Time Magazine Downplays Dangers Of Processed Food

Time Magazine dismissed the danger of hyper-processed foods last week by relying on research linked in part to the soybean industry.

On Tuesday, the paper published an article asking readers to ponder, “What if Ultra-Processed Foods Aren’t as Bad as You Think?” The magazine later changed the title of the piece to “Why One Dietitian is Speaking Up for ‘Ultra-Processed’ Foods” after the original headline provoked controversy online.

The magazine profiled a woke dietician named Jessica Wilson, who was “irked” by Dr. Chris van Tulleken’s book on processed food, Ultra-Processed People: The Science Behind Food That Isn’t Food. According to Time, Wilson complained the book was “over-sensationalized and that the news coverage of it shamed people who regularly eat processed foods — in other words, the vast majority of Americans, particularly the millions who are food insecure or have limited access to fresh food; they also tend to be lower income and people of color.”

“Wilson felt the buzz ignored this ‘food apartheid,’ as well as the massive diversity of foods that can be considered ultra-processed, a category that includes everything from vegan meat replacements and nondairy milks to potato chips and candy,” Time reported. “‘How can this entire category of foods be something we’re supposed to avoid?’ Wilson wondered.”

Wilson went on to conduct an experiment wherein she ate 80 percent of her daily calories from “highly processed foods,” which included swaps of “morning eggs for soy chorizo” among other changes.

“A weird thing happened,” Time reported. “Wilson found that she had more energy and less anxiety.”

Other than the countless variables cast aside in the study of one, the feature went on to highlight research from 2023 which suggested a healthy diet could prominently feature foods which are highly processed.

“Healthy dietary patterns can include most of their energy from [ultra-processed food], still receive a high diet quality score, and contain adequate amounts of most macro- and micronutrients,” researchers concluded.

Author affiliations show at least one researcher is linked directly to the Soy Nutrition Institute Global, an industry research group funded by the United Soybean Board.

Soybeans are among the “Big Three” ingredients that make up most hyper-processed foods, alongside wheat and corn. These edible products account for roughly 60 percent of the American calorie consumption, leaving the soybean industry with obvious incentives to dismiss growing anxiety around industrially manufactured consumables despite clear links associated with obesity, chronic disease, and early mortality.

Other major publications have meanwhile embraced the far-left dogma of “health at every size” to sell Americans the corporate-sponsored lie that obesity is “healthy” just as Big Tobacco similarly sold cigarettes with doctors. Major tobacco companies, in fact, bought some of the nation’s largest food companies throughout the 1980s as corporations manipulated their products to become as addictive as possible.

In January last year, Time Magazine also published a transcribed interview with a fitness historian and titled the article, “The White Supremacist Origins of Exercise.”

“How did U.S. exercise trends go from reinforcing white supremacy to celebrating Richard Simmons?” Time reported. “That evolution is explored in a new book by a historian of exercise, Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, author of the book Fit Nation: The Gains and Pains of America’s Exercise Obsession, out Jan. 2023.” The ensuing interview characterized health and wellness as an instrument of white nationalism, used to marginalize identities on the victim hierarchy of left-wing social justice.

Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist and the author of Social Justice Redux, a conservative newsletter on culture, health, and wellness. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at [email protected]. Sign up for Tristan’s email newsletter here.