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.
We’ve started eating substances constructed from novel molecules and using processes never previously encountered in our evolutionary history, substances that can’t really even be called ‘food.’
Our calories increasingly come from modified starches, from invert sugars, hydrolyzed protein isolates, and seed oils that have been refined, bleached, deodorized, hydrogenated – and interesterified. And these calories have been assembled into concoctions using other molecules that our senses have never been exposed to either: synthetic emulsifiers, low-calorie sweeteners, stabilizing gums, humectants, flavor compounds, dyes, color stabilizers, carbonating agents and bulking – and anti-bulking – agents.
These substances entered the diet gradually at first, beginning in the last part of the nineteenth century, gaining pace from the 1950s onwards to the point that they now constitute the majority of what people eat in the UK and the USA, and form a significant part of the diet of nearly every society on earth.
At the same time as we’ve entered this unfamiliar food environment, we’ve also moved into a new parallel ecosystem, one with its own arms races that are powered not by the flow of energy but by the flow of money. This is the new system of industrial food production. In this system, we are the prey, the source of money that powers the system. The competition for that money, which drives increasing complexity and innovation, occurs between an entire ecosystem of constantly evolving corporations, from giant transnational groups to thousands of smaller national companies. And their bait for extracting the money is called ultra-processed food, or UPF. These foods have been put through an evolutionary selection process over many decades, whereby the products that are purchased and eaten in the greatest quantities are the ones that survive best in the market. To achieve this, they have evolved to subvert the systems in the body that regulate weight and many other functions.
Utra-Processed Food now comprises as much as 60 percent of the average diet in the UK and the USA. Many children get most of their calories from these substances. UPF is our food culture, the stuff from which we construct our bodies. This is your national diet if you are reading this in Australia, Canada, the UK, or the USA.
Ultra-Processed Food has a long, formal scientific definition, but it can be boiled down to this: if it’s wrapped in plastic and has at least one ingredient you wouldn’t usually find in a standard home kitchen, it’s UPF. Much of it will be familiar to you as ‘junk food’, but there’s plenty of organic, free-range, ‘ethical’ UPF too, which might be sold as healthy, nutritious, environmentally friendly, or useful for weight loss (it’s another rule of thumb that almost every food that comes with a health claim on the packet is a UPF).
The formal UPF definition was first drawn by a Brazilian team headed by epidemiologist Carlos Augusto Monteiro in 2010 when they introduced the NOVA classification. Biscuit consumption in Brazil grew by 400 percent between 1974 and 2003, and soft drink consumption also grew by 400 percent. The link between the popular products causing the problem was clear: they were all made from deconstructed, modified ingredients mixed with additives and frequently aggressively marketed.
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 Ultra-Processed food system 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.
For the past thirty years, under the scrutiny of policymakers, scientists, doctors, and parents, obesity has grown at a staggering rate. During this period, fourteen government strategies containing 689 wide-ranging policies have been published in England, but among children leaving primary school, rates of obesity have increased by more than 700 percent and rates of severe obesity by 1600 percent.
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].
Ultra-Processed Food saves money
Even before the current cost-of-living crisis, British consumers only spent 8 percent of their household budget on food, lower than anywhere 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. However, an analysis by the Food Foundation shows that the poorest 50 percent of households would have to spend almost 30 percent of their disposable income on food if they wanted to eat a diet that adheres to our national healthy eating guidelines. The poorest 10 percent of households by income would need to spend almost 75 percent.
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, producing a solid margarine from liquid whale oil was possible. The spread melted at 30’ Celsius and would, therefore, melt in the mouth. By 1960, whale oil comprised 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 process is used to make soybean oil, palm oil, canola (rapeseed) oil, sunflower oil – four oils comprising 90 percent of the global market — and 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, the 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. To avoid the cost of re-writing the packaging, they can stick to these Uncle Tom Cobley labels’ with all the different fats listed.’
The war in Ukraine caused sunflower oil prices to spike!
If you see any of these fats on a label that you wouldn’t use at home (like any modified palm fat, for example), then the product is UPF. In the race toward the bottom, chicken fat could end up in your ice cream burp!!
Nazi Germany invented the first synthetic food – ‘Speisefett’; it was white, tasteless, and waxy and still felt a long way from butter. But that was a trivial problem for a chemist like Arthur Imhausen. Buttery taste comes from a chemical called diacetyl, which is still used to flavor microwave popcorn. (Workers in the factories that manufacture popcorn get a disease that destroys their lungs, which is officially called bronchiolitis obliterans but also known as ‘popcorn workers’ lung.’ Diacetyl has also been detected at very low levels in some vape liquids.) Mixing the fat with diacetyl, water, salt, and a bit of beta-carotene for color allowed Imhausen to complete the transformation of German coal into ‘coal butter.’
Wilhelm Keppler, a politician and a key figure in linking German companies up with the Nazi regime and making Germany self-sufficient, was delighted and wanted to turn the achievement into confidence-bolstering propaganda. But there were two problems. First, Imhausen’s mother was Jewish. Back in 1937, when the Deutsche Fettsäure Werke was being put into operation, Keppler had written to leading Nazi Hermann Göring to ask whether he was sure he wanted to take part in the inauguration considering the fact that Imhausen was of ‘non-Aryan descent.’ Göring asked Hitler about it, who allegedly replied, ‘If the man really made the stuff, then we’ll make him an Aryan!’
And so it was that Göring wrote the following to Imhausen: ‘In view of the great merits you have rendered in the development of synthetic soap and synthetic cooking fat from coal, the Führer, at my suggestion, approved your recognition as a full Aryan.
So that was the first problem taken care of. The second problem was the coal butter’s safety: if it was going to be food for troops, it couldn’t impair their performance. In 1943, Imhausen authored an article in Colloid and Polymer Science with the title: ‘Fatty acid synthesis and its importance for securing the German fat supply.’ The article described in great detail the process for the manufacture of synthetic fat and made an oblique reference to the safety testing: ‘Thousands of tests, led by Director Prof Fr Flössner, confirmed the high value of synthetic cooking fat and made it the first synthetic food in the world to be approved for human consumption.
Otto Fl¨ssner was the chief of the Physiological Department of the Reich Working Group for Public Nutrition. And though it’s true that he did extensive testing on the synthetic fat, what is less well referenced is the context of the experiments, which were conducted on more than 6.000 prisoners in concentration camps.
There is an inexorable logic in all industrial food: to reduce the time workers require for a meal
While most studies focus on obesity, there is also evidence that increased Ultra-Processed Food intake is strongly associated with an increased risk of:
- death – so-called all-cause mortality
- cardiovascular disease (strokes and heart attacks)
- cancers (all cancers overall, as well as breast cancer specifically)
- type 2 diabetes
- high blood pressure
- fatty liver disease
- inflammatory bowel disease (ulcerative colitis and Crohns disease)
- depression
- worse blood fat profile
- frailty (as measured by grip strength)
- irritable bowel syndrome and dyspepsia (indigestion)
- dementia
The last one may be most alarming for those with a family history of dementia. In 2022, a study published in the journal Neurology looked at data from 72.0000 people. Increasing intake of UPF by 10 percent was associated with a 25 percent increase in the risk of dementia and a 14 percent increase in the risk of Alzheimer’s disease.
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