Processed and Ultra-Processed™ foods have been heavy-rotation buzzwords in the food activist community since the Obama administration but gained increased attention once the Trump administration came into power and a chief evangelist against modern food, former Natural Resources Defense Council lawyer Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., was placed in charge of the world's most important government science agency, the National Institutes of Health.

Now, epidemiology has become a Supreme Court over science and instead of evidence-based decision-making, the default has become that if a harm or benefit can be suggested using food or chemical surveys, government will ban it and then tell scientists to figure out why.

That is good news for companies which had been marginalized trying to sell their products to people who want to be scared into believing the pizza box is causing more obesity than the pizza inside it.


How can this be health food? It didn't come from a box, and with no ingredients on the box, it is exempt from being labeled as Ultra-Processed™, or even have calorie information posted.

A psychologist has come up with a new way to monetize the war on food, using nutrition claims based on epidemiological correlation.  Richard Black, PhD, is chief scientific officer for the WISEcode app, wants you to use their app which tells you what ingredients are in food and what potential hazards someone claimed they cause. Which means what foods don't cause harm at all, even if someone in epidemiology claimed they did six months ago.

The problem with epidemiological correlation is that statistical significance is meaningless. By itself, the way it is used in both psychology and Harvard School of Public health food claims, it is so open to fraud it should be eliminated from papers.(1) If you want to believe red wine prevents cancer, you can find a paper correlating it to a benefit just like if you want to believe a weedkiller can cause cancer.(2) 

If companies use the app, they can pay a legal team like Environmental Working Group to promote a Dirty Dozen list of products with the most ingredients linked to risk of diabetes, and show how their foods are not. Or list products with the most phytosterols, if you want to believe those prevent diabetes.

The company believes their approach is better than Nova, which classifies foods in a range from unprocessed to Ultra-Processed™. Nova was created to claim that certain foods increased risk of obesity, heart disease and other chronic health conditions rather than the calories that the science community has shown is the only effect weight loss or gain, and therefore the cause of food harm of benefit. But Nova was a huge flop the first time activists tried to get it mandated in their most politically allied state, California. Whole grain certified organic™ bread can never be natural, scientists showed, it is processed. Everything is processed.

So activists were forced to instead focus on  Ultra-Processed™ but under Nova even that catches too many foods sold by companies who want to be seen as healthy. Organic Unsweeted Orange Juice is basically a Vitamin C-fortified Coca-Cola, the calories are very high, and calories are the only scientific factor in obesity. A blunt Ultra-Processed™ designation meant activists were stuck when trying to differentiate among companies they like and those they hate. If Whole Grain Breakfast Cereal sold in Whole Foods meets the standard for Ultra-Processed™, and it does, there is no point in claiming that is bad.

WISEcode wants to replace Nova with their system, which specifically exempts foods that are Ultra-Processed™ but food demographers have linked to better health outcomes.  To do that, the company picks and chooses epidemiology they like and then only include added sugars. So calories don't matter.

In obesity risk. Calories...don't...matter.

All that matters is if Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health has included an ingredient in one of their 300 papers per year suggesting some harm, or one of the other 9,000 epidemiology claims per year from other schools doing the same thing.

As a bonus, like Non-GMO Project, this could allow companies to buy a certification and claim they are basically health food regardless of how many calories their food has, the way they got high-calorie cupcakes sold at Whole Foods exempted from nutrition information while still being able to target much healthier cupcake mix you bake at home.

Using WISEcode, an Ultra-Processed™ food can instead be reclassified as part of a healthy diet. Want your product exempted? I bet you can pay them to "study" epidemiology papers you provide and they will remove you from that bad list and put you in the good list.

Trump administration economists are going to love this technique. They will be able to lift 10,000,000 people out of poverty next month just by using an app that redefines poverty.

NOTES:

(1) That is why a group of signatories writing in Nature, me included, asked to have editors stop thinking that statistical significance claims mean results are valid. They are not.



(2) There is no science to either claim, just like there is no science to belief that a horse dewormer treated COVID-19 or that SARS-CoV-3 was a miracle of biogenesis which just appeared in that Wuhan wet market naturally.