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A paper co-authored by CU Boulder researcher Christopher Lowry draws upon the infamous ‘Twinkie defense’ to explore the relationship between ultraprocessed foods and human behavior

On November 27, 1978, in the heart of San Francisco, former City Supervisor Dan White climbed through a window into City Hall, pulled out a gun and fatally shot Mayor George Moscone and City Supervisor Harvey Milk. He then turned himself in to the police, saying, “Why do we do things . . . I don’t know . . . I just shot [Moscone], I don’t know.”��

In the trial that followed,��People v. White, which ran from May 1-21, 1979, White’s defense argued not that White was innocent—he’d confessed, after all—but that, when he committed the murders, he’d been suffering from “diminished capacity” and was therefore incapable of premeditation, a key requirement of first-degree murder charges.

One revealing piece of evidence, the defense claimed, was White’s diet. For days leading up to the shootings, White had been gorging himself on junk food, an abnormal behavior for the typically health-conscious former police officer, firefighter and Army veteran.

CU Boulder scientist Christopher Lowry and his research colleagues suggest a link between ultraprocessed foods and human behavior.

It was a risky legal tack—journalists at the time mockingly dubbed it the “Twinkie defense”—but it worked. White was charged with voluntary manslaughter, a lesser charge than first-degree murder, and received a prison sentence of just under eight years, of which he ended up serving only five.

A fierce backlash followed the ruling. Many took to the streets to express their outrage, most notably with the��, while others took to the media.

“There is no question that a travesty of justice occurred in the trial of Dan White,”��. “In the trial of Dan White, the defense, aided and abetted by the prosecution, had the power to hand the case over to the psychiatrists, and the psychiatrists had the power to redefine a political crime as an ordinary crime, and an ordinary crime as a psychiatric problem.”

Yet in a�� �������� Professor of Integrative Physiology��Christopher Lowry, along with several co-authors, suggests that the White case might have been ahead of its time in assuming a link between ultraprocessed foods and human behavior.

Gut reactions

It’s unsurprising that so many people found White’s claim of diminished capacity less than persuasive, says Lowry. In 1979, the scientific community hadn’t yet recognized the microbiome, or the commonwealth of bacteria occupying the human gut. The connection between it, one’s diet and one’s behavior therefore seemed flimsy.

“We didn't know that there was a microbiome, and that the microbiome impacts behavior,” Lowry explains. “[White’s defense team] was just basing their conclusions on observations that these types of foods, these ultraprocessed foods, could affect people’s behavior in negative ways. So, it was kind of a crude assessment of this association between what you eat and behavioral outcomes.”

But for the past several decades, scientific research in a field referred to as psychoneuroimmunology, much of it pioneered by��Steven F. Maier ���Ի���Linda R. Watkins of CU Boulder’s��Maier Watkins Laboratory, has established a clear relationship between microbes (or their components), the brain and behavior.

A crucial explanatory ingredient in this relationship, says Lowry, is inflammation, or the body’s immune response to what it deems threats.��

“There’s a through-line between diet impacting the microbiome and the permeability of the gut barrier, which allows bacteria and bacterial products to get into the body, which can drive systemic inflammation. Systemic inflammation drives neuroinflammation in the brain, and neuroinflammation in the brain alters brain and behavior.”

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“Given the growing evidence that ultraprocessed foods lead to multiple negative health outcomes, I think the goal is to shift away, to the extent possible, from ultraprocessed foods toward less processed food,” says CU Boulder researcher Christopher Lowry. (Photo: iStock)

The takeaway, Lowry explains, is that some foods—namely ultraprocessed foods—can negatively affect the microbiome and thus increase risk factors for violent or rash behavior. “It’s clear that inflammation does impact aggressive behavior, does impact impulsivity.” It’s so clear, in fact, that the negative health outcomes of ultraprocessed foods are now at the forefront of��, and San Francisco is�� makers of ultraprocessed foods for creating products that have saddled governments with public health costs.

Yet the news isn’t all bad, Lowry says. Just as ultraprocessed foods can lead to negative mental health outcomes, less-processed foods can lead to positive mental health outcomes.

“What other researchers have found is that, regardless of whether you look at people without a diagnosis of depression or anxiety, or you look at clinical populations—people that have a diagnosis of anxiety disorder or mood disorder—in either case, you can simply change the diet of these individuals [by reducing their intake of ultraprocessed foods] and improve their anxiety and depression symptoms.”

Food or foodlike substances?

Moving away from ultraprocessed foods would mean big changes for many Americans, says Lowry, who points out that more than 50% of the foods purchased in U.S. grocery stores are ultraprocessed.��

But what counts as ultraprocessed anyway? Don’t most foods go through some degree of processing before ending up on eaters’ plates?

One useful resource, says Lowry, is the four-level�� developed by Carlos Augusto Monteiro and a team of researchers at the University of São Paulo in Brazil in 2009.

“Level 1 is unprocessed. This would be if you pulled the carrot out of the ground and ate it,” says Lowry. “Level 2 involves more processing,” but it’s processing “that we can do in our kitchen. So, you might take a carrot and combine it with some celery and spices and make a stir-fry that you put on rice.”

Level 3 involves processing that people generally can’t perform in their kitchens. “For example, there’s very few of us that can take salmon and make canned salmon. It’s food—it’s salmon—but it’s been processed in a way with very high heat and pressure to make it sterile so that it has a prolonged shelf life.”

Level 4, on the other hand, is another thing entirely, different from the other three levels not just in degree but in kind.

“Level 4 is not food,” says Lowry. “Level 4 is chemicals that have been put together in a way that makes them highly palatable.”��, Level 4 processing produces not food but “edible foodlike substances.”

To avoid inflammation—and its attendant behavioral risk factors—Lowry suggests eaters opt for the first three levels and do their best to steer clear of the fourth.

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Just as ultraprocessed foods can lead to negative mental health outcomes, less-processed foods can lead to positive mental health outcomes, says CU Boulder scholar Christopher Lowry. (Photo: Jacopo Maiarelli/Unsplash)

“Given the growing evidence that ultraprocessed foods lead to multiple negative health outcomes, I think the goal is to shift away, to the extent possible, from ultraprocessed foods toward less processed food,” he says. “The diets that have benefit are rich in fresh fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, healthy fats like olive oil and occasionally fish.”

Free will on trial

In their paper, Lowry and his co-authors raise questions about the role of free will in criminal law. Specifically, how much responsibility does a person bear for a crime they committed while under the influence of diminished capacity?

A few non-food-related examples bring this question into stark relief.

Shane Tamura, who in July shot four people in a Manhattan office building before killing himself, was revealed in an autopsy to have had low-level chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a disease often associated with contact sports like football and boxing. “[S]tudy my brain please,” he said in his alleged suicide note. “I’m sorry.”

And Charles Whitman, the “Texas Tower Sniper” who in 1966 killed his wife, his mother and 11 people on the University of Texas at Austin campus, likewise requested that he undergo an autopsy following his crimes.

“[L]ately (I can’t recall when it started) I have been a victim of many unusual and irrational thoughts,” the Eagle Scout, scoutmaster and Marine veteran wrote in his confession the night before his crimes. “After my death I wish that an autopsy would be performed on me to see if there is any visible physical disorder. I have had some tremendous headaches in the past and have consumed two large bottles of Excedrin in the past three months.”

During the autopsy, medical examiners discovered a nickel-sized tumor pressing up against Whitman’s amygdala. Since the 1800s, researchers have known that damage to the amygdala can cause emotional and social disturbances.

Whether Tamura’s and Whitman’s brain pathologies directly caused their crimes is unknown and impossible to prove, but if their writings are any indication, they didn’t seem fully committed to perpetrating those crimes. And yet perpetrate them they did. What if something similar happened with Dan White? What if what people eat alters their sense of what they choose to do—their free will?��

Of course, some philosophers and scientists don’t believe free will exists at all, perhaps the most popular among them being the neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky, author of����

“When most people think they’re discerning free will, what they mean is somebody intended to do what they did: Something has just happened; somebody pulled the trigger. They understood the consequences and knew that alternative behaviors were available,” Sapolsky says in a��.

“But that doesn’t remotely begin to touch it, because you’ve got to ask: Where did that intent come from? That’s what happened a minute before, in the years before, and everything in between.”

For his part, Lowry expresses less certainty than Sapolsky, but he nevertheless believes the issue of free will as it relates to ultraprocessed foods, the brain and human behavior is an important one to consider.��

“If you’re born in an inner city with low socioeconomic status, you have very limited access to fresh foods—vegetables, nuts, seeds, healthy foods—and instead you’re raised on ultraprocessed foods, which are very cheap, do you ultimately have free will? Do you have the mental foundation to make decisions based on free will? Or is your free will somehow compromised by these conditions, which, at one level, are imposed by societal factors?

“This is a philosophical question,” Lowry adds. “I don’t claim to have the answer.”

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