ULTRA-PROCESSED PEOPLE

Ultra-Processed People – Chris van Tulleken

The one-sentence summary: Most of our calories now come from a novel set of substances presented in products that are industrially processed and designed and marketed to be addictive.

WHAT THE BOOK SAYS

• This is an investigation into the science, economics, history and production of ultra-processed food, or UPF. The author asks the question: why do we all eat stuff that isn’t food, and why can’t we stop? He runs an experiment in which he eats almost nothing but UPF for a month and monitors what happens in his body and brain as a result.
• It isn’t about sugar or exercise or willpower. UPF hacks our brains through a range of tricks that destroys traditional diets. We have started eating substances constructed from novel molecules and using processes not invented by evolution. Many come from modified starches, invert sugars, hydrolysed protein isolates and seed oils that have been bleached, deodorized and hydrogenated. UPF now makes up to 60% of the average diet in the UK and USA.
• The main aim of UPF is to replace the ingredients of traditional food with cheaper alternatives and additives that extend shelf life, facilitate centralized distribution and drive excess consumption.
• RBD stands for refined, bleached and deodorized. This process creates a universal gloop that is frequently interchangeable in products to keep prices down. There is a long list of fats that are in hundreds of products: shea fat, palm fat mango kernel, palm stearate, coconut fat, and so on. By listing a full set of these in the ingredients, manufacturers can buy the cheapest available and swap them in and out at will, without the cost of changing the labelling on products.
• In the UK, a contributory factor to UPF being so prevalent is food poverty. UK consumers spend 8% of their household budget on food, which is much lower than our European neighbours – Germany, Norway, France and Italy all spend 11-14% of their budget on food.
• The NOVA system classifies food into 4 groups:

1. 1. Unprocessed foods found in nature like milk, fruit and vegetables.
   2. Processed culinary ingredients such as oil, butter, sugar, salt and vinegar.
   3. Processed food, often ready-made mixtures of groups 1 and 2, in tins and so on.
   4. Ultra-processed food, defined as ‘formulations of ingredients, mostly of exclusive industrial use, made by a series of industrial processes, many requiring sophisticated equipment and technology.’

• This definition only gets us so far, and defining UPF is difficult. Put more starkly, most UPF is not food – it’s an industrially produced edible substance. One way of thinking about this is that it is likely to be UPF if it contains ingredients that you do not have in your kitchen.
• To complicate matters further, defining processed versus unprocessed is also complicated. Forms of ‘processing’ include cooking with fire, modifying crops, and selective breeding, so this began a long time ago, and all our food is processed to some extent. Just twelve plants and five animals now make up 75% of all the food eaten or thrown away on earth.
• There are three significant externalized costs of UPF: environmental destruction (including climate change and land use), antibiotic resistance, and plastic pollution. The important question is not “What is the carbon footprint of a particular product?” but “Which foods would we find in a food system that helped to resolve the climate and nature crises?”

WHAT’S GOOD ABOUT IT

• Most studies focus on obesity, but UPF is also strongly associated with cardiovascular disease, cancers, diabetes, high blood pressure, depression, and many other ailments. Food additives such as saccharin are also a problem, and we each eat 8kg of them a year.
• Companies like Coca-Cola fund huge amounts of research to deflect from the effects of their products. They have 1,500 different researchers funded to the tune of $5.4 million and producing 461 papers looking at the role of energy balance. Despite such conflicts of interest, disclosure of such funding is often not forthcoming. The Coca-Cola product harnesses sensory confusion by using sour, bitter, cold and fizz sensations to smuggle large amounts of sugar past your palate.
• Food deserts are places where shops don’t sell fresh, healthy food and only UPF is available. Food swamps are where there is a massive oversupply of outlets that only sell UPF, so people can’t eat healthily even if they wanted to.
• Many people are obsessed with food, including the author, who has struggled with addiction. Meanwhile there are those who have no real interest in food and do not find it motivating at all, merely a nutritional necessity.
• Natural food, such as an apple, has what is called a matrix – structural integrity that means the person eating it has to work to break down the structure and release the nutrients. UPF is intrinsically soft or, as the author describes it, ‘pre-chewed.’ This means that the signals to tell you to ‘stop eating’ never arrive.
• Perhaps ironically, the ultimate UPF may well be mineral water, which takes the cheapest ingredient on earth and markets it aggressively for no other reason than financial gain.

WHAT YOU HAVE TO WATCH

• Whilst it contains huge amounts of helpful information, the narrative is somewhat breathless and veers on and off topics at speed, so you often have to wait for another 100 pages before arriving at an answer to a particular question.