yourself at home or a