The Vital Pursuit of Profit

21st Century Gargantua, with apologies to Gustave Doré (1854)

By Will Novosedlik

When it comes to obesity, which has gained a lot of literal and statistical weight since the 1970s, the evidence of study after study shows that the problem is directly linked to the excessive consumption of Ultra Processed Foods.

What are ultra-processed foods (UPFs)? The simple way to think of them is to take something like corn. Fresh off the cob, it’s unprocessed. Canned or frozen, it’s processed. In the form of a Dorito, it’s ultra-processed.

The food companies that make these things are like hedge funds: they win both on the way up and on the way down. The more of these ultra-processed foods the food giants can sell, the more profitable they are. That’s winning on the way up. (Of course, when we say winning, we don’t mean the Dorito-eating consumer. We mean the Pepsico shareholder.)

According to the most recent data from Statistics Canada and the US National Institutes of Health, 30% of men in Canada and 43% in the US are obese. Overall, 35.5% of Canadians and 64% of Americans are overweight. This is all good news for the food giants, where what’s bad for the waistline is good for the bottom line. 

Then comes a threat: the rapidly rising use of weight loss drugs like Ozempic, Contrave and Wegovy (otherwise known as GLP-1's). It means that people are eating less, which is not good for food companies’ bottom lines. The estimate is that by 2030, 9% of the adult US population will be using GLP-1 drugs. That’s 30 million consumers. 

To paraphrase a cliché, one man’s bad news is another man’s business case. While the GLP-1’s are very effective at weight loss, they also reduce muscle mass, which means people on weight-loss drugs desperately need more protein.

Enter Nestle’s Vital Pursuit line of protein-rich frozen meals, launched last year. In a recent article in Barron’s magazine, Nestlé North America CEO Steve Presley said, in perfect public relation-ese, “At Nestlé we want to be there for every moment in our consumers’ lives—today and in the future. As the use of medications to support weight loss continues to rise, we see an opportunity to serve those consumers.” 

And that’s called winning on the way down. 

Of course the healthy approach would be to eat less ultra-processed foods, which now comprise over 73% of the American food supply. The average American adult gets over 60% of their daily calories from UPF’s.

A big part of the problem is that UPF’s are so addictive. They are designed that way. An article in The Guardian describes a study by Kevin Hall, a scientist at the UK’s National Institutes of Health (NIH) in which he got 20 healthy adult volunteers to eat either an ultra-processed or a minimally processed diet for two weeks, then switch to the other diet. He encouraged them to eat however much they wanted. He found that volunteers had eaten 500 calories more each day when they were eating the ultra-processed diet  – and their bloodwork showed elevated levels of hormones responsible for hunger. Which explains the famous Lay's Potato Chips tagline, “Betcha can’t eat just one!”

They’ve got you coming and going. Or should we say, gaining and losing. Either way, winner takes all.

Will Novosedlik is a Toronto-based writer, designer and editor. He is known for a critical perspective on the socioeconomic impact of design, advertising and marketing.