Ultra-Processed People: Why Do We All Eat Stuff That Isn't Food… and Why Can't We Stop?

by Chris van Tulleken

Stabilisers, emulsifiers, gums, lecithin, glucose, a number of different oils … these are the hallmarks of UPF.

The classification system is now called the NOVA system, and it divides food into four groups.1 The first is ‘unprocessed or minimally processed foods’ – foods found in nature like meat, fruit and vegetables, but also things like flour and pasta. Group 2 is ‘processed culinary ingredients’, including oils,fn3 lard, butter, sugar, salt, vinegar, honey, starches – traditional foods that might well

‘Formulations of ingredients, mostly of exclusive industrial use, made by a series of industrial processes, many requiring sophisticated equipment and technology.’

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.

I told him that it technically qualified as UPF because it has milk whey powder in it, an ingredient that isn’t typically used in home cooking.

Using models like this Hall predicted several years ago that a low-carb diet would not have a significant effect on weight.

On the grey, tinned, ultra-processed diet, people ate an average of 500 calories more per day than those on the unprocessed diet, and they gained weight in line with that.

It cost Hall’s team about $100 a week to provide 2,000 calories per day of UPF; for the unprocessed diet, the equivalent cost was more like $150. That’s a massive cost saving with UPF.

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.

The involvement of UPF companies in challenging the association between UPF and poor health is unsurprising. But there is a wealth of data about the pharmaceutical industry, as well as other industries, showing that, when an industry funds science, it biases the results in favour of that industry.

The transformation of coal into butter reveals the unavoidable problems of creating synthetic foods.

In industrialised countries like the UK, each of us ingests 8kg of food additives per year. When I read this statistic, it didn’t seem possible. To put this in perspective, on average we only buy 2kg of flour per year for home baking. But this is all consistent with Carlos Monteiro’s observation: that we are purchasing ever fewer raw ingredients, as more and more of our food is industrially prepared and processed.

Clearly, eating 8kg of synthetic molecules per year, not to mention the synthetically modified fats, proteins and carbs, is troubling, but most additive anxiety is misplaced,

The rats with the damaged hypothalamus ate so much so quickly that they sometimes died by choking on their food: they were no longer able to detect the ‘stop eating’ signals coming from their bodies.

If a person has a high body-fat percentage, then leptin should tell the brain: ‘Lots of fat to be going on with, here. No need to be too food-focused.’

the new UPF food environment is affecting our ability to self-regulate.

This is one of the many reasons why simple advice like ‘Eat less and move more!’ is ineffective for sustained weight loss. It’s as crazy as saying ‘Drink less water!’ to someone who’s feeling thirsty. We don’t just get hungry and eat. We’re controlled by ancient neuroendocrine feedback systems, which evolved to ensure we consume everything we need to pass on a few genes.

If you eat carbs, your blood sugar starts to rise, but insulin brings it back down to normal. When insulin is high, like after a meal, it reduces appetite and turns sugar into fat for storage. When insulin’s low, like when you haven’t eaten in a while, you start burning fat instead.

The idea is that, when we eat lots of carbs, they cause a rapid spike in our insulin levels to cope with the sugar. The spike not only promotes the storage of fat, but it drops sugar levels to lower than they were before the meal. This starves our muscles of energy, meaning that we’re less active as well.

looking at the full spectrum of evidence available, provided you keep consuming the same number of calories, the fall in insulin that comes from cutting carbs doesn’t seem to make you store less fat or burn more energy.

Indeed, for people who can stick to them, I suspect that low-carb diets do workfn5 – it’s just that humans have evolved to eat carbs as the foundation of our diet, and carb-free food is harder to eat. Protein and fat fill you up before you can eat lots of calories.

we don’t really choose what to eat. We are guided by tha...

throughout pre-history, humans have gained a substantial proportion of their calories from honey – up to 16 per cent on average in some communities, and, according to one study done with the Mbuti of the Congo forests, during the rainy season up to 80 per cent of the calories in their diet come from honey.fn7

the portion sizes of our foods are bigger, and their energy higher, than the reference databases say they are. The British Heart Foundation found that, in the twenty years between 1993 and 2013, individual shepherd’s pie ready meals have doubled in size, while a portion of crisps from a family pack has increased by 50 per cent.

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.

The sugar industry has an interest in promoting the narrative that inactivity, rather than food, is the problem.

The diphosphate stabilisers hold everything together through the freezing process so the water doesn’t end up in crystals on the surface.

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

the signals that tell you to ‘stop eating’ haven’t evolved to handle food this soft and easily digested, so soft that it’s essentially pre-chewed.

Flavourings signal that something is UPF, and the need for flavouring tells us a lot about some of the ways UPF does us harm.

!

The body’s ability to link calories with a particular smell or flavour barcode is exploitable by UPF manufacturers.

Part of the reason we are consuming so much is in search of missing tastes and flavour, which also indicate missing nutrition.

He cites research demonstrating that many flavour molecules in tomatoes are the precursors for essential fatty acids and vitamins.

Ultra-processing reduces micronutrients to the point that modern diets lead to malnutrition even as they cause obesity.

There is also evidence that concentrations of different antioxidants, vitamins and minerals affect weight directly by altering levels of the hormone leptin, which in turn affects appetite and regulation of body weight.

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.

Humans have evolved a very sophisticated detection system in our mouths for these molecules because they signify easily digestible protein – not the protein of raw meat, but the protein of perfectly aged, cooked meat.

What happens when the taste in our mouths doesn’t match the calories at all?

If food contains an artificial sweetener, it is, by definition, UPF.

When sweeteners are consumed with even a small amount of sugar, insulin levels seem to rise significantly. This will cause a drop in blood sugar and may then cause hunger, driving increased intake of food

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

A small study showed that desire for sugar was reduced after a two-week break from all artificial sweeteners. One particular artificial sweetener – Splenda – which contains sucralose and maltodextrin, also seems to alter brain activity in rats in areas that control food intake, obesity and energy control, as well as having effects on the gut itself.

I started to think about how sweeteners and flavour enhancers cause that mismatch between taste and nutrition that may cause harm.

There are so many thousands of these additives that I won’t even be able to cover all the major categories. There are flavours, flavour enhancers, colours, emulsifiers, artificial sweeteners, thickeners, humectants, stabilisers, acidity regulators, preservatives, antioxidants, foaming agents, anti-foaming agents, bulking agents, carbonating agents, gelling agents, glazing agents, chelating agents, bleaching agents, leavening agents, clarifying agents and so

Exmples of additives

Ostrowski found that xanthan gum is actually a food for a new bacterial species. From looking at population data, it seems that the gum has driven the colonisation of this bacteria into billions of people. It’s completely absent from populations who don’t eat it – whom Ostrowski could only find in remote groups of hunter-gatherers. Moreover, if you have this bacterial species, then you may also have another novel species that eats the breakdown products made by the first one. The effects of these bacteria are not understood, but it’s clear that xanthan gum creates a food chain in the human gut and, since the bugs it feeds can colonise infants at an early age, it may be having profound effects on immune system development.

there is no functional regulation of food additives in the USA that can ensure food is safe

Trans fats are made when hydrogenation is used to turn liquid plant oils into more useful solid fats.

Nestlé is a Swiss multinational and is the largest food processing company in the world. Its 2021 revenue was a little over $95 billion – larger than the GDP of most countries. Nestlé controls over 2,000 brands, ranging from global icons to local favourites, and sells its products in 186 countries.

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.

Inland rain requires trees. Rain clouds on their own cannot travel more than 400km from the sea, so rain in the centre of a continent – the very rain that creates the central forest of the Amazon for example – requires continuous forest to the coast. Around half the rain that falls on the Amazon comes from its trees. As every school geography student knows, water evaporates from the sea, then falls as rain on coastal forest. Those trees ‘breathe out’ water vapour, which creates new clouds that travel further inland in so-called ‘flying rivers’. Crucially, this is how water reaches the soy and corn plantations in central and western Brazil. Once you destroy the forest you get less rain. A 2019 study showed that the rainy season in the state of Mato Grosso had become a month shorter in a decade,41,42 and many of the major soy farms in Brazil are now suffering from the very drought that they have caused.