How the food system became a victim of its own success
Most chronic diseases trace back to a handful of lifestyle factors — smoking, alcohol, inactivity, and diet. On the diet side, the problem cuts both ways. People get too little of what whole, plant-based foods provide — vitamins, minerals, and fiber — and too much salt, fat, sugar, and ultra-processed food.
That imbalance, Sophie says, is a byproduct of industrialization. As food production scaled up, food got cheaper and engineered to be eaten in excess. At the same time, daily life evolved to gradually remove the physical activity that had once offset it.
“We're surrounded by a real excess of food that's been very cleverly manufactured and marketed.” — Dr. Sophie Atwood
That shift took decades to play out, and its effects are now showing up earlier in people's lives. Lifestyle diseases that once appeared in middle age are increasingly diagnosed in children.
What the traffic light evidence shows — and what it doesn't
Front-of-pack labeling rests on a specific assumption — that people eat poorly because they lack clear information about what's in their food and putting that information on the front of the package will change their choices. The traffic light system — green for within recommended daily limits, red for high — is built on that assumption and is widely adopted across the UK and Europe, with the US now moving in the same direction.
“People generally know what is bad and good for them, but that isn't the key reason why they're eating food.” — Dr. Sophie Atwood
In controlled settings, the labels test well. People find them clear, and they shift choices when products are shown in isolation. On an actual supermarket shelf, surrounded by competing products, pricing, and branding, that effect mostly disappears unless someone's already looking for it.
What the labels reliably move is manufacturers. No brand wants a red label, and that pressure travels back through the supply chain toward reformulation. For shoppers, the effect is narrower — people steer away from red, but green versus amber barely registers, so labels nudge people away from the worst options without doing much to highlight the best.
Why "ultra-processed" caught on — and why that's risky
The term "ultra-processed" has broken through culturally in a way that decades of talk about "junk food" never did. Underneath it is a deep instinct that natural feels safe and processed feels risky — often well below the level of conscious thought.
"Ultra-processed" activates what Sophie calls a behavioral immune system, an innate wariness of anything that seems tampered with or unfamiliar. Food tech neophobia, a specific resistance to novel production methods, amplifies it further.
“There's a lot of messaging out there that's really inaccurate about which food production processes are risky to people.” — Dr. Sophie Atwood
Greek yogurt, fortified breakfast cereals, and plant-based proteins engineered to improve nutrition all risk getting swept into the ultra-processed category. One US study put roughly 70% of grocery shelf items under that umbrella, at which point the definition stops doing much work as a screening tool.
Some of that breadth isn’t incidental. Agricultural lobbies with an interest in protecting traditional livestock farming have leaned into the ultra-processed framing to cast doubt on the plant-based and lab-grown alternatives meant to compete with them.
Why dietary patterns matter more than individual foods
Nutrition science has moved away from judging individual foods toward looking at overall dietary patterns. Cut one thing from someone's diet, and they return to baseline habits elsewhere, leaving the overall diet about the same. Junk food eaten occasionally isn't the problem. Eaten as a daily pattern, it is.
“In nutrition, we always say there are no bad foods, but there are bad dietary patterns. The question becomes how do you shift an entire dietary pattern?” — Dr. Sophie Atwood
Shifting a pattern means changing the conditions someone eats in every day, before any single choice gets made.
Building food environments that support healthy choices
Frank asks Sophie what she'd prioritize with a free hand to set national food policy. She would start by making the healthy option the easy one, everywhere. In restaurants, that means plant-based and vegetable-forward dishes making up most of the menu, not a token corner of it. In retail, it means putting those options where people are already looking and offering a wider range of portion sizes.
“If you go into a restaurant and look at the menu, the ratio of meat dishes to vegetarian or vegan ones is something like 80 to 20, or 90 to 10. In an ideal world, that ratio would be completely flipped.” — Dr. Sophie Atwood
Frank offers Greece, where he is traveling at the time of recording, as a kind of real-world version of that environment — one that grew on its own rather than through policy. Meals tend to be shared and vegetables often show up as dishes worth celebrating in their own right — a different relationship with food that, anecdotally at least, seems to do some of this work without anyone needing to think about labels.
What chefs, retailers, and individuals can do
Sophie points to restaurant kitchens first — people are most willing to try something new there, so chefs who develop appealing plant-forward dishes are often planting ideas that later show up in home cooking and on store shelves. She suggests retailers stock more plant-based and high-fiber options, and place them next to what people already buy, so the trade-off is visible at the point of choice.
On a personal level, Sophie's strongest recommendation is to eat less red and processed meat. It’s good for one’s health and for the planet, too.
This episode of Smarter Food Safety is available now, wherever you get your podcasts.
To learn more about the host, Frank Yiannas, and why Ecolab is partnering on this show, read our profile here.
Episode Field Notes
Terms and resources worth bookmarking for food and beverage operators this year.
Behaviour Change Technique (BCT) Taxonomy: The University College London framework cataloging 93 distinct techniques for changing human behavior — the full toolkit Sophie references to show why labeling is one small piece of a much larger puzzle for shifting dietary patterns: https://www.bct-taxonomy.com
Mediterranean Diet: The dietary pattern both Frank and Sophie return to as the strongest evidence-based model for long-term health — and a living reminder that how and with whom you eat can matter as much as what is on the plate: https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/healthy-weight/diet-reviews/mediterranean-diet/
GLP-1 Medications and Portion Demand: The class of medications reshaping consumer demand for smaller, nutritionally optimized portions — and the commercial signal Sophie identifies as likely to push the food industry toward a wider range of portion options in the years ahead: https://www.kidney.org/kidney-topics/glp-1-receptor-agonists-glp-1-ras
Dietary Guidelines for Americans: The federal guidance both Sophie and Frank reference as the evidence base for what healthy eating looks like — updated every five years by USDA and HHS: https://www.dietaryguidelines.gov
NOVA food classification system: The framework behind the "ultra-processed" term Sophie critiques in this episode — developed at the University of São Paulo and now used globally to classify foods by degree of processing: https://www.eatrightpro.org/news-center/practice-trends/examining-the-nova-food-classification-system-and-healthfulness-of-ultra-processed-foods
