I had a revelation at a railway-station snack shop the day before meeting van Tulleken, when I looked at shelves of candy bars that filled my entire field of vision. Learning about UPF is a different experience-you begin to realize that some of this stuff is barely food at all. That didn’t stop me from eating it, however. When she runs off to play, he realizes that the snack isn’t melting into liquid it has instead become “tepid gelatinous foam.” The culprit is xanthan gum, a substance made from the slime that bacteria excrete to cling to surfaces.īefore reading van Tulleken’s work, I felt pretty confident that junk food was bad. Ultra-processed People begins with a scene in which van Tulleken gives his 3-year-old daughter, Lyra, a tub of ice cream in a park. They allow food companies to make a profit, and consumers to spend less of their disposable income on food: In the U.S., that figure was 10.3 percent in 2021, down from 16 percent in the 1960s.
(A more comprehensive classification system, the NOVA scale, has been developed by Brazilian researchers.) These industrial additives keep food fresh for longer, making supply chains work, and tend to be cheaper than the natural ingredients they replace. UPF is typically defined as anything with one or more ingredients that you wouldn’t tend to find in a home kitchen: stabilizers, modified starches, industrial sweeteners, glycerine, xanthan gum. But he will tell me that the English muffin in front of me-pillowy soft, when it arrives, and pure white-looks ultra-processed. So he won’t tell me what to have for breakfast. Helen Lewis: ‘The revelation was that I was the problem’ “For Xand to set about losing weight on his own would have been to lose a decade-long argument with me,” Chris told me when I interviewed the twins two years ago. Chris discovered during that process that Xand’s other problem was him. Then the brothers made a podcast about ultra-processed food, which Chris already believed was bad, but to which Xand was still addicted. He is also a twin, and until last year his brother Xand was more than 30 pounds heavier than he was (the pair had the biggest weight discrepancy in the King’s College twin study). Van Tulleken is an infectious-diseases doctor. Rather than “food,” van Tulleken thinks UPF is better described as an “addictive edible substance.” If that’s true, it’s bad news for most Americans: UPF makes up 57 percent of the U.S. Hall, which gave participants either an ultra-processed or unprocessed diet and found that the former group ate more calories. He cites a 2019 research study, led by Kevin D.
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He argues that we should be more wary of a diet soda than a cookie baked from scratch at home, because UPF is stuffed full of chemicals that disrupt our body’s ability to regulate appetite and digestion. The problem isn’t the food’s nutritional profile, per se, but the industrial processes to which it has been subjected, and the artificial chemicals used to improve its flavor and shelf life. Van Tulleken’s case against UPF is different. Public-health campaigns against “junk food”-a shorthand for foods with high fat, sugar, and salt content-are well established and formed one of Michelle Obama’s priorities as first lady. I was aching, exhausted, miserable and angry.” “In just a few weeks, I felt like I’d aged ten years. “By the fourth week, it had started to have very noticeable physical effects, forcing me to loosen my belt by two notches,” he writes. As part of the research for Ultra-processed People, he ate a UPF-heavy diet for a month-a stunt reminiscent of Morgan Spurlock’s Super Size Me, and one open to the same criticism about replacing science with showmanship.
(Soft drinks have been linked to bone fractures, but their manufacturers dispute that there is a causal relationship.) There’s a very good reason that van Tulleken refuses to dictate my breakfast order: He has just published a book identifying ultra-processed food, or UPF, as a great evil in our diets, and has therefore signed up for a lifetime of being portrayed as a joyless, middle-class puritan who wants us to live on mung beans and kombucha. When I tell him later that I’ve decided that the occasional full-sugar cola is probably better than multiple diet sodas every day, he replies: “Enjoy the phosphoric acid leaching the minerals out of your bones.” Which sounds a little judgmental, if I’m honest. “Everyone thinks that I have a strong opinion about what they should eat,” he tells me, as I hesitate between the eggs Benedict and the full English. Chris van Tulleken refuses to tell me what to have for breakfast.
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