Unprocessed Whole Foods Are Racist, Diversity Nutritionist Claims

Jessica Wilson, MS. RD., per her Twitter bio, is a self-described “Queer. Black. Fat-positive dietitian.” She advertises her pronouns as “she/her.”

So we’re already off to a glorious start.

Some background on this unique brand of hustle: two years ago, White House “nutrition advisor” Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, whom I exposed at the time as an industry hack funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Nestle, released a criminally wrong “Food Compass©” that ranked foods by their nutritional value, in which he concluded that Lucky Charms are actually much superior to chicken.

Related: White House ‘Nutrition Advisor’ Claims Lucky Charms Are Healthier Than Chicken

Pseudoscientific nutrition advisers cloaking themselves in the auspices of Social Justice™ to peddle corporate propaganda has become a cottage industry.

In a similar vein, Master’s Degree in Science Registered Dietician Jessica is now accusing advocates of whole food diets of “marginalizing” Persons of Color™, citing something called “food apartheid.”

Via Time (emphasis added):

“Jessica Wilson is passionate about the pupusas from Costco. Not just because they’re tasty, but also because they’ve helped the California-based registered dietitian fight back against the mounting war on ultra-processed foods.

It all started in the summer of 2023, when author and infectious-disease physician Dr. Chris van Tulleken was promoting his book, Ultra-Processed People. While writing it, van Tulleken spent a month eating mostly foods like chips, soda, bagged bread, frozen food, and cereal. “What happened to me is exactly what the research says would happen to everyone,” van Tulleken says: he felt worse, he gained weight, his hormone levels went crazy, and before-and-after MRI scans showed signs of changes in his brain. As van Tulleken saw it, the experiment highlighted the “terrible emergency” of society’s love affair with ultra-processed foods.

Wilson, who specializes in working with clients from marginalized groups, was irked. She felt that van Tulleken’s experiment 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. “How can this entire category of foods be something we’re supposed to avoid?” Wilson wondered.”

*Never mind that “food apartheid,” if such a thing can be claimed to exist, is largely due to unchecked criminal activity in neighborhoods where no one with any sense would operate a retail establishment.

As usual, any racism here is coming from the self-appointed champions of diversity: that BIPOCs are too stupid to understand what healthy foods are, or simply prefer eating garbage, so hence trying to explain healthy dietary habits to them in an effort to help them improve their lives would be patronizing and condescending — and, obviously, hateful. 

Continuing:

“So she did her own experiment. Like van Tulleken, Wilson for a month got 80% of her daily calories from highly processed foods, not much more than the average American. She swapped her morning eggs for soy chorizo and replaced her thrown-together lunches—sometimes as simple as beans with avocado and hot sauce—with Trader Joe’s ready-to-eat tamales. She snacked on cashew-milk yogurt with jam. For dinner she’d have one of her beloved Costco pupusas, or maybe chicken sausage with veggies and Tater-Tots. She wasn’t subsisting on Fritos, but these were also decidedly not whole foods.

A weird thing happened. Wilson found that she had more energy and less anxiety. She didn’t need as much coffee to get through the day and felt more motivated. She felt better eating an ultra-processed diet than she had before, a change she attributes to taking in more calories by eating full meals, instead of haphazard combinations of whole-food ingredients.”

Note that van Tulleken backed up his assertion that binging on processed foods causes adverse health effects with some empirical data; bloodwork on hormones, MRI scans, etc. — which is backed up obviously by a cornucopia of publicly available research. There is no real argument here on the facts.

On the other hand, diversity nutritionist Jessica reported that she “felt better,” which is good enough for TIME magazine.  

Ben Bartee is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs.

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