Ultra-Processed People: Why We Can't Stop Eating Food That Isn't Food

by Chris van Tulleken

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.

UPF is thus causing a synergistic pandemic of climate change, malnutrition and obesity.

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.

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.

There’s no supplement, vitamin or antioxidant that decreases risk of death, or even of disease of any kind in healthy people.

First, there is fundamental biological evidence giving plausibility to the connection. A growing weight of evidence suggests that some specific ingredients routinely used to manufacture UPF may be harmful, and that some of the peculiar characteristics of UPF (like its softness and its energy density) are associated with weight gain and ill health.

The transformation of coal into butter reveals the unavoidable problems of creating synthetic foods. There are inherent dangers in consuming complex mixtures of novel molecules as a source of calories – substances we have never encountered before may have unpredictable effects on our physiology.

Shame may interrupt the flow of money, but if it doesn’t it will serve no practical function to limit corporate behaviour.

In the modern world, eating lunch at a table is a sign of health and a good life.

Hall and his co-authors start to describe the connections between the hedonic areas of the brain and the nutrient-detection areas, where our emotional conscious experience meets our internal physiology.

We’re controlled by ancient neuroendocrine feedback systems, which evolved to ensure we consume everything we need to pass on a few genes.

‘Most UPF is not food, Chris. It’s an industrially produced edible substance.’

The hormone that signals fullness barely responded to a large meal, while the hunger hormone was sky high just moments after eating. There was a fivefold increase in leptin, the hormone that

information flow are what cause the structural changes: ‘If traffic starts to flow down a side road it will eventually become enlarged to become a main trunk road. New permanent connections grow.’

‘No, you don’t see these big changes unless you do something significant to the physiology of the brain. It’s not random.’

This impasse between reality and science is partly responsible for the confused way we conceive of obesity: we tend to locate the problem in the individual, not the food, despite the mounting evidence that the food

‘Use of the substance is continued despite knowledge of having a persistent or recurrent physical or psychological problem that is likely to have been caused or exacerbated by the substance.’

haven’t evolved to handle food this soft and easily digested, so soft that it’s essentially pre-chewed. Rather than being digested slowly along the length of the intestine in a way that stimulates the release of satiety hormones, it may be that UPF is absorbed so quickly that it doesn’t reach the parts of the gut that send the ‘stop eating’ signal to the brain.

If you interfere with the rate of consumption, my bet would be you lose a little of that hit and the product won’t sell as well. UPF is soft not by accident, but because that’s the way to sell the largest amount.

Barry explained that hearing influences flavour and smell influences taste. Vanilla, technically a molecule you smell, when added to ice cream will make it seem sweeter, even without adding more sugar. ‘Smell even influences touch,’ he said. ‘Apple-scented shampoo makes your hair feel shinier than other shampoos.’

customer for life. All other colas will taste a little ‘wrong’. The use of flavourings gives the manufacturer absolute control. I eat the same brands of chocolate bar, yoghurt and ketchup that I did as a child.

Neither can we supplement our way out of the problem. Micronutrients are way more efficient and beneficial when embedded in the food matrix than they are in supplement form.

Flavourings, which is to say molecules that affect the taste and smell of food, are a proxy for the low micronutrient content.

then flavours out of context may be messing up the body’s ability to make the correct associations between a nutrient and a food.

Sweet taste in the mouth prepares the body for sugar. If that never arrives, it’s a problem.

Since 2000, there have been only ten applications to the FDA for full approval for a new substance. There have been 766 new food chemicals added to the food supply since then, which means that the other 756 (or 98.7 per cent) have been self-determined by the companies that make them.13

the moment, the global food system is fundamentally oriented towards producing as much food as possible.’

And while sugar often gets the blame for health effects, a significant part of the calorific load of UPF is from refined vegetable oils. Vegetable oils have gone from being a very small source of calories to the dominant fuel in the global diet. Palm is the oil we now eat most, and is increasingly well known for its environmental impact.

If we keep eating more meat, it will require the destruction of more tropical forest, which in turn will drive pandemic disease and climate change.

The food security that many of us enjoy is the product of a system of production that has kept costs low by destroying wild land and not paying for the costs of atmospheric carbon. These approaches will, ironically, create huge food insecurity. This is happening already around the globe, but nowhere more directly than in the areas of the Amazon that have been deforested to grow soy.

typically to compensate for chronic failings in animal welfare. There is no ‘biosecure’ way of rearing animals that keeps the resistant bacteria from their faeces away from us. In the

southern USA, intensive pork farms drain faecal waste into ‘hog lagoons’. These are frequently aerosolised by tornadoes or overflow into water supply following storms.

Their solution to ultraprocessing is hyper-processing, also known as reformulation. This is a very useful strategy for industry because it delays the discussion about warnings on UPF packets. But reformulation won’t work for two reasons.

But the main reason that I don’t think we can reformulate UPF to make it better for us is that it is designed to be purchased and consumed in the largest possible quantities. And a food that is consumed less will never sell as well as a food that’s consumed more.*

The rules of the road have to be set by governments. And in the end, business is really good at reacting to that. Remember the sugar tax that was introduced in the UK in 2018 on the soft drinks industry – that has resulted in a massive reduction in sugar consumed in soft drinks.’

‘commerciogenic malnutrition’ – malnutrition caused by companies.9 Modern obesity is also a commerciogenic disease.

First, the people who make policy and inform policy should not take money directly or indirectly from the food industry. Second, the best way to increase rights and freedoms is to restrict marketing.

The goal should be that you live in a world where you have real choices and the freedom to make them.

‘It’s not food. It’s an industrially produced edible substance.’