Ultra-Processed People: Why Do We All Eat Stuff That Isn’t Food … and Why Can’t We Stop? By Chris van Tulleken
Chris van Tulleken and his identical twin Xand are familiar faces on our TV screens, especially to children and their parents from the CBBC show Operation Ouch! I was prompted to read this book after watching a documentary made by Chris van Tulleken on the topic of Ultra-processed Food (UPF)1 - Irresistible: Why We Can’t Stop Eating.
The book provides a great deal more detail about the research into UPF and its effects and I'd strongly recommend it to anyone interested in climate change or human health.
Here are a few quotes that I found particularly compelling in making the case against UPF and the companies that design and market it.
Everything from chicken nuggets to ice cream can be made from the same base liquids and powders.
UPF is “not food. It’s an industrially produced edible substance.”
There is new evidence of links between UPF and cancer, cardiometabolic disease, addiction and, importantly, eating disorders.
UPF drives production at huge scale of a few crops (palm oil, soya, sugar, wheat, maize, meat and dairy), often in areas of cleared tropical forest. This is a significant contributor to the causes of climate change.
UPF is produced efficiently due to the availability of cheap fossil fuels and other raw materials. Of course, ‘efficiently’ means in a narrow financial sense since the flawed reasoning of today’s dominant economic and business systems excludes the cost of externalities like damage to ecosystems and human suffering.
A great deal of UPF has no or very little real nutritional value therefore environmental damage caused in its production cannot be justified on nutritional grounds. In fact UPF causes a staggering level of harm to individual and public health. The reasons for this are complex and the book sets them out with admirable clarity and rigour.
As a society we have become dependent on UPF – it’s convenient, cheap, has a long shelf-life and is extremely palatable (a lot of effort goes into making it so). In the UK, we eat more meat in the form of UPF than we do in the form of fresh or minimally processed meat (7% versus 5% of our calorie intake). The food system is constructed to market and deliver UPF, consequently the option to switch to healthier but more expensive and time-consuming ‘real food’ is not readily available to a lot of people.
Breaking our addiction to UPF will be very difficult, but as with any addiction, the process starts with understanding the problem. One final extract from this excellent book:
UPF requires the current destructive way of farming and is the only possible output of this system. With agro ecological approaches, we could increase food quality and diversity whilst reducing all those external costs of ill health and climate change. It may be a fantasy to assume it would fix all problems, and it would almost certainly present new challenges, but they would be nothing compared with the consequences of not changing the food system.
- A word about the definition of UPF. The 'official' definition in the Nova food classification system is very very long. One way of identifying whether something is UPF is the length of a product's ingredients list and the inclusion on that list of things you don't recognise and wouldn't use in your own kitchen. This BBC article is quite helpful. https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/articles/what_is_ultra-processed_food