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

by Chris van Tulleken

Everyone sat forward as the data made the case that these old, dead viruses found throughout the human genome aren’t dead at all. They have functioning genes, ready to make more viruses. Every cell in the human body is a potential virus factory, but something keeps these viral genes quiet. It turned out that they’re suppressed by other genes in the cell.

The paper was saying that one part of our genome is constantly at war with another part.

UPF now makes up as much as 60 per cent of the average diet in the UK and the USA.

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.

Children in the UK and the USA, countries with the highest rates of UPF consumption, aren’t just heavier than their peers in nearly all other high-income western countries, they’re shorter too.11,12 This stunting goes hand in hand with obesity around the world, suggesting that it is a form of malnutrition rather than a disorder of excess.

But an analysis by the Food Foundation3 shows that the poorest 50 per cent of households would need to spend almost 30 per cent of their disposable income on food if they wanted to eat a diet that adheres to our national healthy-eating guidelines.

If you extract the different starches made by different plants, you find that they have contrasting properties. You can mix them with water to make all kinds of different gels and pastes with different textures at different temperatures.

xanthan gum. The last of these is, revoltingly, a bacterial exudate: slime that bacteria produce to allow them to cling to surfaces.

This means that butter is mainly fat with a little water dispersed. Since butter is not a liquid, bacteria can’t move through it, so it keeps for a long time without refrigeration and it’s full of those fat-soluble vitamins and essential fatty acids.

But recent research shows that inability to produce lactase made remarkably little difference to our ability to enjoy milk.9 The major motivation for early processing would probably have been preservation: yoghurt (made when the lactose sugar is consumed by Lactobacillus bacteria to produce the natural preservative lactic acid) and butter keep much longer than milk.

The experiment was simple enough. Volunteers were fed either an ultra-processed diet or a diet that was identical in terms of fat, salt, sugar and fibre but without any UPF. After two weeks, both groups then switched to receive the other diet. During both phases, participants could eat as much as they liked. On the ultra-processed diet, participants ate more and gained weight, whereas on the unprocessed diet they actually lost weight, despite having access to as much food as they wanted.

think a more useful way of explaining the salt in Coco Pops might be: this cereal contains 20 per cent more salt per gram than a typical microwave lasagne.

Carlos decided that, rather than focusing on single nutrients or food items, he would look at the overall dietary pattern. He and his team would approach the task of drawing a boundary around ‘bad food’ in a different way. Rather than starting at the beginning, down at the microscopic level, they’d start at the end. They’d identify what foods were causing the problems, and then work backwards to see what they all had in common.

Almost all the large-scale independent studies of multivitamin and antioxidant supplements have shown that, if anything, they increase the risk of death. This

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. Perhaps even more surprisingly, participants actually lost weight when they were on the unprocessed diet, even though they could eat as much of it as they liked. As already mentioned, it wasn’t that the UPF was more delicious,

Since 2010, more and more evidence has accrued suggesting that UPF is very probably the primary cause of not only the rapid global rise in obesity, but potentially of all sorts of other health problems as well.

Kevin Hall had posed, but on a massive scale. Their finding was that, even after adjusting for nutritional content in this way, the result remained statistically significant. It looked, once again, like the nutrients were less of a problem than the processing.

they found that increased consumption of UPF is associated with increased death from cardiovascular disease. They then added controls for fat, salt and sugar, and the effect remained.

most studies focus on obesity, but there is also evidence that increased UPF intake is strongly associated with an increased risk of: death – so called all-cause mortality8–12 cardiovascular disease (strokes and heart attacks)13–15 cancers (all cancers overall, as well as breast cancer specifically)16 type 2 diabetes17,18 high blood pressure19–21 fatty liver disease22 inflammatory bowel disease (ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease)23,24 depression25 worse blood fat profile26 frailty (as measured by grip strength)27 irritable bowel syndrome and dyspepsia (indigestion)28 dementia.29

it’s perfectly possible for someone to eat a high-UPF diet that is actually relatively low in fat, salt and sugar. Such a person’s diet would be healthy according to the guidance, while according to the evidence it would probably cause health problems.

Mixing the fat with diacetyl, water, salt and a bit of beta-carotene for colour allowed Imhausen to complete the transformation of German coal into ‘coal butter’ – the first totally synthetic food.

Per gram, our mitochondria produce 10,000 times more energy than the sun.

In industrialised countries like the UK, each of us ingests 8kg of food additives per year. When

Davis was proposing that humans, like Eddie Rixon’s cows, are able to vary their diet precisely, according to what we need – that we too have the apparatus to eat without any knowledge of nutrition in a way that will allow us to construct and maintain our bodies.

But when the overall data were analysed, there was a surprise: there was no difference between the groups in terms of the effect of fat or sugar on metabolism. A calorie was a calorie, regardless of whether it came from carbs or fat.

Sugar and salt are the two greatest food additives in terms of driving appetite, which is why they are nearly universal in UPF, whether it’s beans or pizza. So, high sugar content is one of the properties of UPF that drives weight gain.

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.

But the doubly labelled water experiments show that we’re actually underestimating how much we eat to a much greater extent today than we did a few decades ago.

It seems that people burn the same amount of energy each day whether they walk ten miles or sit at a desk. The significance of this can’t be missed: it means that we cannot lose weight just by increasing activity. Variation in body-fat percentage is unrelated to physical activity level or energy expenditure.

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. This is especially true when we look at longer timeframes of several days or weeks. In the case of the Hadza, when they rest, they really rest. And it’s true for athletes and everyone else who is active too. We can be very active for a period of time, but we claw back that energy debt later. It’s this reduction of energy usage in other ways inside the body that may explain why exercise is associated with improved physical health, even if it doesn’t lead to weight loss.

Since we’re not spending that energy on walking, we spend it elsewhere, on things like being stressed. The hypothesis says that office workers will likely have increased levels of adrenaline, cortisol and white blood cells, all of which make us anxious and inflamed.52,53

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.

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.fn2 But the vast majority of people who live with obesity have many minor genetic differences compared with people with lower BMI.

Giles Yeo had told me that genes affect eating behaviour, including the speed at which people eat and the foods they choose.

While almost everyone living with obesity will have genetic risks, some people who live at a so-called ‘healthy weight’fn3 also have genes for obesity, which could suggest that they are exerting willpower over their genes. However, that is not the case. The difference between people with the same genes and differing weights is the environment they live in, not their willpower.

There are over 6,500 food deserts in the USA according to the US Department of Agriculture. They’re found in areas with higher levels of poverty and higher percentages of ethnic minority populations.2 In the UK, over 3 million people do not have a shop selling raw ingredients within 15 minutes of their homes by public transport.

There is a clear correlation between poverty and the density of fast-food outlets, with almost twice as many in the most deprived areas compared with the least.

So, it’s much trickier to make lots of money from NOVA groups 1–3, especially at small scale. Huge food companies like Cargill can make money from beef because they’re so big, but they still rely on supplying that beef to manufacturers of UPF. There aren’t any start-ups making great milk or beef. There’s

living in a world where one in three children by the age of eleven are at risk of diet-related disease. One in three. We shouldn’t see these companies as relatable or sexy.’

The exact mechanisms aren’t clear, but when you’re stressed you secrete more of the hormone cortisol; this seems to drive increased intake of calorie-dense UPF through effects on many of those hormones involved in the energy-intake regulation system. Cortisol may also lead to fat accumulation around organs, known as visceral fat, which is associated with worse health outcomes.

been worked out in similar twin studies.fn5 They have shown that body-fat percentage is highly heritable – up to 90 per cent.12 But, depending on the group you study, heritability can also be as low as 30 per cent.

She and her colleagues found that, in families with secure incomes and high levels of food security, the heritability of their body weight was around the 40 per cent mark. But in households with the lowest incomes and the highest levels of food insecurity, it jumped to over 80 per cent.

‘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.’

Paul Hart had explained how most UPF is reconstructed from whole food that has been reduced to its basic molecular constituents which are then modified and re-assembled into food-like shapes and textures and then heavily salted, sweetened, coloured and flavoured. Avena speculated that without additives these base industrial ingredients would probably not be recognisable as food by your tongue and brain: ‘It would be almost like eating dirt.’

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

The principle of the matrix is pretty straightforward: that food is not merely the sum of its constituent parts. Anthony explained that the purpose of the digestive system is to destroy the food matrix.

What they found was that both the juice and the puree caused blood sugar and insulin levels to spike higher than the whole apple, before falling to a lower level than they had been in the first place.

As a result of the sugar crash all the participants still felt hungry. The whole apple, meanwhile, made blood sugar rise slowly, before it returned to the baseline level – no crash, and the fullness from the whole apples lasted hours.

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. 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.

the fact that it takes so little chewing may explain many of our contemporary dental problems. In the UK and the USA, around a third of twelve-year-olds have an overbite – a jaw that’s too small for their face – which is why so many children today need orthodontic work.