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Loading... Ultra-Processed People: The Science Behind Food That Isn't Food (2023)| 280 | 6 | 95,078 | 
(4.07) | 14 | Health & Fitness.
Nonfiction.
HTML: New York Times Bestseller
International Bestseller
A manifesto to change how you eat and how you think about the human body. It's not you, it's the food. We have entered a new age of eating. For the first time in human history, most of our calories come from an entirely novel set of substances called Ultra-Processed Food. There's 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 that you wouldn't find in your kitchen, it's UPF. These products are specifically engineered to behave as addictive substances, driving excess consumption. They are now linked to the leading cause of early death globally and the number one cause of environmental destruction. Yet almost all our staple foods are ultra-processed. UPF is our food culture and for many people it is the only available and affordable food. In this book, Chris van Tulleken, father, scientist, doctor, and award-winning BBC broadcaster, marshals the latest evidence to show how governments, scientists, and doctors have allowed transnational food companies to create a pandemic of diet-related disease. The solutions don't lie in willpower, personal responsibility, or exercise. You'll find no diet plan in this bookâ??but join Chris as he undertakes a powerful self-experiment that made headlines around the world: under the supervision of colleagues at University College London he spent a month eating a diet of 80 percent UPF, typical for many children and adults in the United States. While his body became the subject of scientific scrutiny, he spoke to the world's leading experts from academia, agriculture, andâ??most importantâ??the food industry itself. But more than teaching him about the experience of the food, the diet switched off Chris's own addiction to UPF. In a fast-paced and eye-opening narrative he explores the origins, science, and economics of UPF to reveal its catastrophic impact on our bodies and the planet. And he proposes real solutions for doctors, for policy makers, and for all of us who have to eat. A book that won't only upend the way you shop and eat, Ultra-Processed People will open your eyes to the need for action on a global sc… (more) |
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For Dinah, Lyra and Sasha  | |
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Every Wednesday afternoon in the laboratory where I used to work, we had an event called journal club. The word 'club' makes it sound more fun than it was. | |
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UPF 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 that you wouldn't usually find in a standard home kitchen, it's UPF. The formal UPF definition was first drawn up 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. When you bury a seed or a potato, it essentially eats itself to produce roots and leaves. Its title was 'Food, not nutrients, is the fundamental unit in nutrition', and it pointed out an as-yet unexplained phenomenon: that a number of good studies had identified foods, such as whole grains, nuts, olives and oily fish, that seemed to reduce chronic disease risk, but that the benefit of the relevant nutrient—beta-carotene, fish oil, vitamin B, etc—vanished as soon as they were extracted from the food and taken instead as a supplement.
In short, there aren't any supplements that work for healthy people. Beneficial nutrients only seem to help us when we consume them in context. Fish oil doesn't benefit us, but oily fish do. It seems unbelievable, I know. There's no supplement, vitamin or antioxidant that decreases risk of death, or even of disease of any kind in healthy people. Almost all the large-scale independent studies of multivitamin and antioxidant supplements have shown that, if anything, they increase the risk of death. This is especially true for vitamin E, beta-carotene and high-dose vitamin C. If you can understand that outside the context of possible deficiency vitamins supplements don't work, then you have begun to understand that food and food extracts are not the same. The power of good science is that it can handle a bad, wrong or arbitrary hypothesis. That, really, is the defining characteristic of science. The teams from France and Brazil looked at the risk of breast, prostate, colorectal and overall cancer, and found that, with a 10 per cent increase in the proportion of UPF in the diet, there was a roughly 10 per cent increase in the overall risk of cancer and the risk of breast cancer. Increasing intake of UPF by 10 per cent was associated with a 25 per cent increase in the risk of dementia and a 14 per cent increase in the risk of Alzheimer's disease. Stabilisers, emulsifiers, gums, lecithin, glucose, a number of different oils... these are the hallmarks of UPF. Food intake is under little more conscious control than breathing or drinking, and this is why it is nearly as hard to limit food intake as it is to limit water or oxygen intake. The consumption of calories is quick, but the burning of calories is slow. That's why we don't need to eat continuously. But quick consumption also opens up the possibility of eating more than we need. These findings challenge everything about our understanding of how the body uses calories. It seems that people burn the same amount of energy each day whether they walk ten minutes or sit at a desk. The significance of this can't be missed: it means that we cannot lose weight just by increasing activity. But it turns out that, if we are active, our bodies compensate by using less energy on other things, so that our overall energy expenditure stays the same. A sedentary life (of the kind you probably live if you're reading this – although not necessarily) leads to higher levels of testosterone and oestrogen, which might sound good to some people, but which can increase risks of cancers. By contrast, the Hadza – who do around two hours of moderate and vigorous physical activity every day, many times more than typical people in the UK and the USA – have morning salivary testosterone concentrations that are roughly half those of western populations. The evidence is clear that we are eating more calories than ever and that trying to change our energy expenditure is not going to make a significant difference to weight. Obesity is caused by increased food intake, not inactivity, and the best evidence (as Kevin Hall and Sam Dicken demonstrated) shows that, by food, we mean UPF. Obesity is somewhat heritable. Almost everyone living with obesity will have genes that drive it. There are two broad kinds of genetic obesity. There are rare defects in single genes, which lead to cases in which weight gain is essentially unavoidable no matter the environment. But the vast majority of people who live with obesity have many minor genetic differences compared with people with lower BMI. Most of these differences are in genes that work in the brain and that affect eating behaviour. But that some people solve emotional problems with food – that's genetic. So, by alleviating (or more properly 'curing') poverty, especially childhood poverty, we could cut the risk of obesity in half without any other intervention. The difference in people's weight has nothing to do with willpower. It's simply a collision of genes and the constraints of the food environment. 'Some ultra-processed foods may activate the brain reward system in a way that is similar to what happens when people use drugs like alcohol, or even nicotine or morphine.' She also told me about how the preservatives and emulsifiers in UPF disrupt the microbiome, how the gut is further damaged by processing that removes the fibre from food, and how high levels of fat, salt, and sugar each cause their own specific harms. And there was one small comment that stuck. Whenever I talked about the 'food' I was eating, she corrected me: 'Most UPF is not food, Chris. It's an industrially produced edible substance.' My personal rule of thumb is: if I'm struggling with whether to call a food UPF, then it probably is UPF. Ultra-processing reduces micronutrients to the point that modern diets lead to malnutrition even as they cause obesity. Umami or savoury taste comes from those three molecules familiar from UPF ingredients lists: inosinate, guanylate and gutamate. If food contains an artificial sweetener, it is, by definition, UPF. Overeating may be driven by food additives that alter the microbiome and promote intestinal inflammation. Of course, mice aren't people, but the effect of different components of UPF on the delicate lining of the gut, and the resultant effect on our brain, is becoming increasingly clear. Xanthan gum is one that we constantly consume. It's an exopolysaccharide: a sugary slime secreted by the bacteria Xanthomonas campestris, which forms black rot on vegetables. Unless you're eating edamame or tofu, any soy you consume is ultra-processed through multiple physical and chemical stages: crushed, separated and refined into its different parts, it can appear on food labels as soy flour, hydrolysed vegetable protein, soy protein isolate, protein concentrate, textured vegetable protein, vegetable oil (simple, fully, or partially hydrogenated), plant sterols, or the emulsifier lecithin. Its many guises hint at its value to manufacturers. The impact of the current food system is not sustainable for the next few decades – let alone the next few millennia. The environmental cost is so immense that, even if we stopped all fossil-fuel emissions, emissions from the global food system alone will take us well beyond the fatal 1.5°C rise in temperature by 2100. And, while there will always be an environmental impact from farming and processing food for 8 billion people, UPF is a particular driver of carbon emissions and environmental destruction. For these commodity crops to be profitable, they need to be turned into something, and there are two options (or three, if you count biofuel): 'You can force the crops through a factory-farmed animal to produce meat, or process them into an aggressively marketed UPF.' Growing specific foods for specific communities is a hassle. It's much more profitable to grow a small number of things with maximum efficienc, then colour, flavour and market them as diverse foods. As we've seen, everything from chicken nuggets to ice cream can be made from the same base liquids and powders.
'Factory farming and UPFs are two sides of the same industrial food coin,' Any moral critique of Bozer of Coca-Cola misunderstands the obligations of the company: this is what they must do until they are required by law to do something different. And I told Xand that, no, the calcium carbonate did not make his sausage roll UPF. It doesn't count as a 'funky' ingredient because it's added by law to most white wheat flour. It's chalk. | |
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▾References References to this work on external resources.  Wikipedia in English
None ▾Book descriptions Health & Fitness.
Nonfiction.
HTML: New York Times Bestseller
International Bestseller
A manifesto to change how you eat and how you think about the human body. It's not you, it's the food. We have entered a new age of eating. For the first time in human history, most of our calories come from an entirely novel set of substances called Ultra-Processed Food. There's 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 that you wouldn't find in your kitchen, it's UPF. These products are specifically engineered to behave as addictive substances, driving excess consumption. They are now linked to the leading cause of early death globally and the number one cause of environmental destruction. Yet almost all our staple foods are ultra-processed. UPF is our food culture and for many people it is the only available and affordable food. In this book, Chris van Tulleken, father, scientist, doctor, and award-winning BBC broadcaster, marshals the latest evidence to show how governments, scientists, and doctors have allowed transnational food companies to create a pandemic of diet-related disease. The solutions don't lie in willpower, personal responsibility, or exercise. You'll find no diet plan in this bookâ??but join Chris as he undertakes a powerful self-experiment that made headlines around the world: under the supervision of colleagues at University College London he spent a month eating a diet of 80 percent UPF, typical for many children and adults in the United States. While his body became the subject of scientific scrutiny, he spoke to the world's leading experts from academia, agriculture, andâ??most importantâ??the food industry itself. But more than teaching him about the experience of the food, the diet switched off Chris's own addiction to UPF. In a fast-paced and eye-opening narrative he explores the origins, science, and economics of UPF to reveal its catastrophic impact on our bodies and the planet. And he proposes real solutions for doctors, for policy makers, and for all of us who have to eat. A book that won't only upend the way you shop and eat, Ultra-Processed People will open your eyes to the need for action on a global sc ▾Library descriptions No library descriptions found. ▾LibraryThing members' description |
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Chris van Tulleken provides a different lens through which to examine what we eat and why, and how food is made and marketed. Based on mountains of others' original research, and his own medical expertise and willingness to learn from new information, he introduces the NOVA framework for classifying foods, which divides food into four groups: (1) unprocessed or minimally processed, (2) processed culinary ingredients (e.g. butter, sugar, salt, honey, vinegar), (3) processed food (e.g. canned beans or fish), and (4) ultra-processed food (UPF). It is this fourth category that is concerning on so many levels, from human health to the health of the planet. And because the companies that make and market UPF (Nestle, Coke, etc.) won't change without outside regulation, it is up to governments to require changes. (This doesn't even necessarily need to hurt the companies financially; tobacco and pharma are highly regulated and highly profitable.)
See also: Once Upon A Time We Ate Animals by Roanne Van Voorst; Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver
Quotes/notes
Diet-related diseases come from the collision of some ancient genes with a new food ecosystem that is engineered to drive excess consumption and that we currently seem unable, or perhaps unwilling, to improve. (8)
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. (8-9)
...to make choices we all need accurate information about the possible risks of our food, and that we should be less exposed to aggressive, often misleading marketing. (9)
Here's the theory: the main reason for the rapid increase in overweight and obesity throughout the world, especially since the 1980s, is the correspondingly rapid increase in production and consumption of ultra-processed food and drink products. (32)
In short, there aren't any supplements that work for healthy people. Beneficial nutrients only seem to help us when we consume them in context....outside the context of possible deficiency vitamin supplements don't work....food and food extracts are not the same. (47)
Almost all juices and fizzy drinks are acidic enough to dissolve a tooth.(120)
Obesity is caused by increased food intake, not inactivity, and the best evidence...shows that, by food, we mean UPF. (132)
When any industry funds research, the findings are typically biased in favor of the funder - not in every single study, but overall this pattern is very consistent. (134)
...inactivity is not a significant contributor [to obesity] and that the primary cause is ultra-processed food and drink. This is an existential threat to the companies whose existence depends on the sales of these products. (135)
[By alleviating or curing] poverty, especially childhood poverty, we could cut the risk of obesity in half without any other intervention. (145)
"Some ultra-processed foods may activate the brain reward system in a way that is similar to what happens when people use drugs like alcohol, or even nicotine or morphine." (Nicole Avena, 153)
...a high UPF diet...is linked to more deaths globally than tobacco, high blood pressure or any other health risk....Since the risks are so high, there may be advantages to considering UPF as an addictive substance. It may help to reduce some of the stigma....It allows the affected person to focus outwards on the industry causing the harm...rather than inwards on personal failure. (167)
...we may be eating more food to compensate for becoming increasingly deficient in micronutrients. Ultra-processing reduces micronutrients to the point that modern diets lead to malnutrition even as they cause obesity. (190-191)
Flovourings...are a proxy for the low micronutrient content....whether the flavourings are 'natural' or artificial is irrelevant. (192)
The [1950s] report said: "Eminent pharmacologists, toxicologists, physiologists and nutritionists expressed the fear that man of the chemicals being added to food today have not been tested sufficiently to establish their non-toxicity and suitability for use in food." (227)
GRAS = generally recognized as safe (228)
This is known as self-determination. You can simply decide whether you think your product is safe and then put it in food. (229)
The burden of proof should be on the companies that make and use additives to demonstrate long-term safety....Why is the burden of proof on civil society groups, activists and academics to show that adding thousands of entirely synthetic novel molecules to our diet might be harmful? (235)
"Factory farming and UPF are two sides of the same industrial food coin" (Rob Percival, 257)
We could at least imagine a system arranged around agro-ecological farming and the consumption of a diverse range of fresh and minimally processed whole foods. (265)
Everyone at every level of the food industry I spoke with agreed: regulation must come from outside. (279)
"commerciogenic malnutrition" - malnutrition caused by companies [e.g. through aggressively marketing baby formula in low-income settings] (288-289)
"It's not food. It's an industrially produced edible substance." (Fernanda Rauber, 303)
The requirement for growth and the harm it does to our bodies and our planet is so much part of the fabric of our world that it's nearly invisible. (304) (