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

by Chris van Tulleken

It is well known that meat is less carbon efficient than plants as a source of food. Producing 100g of protein from beef emits at least 25kg of carbon dioxide, on average. Chicken produces far less, at 4–5kg of carbon dioxide per 100g, but we eat vastly more chicken than beef. Per 100g, tofu produces 1.6kg carbon dioxide, beans 0.65kg and peas 0.36kg. Some nuts are carbon negative even after transport, because tree nuts are replacing crops and taking carbon from the air.26

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.

Because most of what we eat is UPF, most of the meat we eat is in UPF. UPF meat (reformulated nuggets, burgers and so on) accounts for 7 per cent of average UK diet, whereas fresh or minimally processed meat accounts for only 5 per cent.

If you keep a chicken as a pet, it will live for around six years. Yet birth-to-slaughter time for 95 per cent of the chicken we eat is just six weeks –less than 2 per cent of their natural lifespan. Free-range chickens live for around eight weeks, and free-range organic chickens for around twelve weeks (that’s why it’s more expensive).

spending more on a fancier brand will mean that more care is taken over the type of chicken in your UPF, then you’d be mistaken.

Over 100 brands were recalled from the more budget end of the spectrum. But there were also recalls from higher-end places that charge more. The entire spectrum of UK food retail was represented by the recalls: Aldi, Tesco, Starbucks, Amazon, Waitrose, Sainsbury’s, Jamie Oliver Deli by Shell, Co-op, M&S, Leon and Pret.

Such a system would promote biodiversity and has the capacity to produce enough healthy food for a growing population on a lower land footprint than today with massive climate benefits. We would need to eat significantly less meat, but the modelling is clear that it is possible.48–53

There is no ‘biosecure’ way of rearing animals that keeps the resistant bacteria from their faeces away from us.

I don’t care how you feed yourself or your child. The goal should be that you live in a world where you have real choices and the freedom to make them.

They are doing precisely what the tobacco companies did for many decades – doubt is their product.

One reason might be that the British Nutrition Foundation’s ‘Healthy Eating Week’ in 2023 was sponsored by Coca-Cola, among others.

The truth is that the UK has been left behind. Globally, the jury is now in on a diet high in UPF. Public health academics from South and Central America whose speeches followed mine stood up and gave presentations about how they are labelling UPF with black octagons (see Chapter 19) and how it is already driving down purchases.

You cannot help to solve a problem you profit from creating.

Poverty is a failure of justice: children should all have the same opportunities in life irrespective of the household they are born into.

So, it’s not just morally right to end poverty, it is way more cost-effective to do so than to spend money fixing the lives it shatters.

At present around 80 per cent of the world’s farmland is used to graze animals or to produce crops to feed to animals. The combined weight of animals bred for food is now ten times the combined weight of all wild mammals and birds put together.27,28