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Last week, I reviewed the new TV series, Beyond Paradise.

Book: Ultra-Processed People: The Science Behind Food That Isn’t Food by Chris Van Tulleken
Genre: Nonfiction
Publisher: W.W. Norton and Company
Publication date: 2023

Source: Hardback borrowed from library

Summary: Ultra-Processed People explains how it came to be that 60% of our diet consists of Ultra-Processed Food (UPF) for those of us in the US and UK and a growing number of people around the world. “Food” means that it’s edible, nominally. “Ultra-Processed” means that the factory-made ingredients wouldn’t strike us as food.

We’ve started eating substances constructed from novel molecules and using processes never previously encountered in our evolutionary history, substances that can’t really even be called ‘food’. Our calories increasingly come from modified starches, from invert sugars, hydrolysed protein isolates and seed oils that have been refined, bleached, deodorised, hydrogenated–and interestified. And these calories have been assembled into concoctions using other molecules that our senses have never been exposed to either: synthetic emulsifiers, low-calorie sweeteners, stabilising gums, humectants, flavour compounds, dyes, colour stabilisers, carbonating agents, firming agents and bulking — and anti-bulking — agents. (pp. 4-5)

Yum.

Ultra-Processed People also documents many ways that UPF damages people and our environment. Well, some of them. There haven’t been enough studies to say for sure how these various chemicals impact the human body. And, as we’ve all been learning in recent years, environmental impact is complicated and hard to predict, but often worse than we initially believe.

While he did his research for the book, Chris Van Tulleken took on an experiment to eat 80% UPF for four weeks. That’s the amount that American and British children eat. The result was a large weight gain of 6kgs (13 lbs). The hormones related to appetite were out-of-whack from the pre-experiment testing such that the fullness signal in his body was barely measurable after a big meal and his hunger hormone went “sky high just moments after eating.” (p. 160)

Thoughts:
This seems like an odd book to choose for British Isles Friday, but I really enjoyed that it was written by a British doctor and professor at University College London. You can see from the quote above that the spellings haven’t been changed for an American audience. My spell checker flags all of those excess ‘u’s and wants to change a bunch ‘s’s to ‘z’s.

Ultra-Processed People is engagingly written which means that we get to see the author walk alongside Regent’s Canal with someone he is interviewing. He visits the office of another expert and “looks across at two enormous limestone lions that flank the rear entrance to the British Museum.” (p. 180)

He talks about eating at Pret which was a place that I went to several times when we were in England. It seemed to have relatively healthy food that could be consumed by someone living in hotel rooms. It turns out than when you read the ingredients, the soups and sandwiches contain a dizzying array of chemical compounds that are anything but natural.

I learned about this book from a Brit which is the only reason that I paid attention to the different covers on the two editions. Personally, I think the British cover is better. The main image is a loaf of commercial bread, making it clear that one of our basic food staples is jam-packed with UPF ingredients. Also, the subtitle seems more to the point in the British version: Why Do We All Eat Stuff That Isn’t Food…and Why Can’t We Stop?

The Britishness of it all was mildly annoying at the end, however. While reading the book, the question of “what can we do about this?” got more and more urgent for me. He stated two policy recommendations in a succinct paragraph:

First, the people who make policy and inform policy should not take money directly or indirectly from the food industry. Second, the best way to increase rights and freedom is to restrict marketing.

That’s a non-starter in the US where both proposals will be shouted down with “FREE SPEECH!”

I think the low-hanging fruit in the US might be the ridiculous loophole for Generally Recognized As Safe (GRAS) food additives. Companies in the US decide, on their own, what qualifies as GRAS. It is not in their best interests to check for the impact that their ingredients have on the human body and the US food regulatory environment doesn’t require that they do so.

Appeal: Ultra-Processed People is not a book that is meant to tell you how to eat. On the other hand, both the author and his brother ended their UPF addictions by eating a lot of UPF while also learning about how damaging it is — a kind of aversion therapy that also works for smokers.

That’s worth a shot, but if you’re not willing to sacrifice your body for a temporary high-UPF experiment, I’ve read some other books that helped me reduce my intake of factory-made foods, even before I read this book. Try Food Rules by Michael Pollan (illustrated by Maria Kalman) and The End of Overeating by David A Kessler.

Read Ultra-Processed People to learn about the bigger picture and global impact of Ultra-Processed Food.

Ultra-Processed People helped me take my healthy eating to a new level. My normal eating is quite low in UPF, but my days that aren’t normal often had UPF in it. I’m starting to skip opportunities to eat outside the house in preference to coming home to eat something that I know works better in my body. When I went to see Barbie a couple of weeks ago, I didn’t eat or drink anything at the theater — that might be a first for me!

Have you read this book? What did you think?

I’m sharing this post with Weekend Cooking. Visit The Adventures of an Intrepid Reader for more posts about food.

Edited to add: I’m also sharing this with the August Foodies Read collection. Thanks, Heather!