Julio Basulto: "We take more calories from alcohol than from legumes"

• Newspaper library Read all the interviews on the back cover of EL MUNDO

Julio Basulto

.1971,

.

Dietitian-nutritionist, associate professor in the Human Nutrition and Dietetics degree at the

.

In his provocatively titled book

(Vergara) he reveals the enormous amount of garbage we ingest.

Food is something we eat to nourish ourselves.

Is everything we eat that does not provide us with nutrients also food?

I call them edible substances, they are those products that more than nourish us, they

us .

I absolutely refuse to call food products that have very poor nutritional composition, very poor quality, very high caloric density, and very low nutritional density.

As I also refuse to call a sugary drink a soft drink, even though it is recognized as such by the legislation in Spain, because for me a soft drink is something that really refreshes, and sugary drinks do not refresh, they are fattening.

Many products that carry flashy labels saying they are free of added sugars or contain zero fat, are they junk food?

The Ministry of Health is assessing these days the ban on health claims - such as "no added sugars" - for food products that do not meet certain nutritional profiles.

Because if they don't have a certain nutritional quality profile, those labels are confusing.

For example, iron can be added to a chocolate palm tree, something very easy from the point of view of food technology, and then it is possible to say that this chocolate palm tree has iron and iron helps the formation of red blood cells and oxygen transport in cells and intellectual performance.

And yes, iron does that.

But the chocolate palm tree is not very healthy, rather the opposite.

Unhealthy products should not carry health claims.

Nowadays the labels confuse a lot.

They are not intended to inform the population, which has no nutritional knowledge, but to confuse it.

And how should the labeling of food products be?

As in Chile, where there are some stamps, the black stamps, in which it is clearly detailed if a product has a lot of sugar, a lot of salt, a lot of calories... He says in his book that "edible scrap", as he calls it you cause 2.1 million deaths annually in Europe from cardiovascular diseases alone...

Yes, in Europe alone there are 2.1 million deaths per year from cardiovascular diseases attributable to poor diet.

Only in Europe, because worldwide those who die each year from diseases related to poor nutrition are 11 million people.

A good part of these deaths take place in impoverished countries that do not have resources.

The frightening thing is that in Europe there are 2.1 million deaths a year due to cardiovascular diseases related to poor diet.

And if when a product is immediately withdrawn from the market because it is poorly processed or otherwise causes illness, why aren't all those food items with no nutritional value and that slowly cause death not withdrawn?

I do not know.

It is a matter that escapes me, it is a legal matter.

I don't know if it would be useful to remove them, maybe that would cause a knock-on effect or people would cry out in heaven, as happened with the dry law.

Brussels has recently considered including health warnings on wine and other alcohols similar to those that are already mandatory on tobacco packages, and parties such as the PP have prided themselves on blocking this initiative, which was only intended to inform the population .

Because, as the WHO and the World Cancer Research Fund say, any dose of alcohol is dangerous.

But then, should the sale of some foods that are harmful to health be prohibited or not?

Perhaps in certain age ranges they should be prohibited.

For example: "energy drinks", which do not give energy but make you nervous, should not be sold to minors.

Its sale to minors should be prohibited and, of course, also its advertising aimed at minors, because its relationship with health problems is very clear.

I don't know if it should be prohibited or not, but labeling certain foodstuffs and certainly prohibiting their advertising would seem fine to me.

Last Sunday I took my son to a concert in Barcelona sponsored by a beer brand, and 90% of the people there were 15 years old.

Only by stopping this type of outrage would we take a big step. Does eating badly kill more people than tobacco?

Yes. Eight million deaths from tobacco, which is outrageous, and 11 million deaths from poor nutrition.

And there are many nuances: tobacco is addictive, one out of every two people who starts smoking develops an addiction, and that's why tobacco companies try with all their might to get people to start smoking as young as possible.

With covert advertising, because they can no longer do direct advertising, but they continue to do indirect advertising.

The figure of 11 million deaths per year due to poor nutrition comes from a scientific study without conflicts of interest in which the food industry has not participated and is very solid, a study that has taken into account all the possible directly related pathologies with bad diet.

But that does not mean that you have to continue smoking because it is worse for your health to eat badly.

I say this because when the news came out that poor nutrition kills more people than tobacco, I saw a lot of comments to that effect.

What this data means is that one must be aware that a bad diet poses a risk for chronic pathologies of which we are not even aware.

But above all, it means that governments should take serious action, and they are not.

Just as the tobacco industry resisted for years admitting that tobacco was harmful to health, will the food industry eventually admit that it sells shitty food, to paraphrase the title of his book?

I say this because when the news came out that poor nutrition kills more people than tobacco, I saw a lot of comments to that effect.

What this data means is that one must be aware that a bad diet poses a risk for chronic pathologies of which we are not even aware.

But above all, it means that governments should take serious action, and they are not.

Just as the tobacco industry resisted for years admitting that tobacco was harmful to health, will the food industry eventually admit that it sells shitty food, to paraphrase the title of his book?

I say this because when the news came out that poor nutrition kills more people than tobacco, I saw a lot of comments to that effect.

What this data means is that one must be aware that a bad diet poses a risk for chronic pathologies of which we are not even aware.

But above all, it means that governments should take serious action, and they are not.

Just as the tobacco industry resisted for years admitting that tobacco was harmful to health, will the food industry eventually admit that it sells shitty food, to paraphrase the title of his book?

it means that governments should take serious action, and they are not.

Just as the tobacco industry resisted for years admitting that tobacco was harmful to health, will the food industry eventually admit that it sells shitty food, to paraphrase the title of his book?

it means that governments should take serious action, and they are not.

Just as the tobacco industry resisted for years admitting that tobacco was harmful to health, will the food industry eventually admit that it sells shitty food, to paraphrase the title of his book?

I do not know.

But in an internal document released in 2021, Nestlé acknowledged that more than 60% of its products are unhealthy.

Now, the problem is that it was an internal document...

Yes. But even if the food industry recognized that their products are unhealthy, would that mean fewer people would eat them?

I do not know.

If they continue to be ubiquitous, cheap and highly publicized by celebrities, charlatans and health workers, if they appear in Netflix series, if we see our idols eating them, I am not sure that their consumption will drop. or 90 kilos of industrial food, substances that not only do not nourish but also damage our body, right?

Of course.

Those foods provide calories, but not nutrients.

And, above all, they alter the palate.

People complain that apples or tomatoes don't taste like anything anymore, and surely today they don't reach their point of ripeness like they did before.

But I assure you that when someone reduces their salt intake, their sugar intake, their alcohol consumption, their consumption of flavor enhancers such as monosodium glutamate -present in ultra-processed foods- and their consumption of non-caloric sweeteners such as stevia or aspartame food tastes good to you.

This is one of the great problems of industrial foodstuffs: in addition to providing calories without nourishment and increasing obesity, they are leaving us without a palate.

Are we also losing our palate in Spain?

Yes.

More than 90% of Spaniards take more than twice the maximum amount of salt that they should take.

In Spain each person takes about 100 grams of sugar daily.

In Spain we take more calories from alcohol than from legumes.

Flavor enhancers have a much higher power than sugar and salt to give flavor, a power much higher than what would be achieved with any culinary ingredient that one has at home.

And that causes two things: the first is that they make you eat more, because those flavor enhancers make what you are going to eat taste great.

And, secondly, these enhancers alter the perception of taste, desensitize the palate, so that a higher taste threshold is needed each time and you end up eating worse.

Apart from cardiovascular diseases,

What other health problems are caused by the enormous consumption of ultra-processed foods?

80% of preventable deaths in our environment have to do with lifestyle, according to the World Health Organization.

Among the problems caused by processed foods, I could cite type 2 diabetes, some types of cancer, arterial hypertension, hypercholesterolemia, the presence of insulin without becoming diabetes.... There is a long list of pathologies that are directly related or indirectly with food, for example Alzheimer's.

There is considerable evidence that a continued poor lifestyle increases the risk of Alzheimer's.

It does not produce it, because Alzheimer's has a lot to do with genetics and with age, with the fact of turning years.

But that doesn't mean diet doesn't play a role.

And there are many other diseases related to what we eat... Tooth decay is another.

And a cavity when you don't have money to go to the dentist can greatly limit the life of those who suffer from it.

Most diseases are related to lifestyle and diet.

Do we eat too much meat?

Yes, we eat too much red meat.

With white meat it is more debatable, but with red and processed meat there is no question.

We must reduce the consumption of red meat, and regarding processed meats, the advice of the World Cancer Research Fund and the World Health Organization is to avoid them.

And the same goes for sugary drinks: avoid them.

That does not mean that if you take one one day you will die.

And it also doesn't mean that if you drink a sugary drink once a week you're going to get cancer.

It means that the scientific evidence linking its intake, even in low doses, with an increased risk of chronic diseases is very strong.

Knowing that these products are not necessary because they do not contribute anything, it makes sense to advise the population to avoid them.

Nothing happens because they take them from time to time,

but better not take them.

As for red meat, consumption is much higher than the safety limits.

It is not essential to eat red meat, but if it is eaten, it should not exceed 280 grams per person per week, and we eat about 500. What should we do then?

Well, public and comprehensive policies.

Because if we only apply a few public policies, they will be small patches.

And since the food industry has the greatest experts in its ranks, they would find a way to dismantle those policies.

What is needed are public policies that reduce inequalities, because income inequality makes it difficult for one to eat well.

If a person arrives home at 8:00 p.m. after leaving at 7:00 a.m. and has a salary that prevents him from living with dignity, he has neither the time nor the desire to learn to eat healthy.

People with fewer resources eat worse.

Policies are also needed that put an end to power asymmetries, because what predatory marketing achieves is that small companies are engulfed by large ones,

that in the end they are the ones that have the power to, for example, lower the prices of unhealthy products, making it much cheaper to eat badly than to eat well.

Policies so that there are no conflicts of interest because, for example, the Spanish Agency for Food Safety and Nutrition (AESAN), the highest nutrition body in Spain, had as its director a person who had held a senior position in Coca for 20 years Line.

And that woman, when leaving AESAN, returned to Coca Cola.

Does she believe that if she had put Coca Cola to give birth, they would have hired her again there?

Well that.

More measures?

Yes. Raise the price of alcohol, sugary drinks and unhealthy products.

Raising the price of these things is an educational measure, because people understand that when something is taxed it is because it is not very healthy,

and there are clear decreases in the consumption of these products.

There should also be health warnings on unhealthy products, something that currently does not exist.

Breastfeeding should also be supported and the advertising of breastmilk substitutes should be stopped.

The ubiquity of unhealthy products in supermarkets aimed at children should be avoided: according to studies, 90% of products aimed at children in a supermarket are unhealthy.

Direct or covert advertising of unhealthy products aimed at children should be prohibited, as the Government now intends to do.

That there be more education and that there is no self-regulation in advertising codes.

Policies that generate a decrease in the consumption of red meat.

And etc.

But above all these policies must be comprehensive,

because this is a very serious problem.

There are those who say that without industrial and processed foods it would be impossible to feed a planet of more than 7,000 million people... No, that is not the case.

The difficulty we have in feeding the entire planet comes from the high consumption of meat and the high consumption of ultra-processed foods.

In order to feed Catalonia with the amount of meat it eats, for example, approximately three Catalonias of arable land are necessary to feed the cattle that the Catalans then eat.

Cattle spend a lot of resources that we could use to plant fruits and vegetables, legumes, cereals, whole grains or nuts, which are nutritionally much better and also provide the same amount of protein and nutrients that meat provides us.

And regarding the ultra-processed and the processed... To give you an idea: to create a one-liter bottle of water, which is processed, you have to use more than 200 liters of water, as Marion Nestle denounced at the time, a world expert in nutrition.

The production of ultra-processed products has a very important environmental cost.

I don't know if you could feed the whole world on a plant-based diet.

But I do know that with the other no.

What is eating well?

Don't eat bad.

It's very clear to me.

When you tell people to eat right, they keep eating wrong.

It adds, but does not take away.

Positive messages are fine, but they don't translate into changes, either weight loss or substantial improvements in diet.

The key is to remove what is bad for us and not so much to add what is good for us.

In Spain we could eat more fruit and vegetables, but compared to any other part of the world our consumption is very high.

Our nutritional problem is not that we lack nutrients, but that we have too much salt, we have too much sugar, we have too much unhealthy fat, we have too much empty calories, we have too much alcohol, we have too much liquid calories... Eating well is not eating badly.

Conforms to The Trust Project criteria

Know more

• Final Interview

The final interviewMaría Esclapez, psychologist from 'The Island of Temptations': "Healthy relationships exist, but you have to work on them"

HealthInnovation and public health systems

HealthA drug for primary tumors also works on breast metastases

See links of interest

• Last News

• Work calendar 2022

• Home THE WORLD today

• Zalgiris Kaunas-Barça

• Atletico Madrid - Cadiz

• Real Zaragoza - Fuenlabrada

• Brighton and Hove Albion - Liverpool

• Levante - Espanyol