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

by Chris van Tulleken

British consumers who in 2017, even before the current cost-of-living crisis, spent just 8 per cent of their household budget on food, lower than almost anywhere else other than the USA (where people spend 6 per cent). Our European neighbours – Germany, Norway, France, Italy – all spend 11-14 per cent of their budget on food, and households in low-income countries spend 60 per cent or more.1

shame and outrage are clearly inadequate to limit the survival of companies that are complicit in atrocities. And the ecosystem idea seemed to explain why: their behaviour changes only when the flow of energy, the money, is diverted. Shame may interrupt the flow of money, but if it doesn’t it will serve no practical function to limit corporate behaviour.

A single cell uses around 10 million ATP molecules every second. Per gram, our mitochondria produce 10,000 times more energy than the sun.

Sugar and salt are the two greatest food additives in terms of driving appetite, which is why they are nearly universal in UPF,

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.’

Evidence from skulls shows that pre-industrial farmers who were eating increasing levels of carbohydrate have plenty of cavities and dental abscesses, but fewer than 5 per cent have impacted wisdom teeth, compared with 70 per cent of modern populations.3,

energy density of food has a crucial role in moderating daily energy intake.

The researchers showed that going from unprocessed food to processed food to UPF increased the number of calories consumed per minute from thirty-six to fifty-four to sixty-nine.

French fries smell ‘good’ because the body and brain have linked the smell with the huge nutritional load of fat and carbs that follows.

The fact that we’ve maintained such elaborate sensory organs, and the neurological tissue to process the information, means that taste and smell are very important to humans.

For every one of your cells there are, by some estimates, 100 other organisms living as part of you: viruses, phages, bacteria, protozoans, archaea, fungi, and even a few animals like worms and mites.

of the thousands of different strains of plants and breeds of animals that have been cultivated since the birth of agriculture, just twelve plants and five animals now make up 75 per cent of all the food eaten or thrown away on earth.

Oil is cheap for the same reason that UPF is cheap: because, according to the International Monetary Fund and lots of other people, we all subsidise it by paying around $6 trillion (yes trillion) worth of external costs, like increases in healthcare costs due to air pollution and the costs of a changing climate.

A staggering 91 per cent of all the plastic waste ever produced has not been recycled and has either been burned, put into landfill or is simply in the environment.

Third, while initial samples were given at low price, or even for free, once the mother had stopped lactating the price went up, creating poverty further and endangering the child and its siblings. In east Africa, for example, to feed an infant properly would take more than a third of a labourer’s salary.

The marketing budget of the formula industry is almost incomprehensibly large at around $3–5 billion dollars per year – comparable to the entire annual operating budget of the World Health Organization. This spend by industry means that the market for infant formula and follow-on milk is growing eight times faster than the global population.

No one thinks that Philip Morris should fund the doctors who generate the research around whether smoking harms you. No one thinks that tobacco legislation should be written by charities funded by British American Tobacco. Why should food policy around health be any different?