Why Do We All Eat Stuff That Isn’t Food… and Why Can’t We Stop?
Ultra-Processed Food as a Share of Household Purchases by Country
[USA and UK is over 60% – teens often over 80%, 2020, Canada and Australia following close]
NB! If the food is covered in plastic and there’s a label on it with ingredients you don’t recognize or couldn’t find in your kitchen, it’s probably UPF.
If you only read one diet or nutrition book in your life, make it this one.
– Bee Wilson
A devastating, witty and scholarly destruction of the shit food we eat and why.
– Adam Rutherford
We have entered a new ‘age of eating’ where most of our calories come from a novel set of substances called Ultra-Processed Food, products which are industrially processed and designed and marketed to be addictive. But do we understand what it’s doing to our bodies?
Join Chris in this ground-breaking book as he lives on a diet of almost nothing but UPF while traveling through the worlds of food science, history, and economics. What’s happening in our bodies and brains when we eat UPF? What makes it the number one cause of diet-related diseases, including obesity, and early death? How does it contribute to environmental destruction, and why is it nearly universal in our diets? You’ll learn what we can do about UPF and the companies that make it.
Ultra-Processed People exposes why we’ve lost an understanding of how weight gain really works, why UPF should be looked at as an addictive substance, and why none of it is your fault. We have the right to know what we’re eating and the right to good, affordable food. So eat along with Chris as you read; you may find, as he did, that the foods you’ve previously felt addicted to become less and less appealing.
The harsh reality of ultra-processed food – with Chris Van Tulleken
Buy Chris’s book here: https://geni.us/YqqoR
00:00 Why we need to talk about our diets
03:40 We’re part of an experiment we didn’t sign up for
10:05 What is ultra processed food?
12:50 What Donald Trump got right about UPF
14:20 What Diet Coke does to your health
17:53 How ultra processed food is made
23:55 Why does ultra processed food cause obesity?
29:05 Doesn’t exercise burn calories?
35:37 What about willpower and diet?
38:18 What role do stress and genes play?
39:45 How does ultra processed food harm us?
47:33 How UPF affects the planet
50:41 Ultra processed food is addictive
52:25 The food system is financialised
54:28 What are the solutions?
This lecture was filmed at the Ri on 19 September 2023 through the generous support of Digital Science.
The industrialization and commercialization of food have transformed our diets, whereby most of our calories come from an entirely novel set of substances. Ultra Processed Food (UPF) now makes up 60% of the average diet in the UK and USA. It is highly processed, highly addictive, and largely unhealthy.
Join award-winning broadcaster, practicing NHS doctor, and leading academic Chris van Tulleken as he explores the invention of UPF and its impact on our health and weight – from altering metabolism and appetite to an increased risk of cardiovascular disease and tooth decay. Chris uncovers the limitations of relying solely on exercise and willpower to combat the health risks of high UPF diets. Drawing on his own experiment of eating an 80% UPF diet for one month, he provides solutions for both individuals and policymakers to challenge this unregulated industry.
Chris van Tulleken is an infectious diseases doctor at UCLH and one of the UK’s leading science broadcasters. He has won two BAFTAs for his long-running CBBC series Operation Ouch, co-presented with his twin brother Xand, and hosted numerous programs across the BBC. Following his BBC One documentary ‘What Are We Feeding Our Kids?’ and the chart-topping podcast ‘A Thorough Examination – Addicted to Food,’ Chris has become the UK’s go-to expert on ultra-processed food. Chris trained at Oxford and has a PhD in molecular virology from University College London, where he is now an Associate Professor. His research focuses on how corporations affect human health, especially in the context of nutrition.
Where ‘you’ end and not ‘you’ begin is far from clear. You’re covered in microbes that keep you alive — they’re part of you as much as your liver is — but those same microbes can kill you if they get into the wrong area of your body. Our bodies are much more like societies than like mechanical entities, compromising billions of bacteria, viruses, and other microbial life forms, but just one primate. – Chris van Tulleken
Life has only two projects; reproduction and extracting energy to fuel that reproduction. Over billions of years, our bodies have superbly adapted to using a wide range of food. But over the past 150 years,
food has become … not food.
Rather modified substances from economically motivated producers of what is not natural food provided from nature but laboratory and factory-made substances; what we call ultra-processed food. In the UK and the USA these substances now make up as much as 60 percent of our diet with Canada and Australia following tight.
The formal UPF definition was first drawn by a Brazilian team back in 2010, but since then, a vast body of data has emerged in support of the hypothesis that UPF damages the human body and increases rates of cancer, metabolic disease, and mental illness, that it damages human societies by displacing food cultures and driving inequality, poverty, and early death, and that it damages the planet. The food system necessary for its production, and of which it is the necessary product, is the leading cause of declining biodiversity and the second largest contributor to global emissions. UPF is thus causing a synergistic pandemic of climate change, malnutrition, and obesity. This last effect is the most studied, but UPF doesn’t cause heart disease and strokes, and early death simply because it causes obesity. The risks increase with the quantity of UPF consumed, irrespective of weight gain. Additionally, people who eat UPF and don’t gain weight have increased risks of dementia and inflammatory bowel disease.
US National Health surveys show that — in white, Black, and Hispanic men and women of all ages — there was a dramatic increase in obesity beginning in the 1970s. The idea that there has been a simultaneous collapse in personal responsibility in both men and women across age and ethnic groups is not plausible.
Children in the UK and the USA, countries with the highest rates of UPF consumption, aren’t just heavier than their peers in nearly all other high-income Western countries; they’re shorter, too. This stunting goes hand in hand with obesity around the world, suggesting that this is a form of malnutrition rather than a disorder of excess.
In the UK, overweight now affects more than a quarter of children and half the adult population. Policies in the UK and almost every other country have failed to solve obesity because they don’t frame it as a commerciogenic disease— that is, a disease caused by the marketing and consumption of addictive substances [like drugs and cigarettes].
This is a book of the systems that provide our food and tell us what we should eat.
UPF saves money, and British consumers, even before the current cost-of-living crisis, only spent 8 percent of their household budget on food, lower than almost anywhere else other than the USA (where people spend 6 percent. Germany, Norway, France, Italy — all spend 11 – 14 percent of their budget on food, and households in low income countries spend 60 percent or more. In the UK (and many other countries), housing, fuel, and transportation are fantastically expensive, squeezing that food budget. For rich people this isn’t a problem. For poor people UPF provides them a kinder egg solution; cheaper, quicker, and supposedly just as nutritious— if not more so — than foods and meals that need home preparation.
During Napoleon’s era, in 1869, his nephew organized a competition where a French chemist and pharmacist, Hippolyte Mège-Mouriès, came up with the first ultra-processed butter substitute from solid cow fat named Oleomargarine. By 1930, it was possible to produce a solid margarine from liquid whale oil. The spread melted at 30’ Celsius and would therefore melt in the mouth. By 1960, whale oil made up 17 percent of the total fats used in margarine production. By 1907, the early Procter & Gamble Company (who would go on to make Pringles) had worked out how to turn cottonseed oil into solid edible fat.
In a chemical process known as RBD oils are refined, bleached and deodorized. This is the process used to make soybean oil, palm oil, canola (rapeseed) oil and sunflower oil – four oils that make up 90 percent of the global market — and any other non ‘virgin’ or ‘cold pressed’ oils.
Having solved the problems of cottonseed oil, P&G began a large campaign marketing the de-toxified oil as Crisco, an acronym for crystallized cottonseed oil. By 1920, use of the product was widespread. Crisco shortening, essentially a fake lard, was possibly the first mass-produced UPF!
- They can simply use whichever happens to have the cheapest market price. The war in Ukraine caused sunflower oil prices to spike!
- In the race toward the bottom, chicken fat could end up in your ice cream burp!!
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