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

by Chris van Tulleken

In Hall’s experiment, the softness plus the calorie density meant that participants consumed an average of seventeen calories per minute more when eating UPF compared to the unprocessed diet.

And, perhaps most importantly, it doesn’t seem to matter whether the energy in the food comes from fat or carbs – it’s the energy density that is the more important determinant of calorie intake.

The number of chews per bite has a direct effect on slowing and reducing food 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.

Barry explained that hearing influences flavour and smell influences taste.

Anyone who drinks wine would be confident they could tell white from red, but even the experts fall for this illusion because colour exerts a dominant influence over how we perceive the smell and the taste of the wine. This is because our senses interact. This study suggests that colour seems to play a stronger role than odour in determining what we think we are tasting.

The words ‘taste’ and ‘flavour’ are used interchangeably to describe the unified perceptual experience of a food. But in scientific terms, flavour is both taste and smell, and flavour molecules are detected by receptors in the nose as well as by taste receptors in the mouth and throat. So, scientifically speaking, two boiled sweets with the same amount of sugar but different ‘flavours’ may taste identical (sweet), but smell distinct.

Flavour arises when the brain puts together inputs from taste, smell and touch. When we eat, we use information from our eyes, ears, nose, tongue and lips to build up an impression of flavour. The bones and muscles in our face detect vibrations from crunch and resistance from chewiness. Receptors in the mouth detect chemical changes in saliva and alterations in friction from oils and powders.

A signature set of volatile molecules evaporates from almost every substance in the world. Smell involves the detection of these molecules using receptors in the nose. And it’s fantastically precise.fn3 It’s often said that we can detect 10,000 different smells, but that’s wrong – it’s far too low. A 2014 study3,4 tested people using a matrix of different smells and estimated that we can distinguish between more than 1 trillion potential compounds,

over the past half century or more, industrial animal and plant breeding has focused on size and looks, such that the flavour has been bred out of meat, tomatoes, strawberries, broccoli, wheat, corn – pretty much everything we eat.

flavour is a signal of particular nutrients, which is what sends us in pursuit of those flavours.

example, many fruits and vegetables. But Schatzker’s core idea that we are chasing flavours in search of missing nutrition is increasingly well evidenced. A

Whole foods contain thousands more molecules than manufacturers add back in, and it is these molecules’ more subtle health effects that could be responsible for the well-established benefits of eating whole food – protection against cancers, heart disease, dementia and early death.

‘If you use beef bones and beef sinew, you get risotto on a completely different level than if you use vegetable stock.

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.

They’re the signature of fermented fish and plants, rich meaty broths, vintage cheese. That’s why foods with these molecules in them taste great.

You taste all over your mouth and a bit at the back of your throat and, contrary to popular belief, there don’t seem to be particular areas for each taste.

We’re pretty sure we have at least five types of receptors for five distinct tastes in our mouths: sweet, umami (savoury), sour, salt and bitter.fn2 We may also have specific tastes for water, starch, maltodextrins, calcium, various other metals and fatty acids, but it’s remarkably difficult to be sure if we are truly detecting taste.

Umami or savoury taste comes from those three molecules familiar from UPF ingredients lists: inosinate, guanylate and glutamate.

Glutamate is found in breastmilk, seaweed, tomatoes, scallops, anchovies, cheese, soy sauce, cured ham and many more foods. Inosinate is found mainly in fish – dried bonito and dried sardines. It starts to form as soon as a fish dies, reaching a maximum level about ten hours later. Guanylate is found mainly in dried shiitake and other mushrooms, forming from the breakdown of DNA in dying cells.

Vitamin C is likely the original reason we held onto sour detection, because it’s really the only nutritionally important sour taste.

Bitter signals ‘potentially toxic’, and a huge number of different chemical structures taste bitterness. We need twenty-five different genes to detect bitterness, which gives us a great ability to detect toxins.

the body doesn’t want to absorb sugar at a rate that exceeds its ability to remove it from the blood. Sweet blood is harmful in lots of different ways – sugar is food for bacteria, for one thing, and having lots of sugar in the blood also causes large shifts of water from cells into the blood. This increases the blood volume and makes the kidneys produce urine, resulting in dehydration – this is why peeing a lot is one of the first signs of diabetes.

For reasons that aren’t entirely clear, you can suppress sweetness if you make something cold and fizzy.

My personal reading of the data is that drinks containing low-calorie sweeteners are linked to obesity and type 2 diabetes very slightly more than their sugary equivalents, but don’t forget that sugar-sweetened beverages are very strongly linked to these things too – being only as bad as a sugary drink is still terrible.

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

She showed that the degree to which people would learn to want a flavour was affected not just by calories in the drink but by whether the sweetness and the calories were matched.23 Just

Small gave healthy volunteers drinks containing varying quantities of sucralose, sugar, or both – that seemed to demonstrate that a mixture of sweetener with sugar decreased the body’s response to insulin in a similar way to type 2 diabetes.

It was funded by the UK Food Standards Agency and included around 300 children.8 They were given either six colourants – all E numbers – and a preservative, or a placebo. The children who drank the additive-enhanced drinks had higher hyperactivity scores than those who consumed placebos.

And, like all new colonists, they destroy the local culture and ecosystem both deliberately and accidentally. This is called dysbiosis. We are increasingly sure that dysbiosis is linked to inflammatory bowel disease

The researchers tested polysorbate 80 and CMC in mice at concentrations lower than we all eat very regularly.fn7 Over just 12 weeks, the changes were dramatic. The mucus barrier was badly damaged. In healthy mice, gut bacteria are suspended in a layer of mucus away from the cells lining the gut, but in the emulsifier-treated mice, the bacteria were practically touching these cells.

look at what xanthan gum does in the body.29 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.

In 1997, the FDA proposed that this interpretation of the amendment was absolutely fine, and in 2016 they finalised the rule, meaning that it’s legally above board. 10–12 This is known as self-determination. It sounds so affirming and positive, right? You can simply decide whether you think your product is safe and then put it in food.

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

Neltner estimates that there is a universe of around 10,000 substances added to food in the USA. But because companies are allowed to self-determine, even the FDA doesn’t have a complete list, and around 1,000 of these substances are estimated to have been self-determined secretly.

VAT is payable on confectionery, with the exception of cakes and biscuits, which are staples, with the exception of chocolate-covered biscuits, which are luxuries, with the exception of chocolate-covered gingerbread men assuming they have no more than a couple of chocolate dots for eyes, which are staples. Gingerbread men with chocolate buttons or belts, however, are, in the eyes of the law, a luxury. Also, when the chocolate

If dietary trends continue, per-capita greenhouse-gas emissions from empty calories (calories without significant additional nutritional value) are estimated to nearly double by 2050. In Australia, for example, UPF consumption is already estimated to contribute more than a third of the total diet-related environmental effects.

The result of this is that, 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.

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.

First, they point out that there is far less energy in our food than it takes to make it. Neolithic people would not survive if they had to do this level of processing themselves by hand.

The second inefficiency they report is that plants produce a huge amount of potentially nutritious protein, but we eat hardly any of it. Instead, we feed it to animals.

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.

be particularly aware of emulsifiers and artificial sweeteners. Emulsifiers can thin the mucus lining of the gut, allowing faecal bacteria to leak into the blood stream and inflaming your whole body.