Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - BITESIZE | Why You Can’t Stop Eating Ultra-Processed Foods | Dr Chris Van Tulleken #480

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today's Bite Size episode is brought to you by AG1, a science-driven daily health drink with over 70 essential nutrients to support your overall health. It includes vitamin C and zinc, which helps support a healthy immune system, something that is really important at this time of year. It also contains prebiotics and digestive enzymes that help support your gut health. It's really tasty and has been in my own life for over five years. Until the end of January, AG1 are giving a limited time offer. Usually they offer my listeners a one-year supply of vitamin D and K2 and five free travel packs with their first order. But until the end of January, they are doubling the five free travel packs to

Starting point is 00:00:51 10. And these packs are perfect for keeping in your backpack, office, or car. If you want to take advantage of this limited time offer, all you have to do is go to drinkag1.com forward slash live more. Welcome to Feel Better Live More Bite Size, your weekly dose of positivity and optimism to get you ready for the weekend. Today's clip is from episode 414 of the podcast with Dr. Chris Van Telleken. Chris is a practicing infectious diseases doctor, one of the UK's leading science broadcasters, and author of the book, Ultra Processed People.

Starting point is 00:01:37 Overconsumption of ultra processed foods may be the biggest public health crisis of our time. maybe the biggest public health crisis of our time. And in this clip, he shares why he believes we eat so much stuff that isn't really food, and why we can't stop. I think when a lot of people think about their diet and the foods that they're consuming, they think about it through the lens of weight. One of the really interesting things that you elaborate on in your book is this idea that ultra-processed food consumption is harmful to us, or has the potential to be harmful to us, irrespective of its impact on our weight. We have really good data that they drive

Starting point is 00:02:26 a huge number of what we kind of euphemistically call negative health outcomes, which is everything from cardiovascular disease to metabolic disease to early death. So we're pretty sure that ultra processed food is now the leading cause of early death on planet Earth, ahead of tobacco. So if you, like most people in Britain, eat an average of 60% of your calories from ultra-processed food, you're still vulnerable to all those harms. So if we break down the evidence, because we're sure that ultra-processed food, that a non-whole food diet is causing these problems. And if you go, well, what are the plausible mechanisms? You're like, well, synthetic emulsifiers, we've got really good data now that they scrub out your gut, they thin the mucus lining, they disrupt the microbiome. Now,

Starting point is 00:03:09 do we understand all the knock-on impacts of that? No. But do we know that it generates terrible inflammation and metabolic disease in rats? Yes. You know, are rats people? No. But if it does it to rats, do we have reason to be concerned about the number of synthetic emulsifiers we're eating? Yeah, absolutely. Do we have early human data that's troubling? Absolutely. And could this also explain, if we scrub out the gut, we inflame it, and we start leaking fecal bacteria into our bloodstream that drains to our liver, do we think this cycle of inflammation

Starting point is 00:03:37 that that's going to drive might be explaining the increases in GI cancers, in gastrointestinal cancers, including liver cancer in young people? Yeah, it could be. It's pretty plausible. And the emulsifiers, and then we can go through that with carboxymethylcellulose, with maltodextrin, with non-nutritive sweetness. So with the additives alone, we can start doing that. Then we can look at all the synthetic fats and on and on and on. So the idea that this food might be driving all these problems isn't exactly wildly improbable. It's extremely likely and well-evidenced. And where I feel comfortable as a doctor making these recommendations is,

Starting point is 00:04:12 if you think about what's the risk of harm here, well, there's pretty much zero risk of harm when you improve your diet. The only diet we've ever studied that's associated with disease is an ultra-processed Western industrial diet. So we, you know, we, there are all kinds of, I mean, we're going to come to the definition, but you know, there's this very long 11 paragraph formal definition on the United Nations Food and Agriculture website, but we can sum it up by going, it's like food made by companies to generate growth for pension funds. That's a good working definition. High fat, salt, sugar is sort of a, it's sweet. If you use the definition as we do in law in the UK, it sweeps up about 85% of the problem products. We could say anything with a health claim,

Starting point is 00:04:57 almost all of those low fat, prebiotic, supports your immune system, has 30% less sugar, all of that is ultra processed or most of it. So how we define the harmful food, we're talking about American food. We're talking about if your food is made in a big factory owned by a transnational food corporation, there is a good chance that it will cause you harm. So there is a huge difference between processing, which is ancient and we have to process our food, and ultra processing, which is new. It's exclusively industrial. And it is about making products that are convenient, easily marketed, addictive, and very, very profitable. Let's talk about these ultra processes. Let's get some examples.

Starting point is 00:05:43 I did something this morning, which I haven't done in a long, long time, right? I went to our local corner shop, which I do go there to get certain things, but I came back with a bag full of shopping of things that I haven't bought in a long, long time. I'm going to get them on the table, Chris, and through the lens of what you've been writing about and talking about so far, I want you to help us all understand how do we figure out whether that food product that we're buying is helping us or harming us. Ingredient labels are things that I've spoken about on this show for many years, and you've got to read ingredient labels because you simply don't know what you'll get.

Starting point is 00:06:28 I had never read an ingredient list until maybe 2019 or something. You're kidding me. I just didn't I just assumed it was probably all fine. You know I was a molecular biologist. I'm like well chemicals are normal it's fine to have chemicals in food. I just hadn't read it and then

Starting point is 00:06:43 now I assume everyone does read ingredients labels. And when I show, you know, I mean, you know, you've worked in hospitals. We all eat it the same. We all eat it at Pret or Gregg's or Boots or we buy our sandwiches from M&S. When you get people to read the ingredients on a sandwich in these places and it's got 38 different ingredients, people are like, wow, I just never looked. Let's just talk about how, in inverted commas, real foods become ultra processed. Now, I think I've got it here. Have you got some bread? Again, I just looked in the local news agents. I just thought, what is looking healthy? Yeah.

Starting point is 00:07:18 Right. Medium slice, whole meal, no added sugar. Right. So perhaps talk me through what's in that this let's have a quick look at the ingredients and check it is so um it's got uh it's got vegetable oils including sustainable palm there's no such thing as sustainable palm let's be clear about this and palm fat that's in this is not uh it's not the red spicy liquid that you squeeze out of palm nuts for west african cooking this refined, bleached, deodorized, hydrogenated, and intersterified palm fat. So that is, makes it, then there's wheat gluten, and then there's emulsifiers E471, E481, E472E. So that is diacetyl tartaric acid esters of mono and diglycerides of fatty acids. So this is, this is ultra processed bread. I mean, it's all my, you know, other foods with lots of ingredients. Yes, tick. Foods with health claims, no added sugar.

Starting point is 00:08:06 Real bread, I would say it may be useful for many people to not think of this or any bread like this as real bread. Real bread has three ingredients. It has water, wheat, and salt. That's how you make bread. You can use naturally occurring yeasts. This has, you know, no added sugar. Sugar should not be in any bread.

Starting point is 00:08:24 I mean, sugar's what you put in cake. It doesn't go in bread. Do you know, no added sugar. Sugar should not be in any bread. I mean, sugar is what you put in cake. It doesn't go in bread. And do you know, can I just say, Chris, one of the ways that you outlined in your book, I thought was brilliant, which was if you're wondering whether that food is ultra processed, it probably is. If you're reading an ingredients list, you're probably eating an industrially produced food. If you go and buy broccoli there is no ingredients this time there's also no health claim on broccoli or cabbage or

Starting point is 00:08:50 tomatoes or onions or garlic one ingredient foods it's like one ingredient food you know the one thing we're sure is if you cook at home unless you are cooking those kind of internet cakes where you make them all out of candy yeah you know if you're cooking at home you know almost no matter what ingredients you're using, you're going to be doing yourself a service. So that bread, so the difference between that bread and what I would call real bread is, there are several things about that are harmful.

Starting point is 00:09:15 It's incredibly soft. So that is one of the products that you will spread with an ultra-processed spread of some kind, some margarine, maybe some low-fat mayonnaise or some chocolate spread, and you will consume calories at a rate your body cannot keep up with. The flour is very, very fine particles and the protein has been back-added to the flour. Bread flour should be very high protein. They've back-added the wheat gluten into that for absolute control. And then it's emulsified. And the emulsifiers do all kinds of things. Broadly, that bread is a kind of whipped foam of these commodity carbs, proteins, and fats.

Starting point is 00:09:49 And then it's sort of baked into this very light, soft, spongy substance that is a vehicle for ultra-processed spreads. So the main thing about the difference between that and real bread is you'll consume it very quickly. But it has got those emulsifiers, which we have some evidence will drive some harms. This is ultra processed, right? Why is that a problem? So in terms of the ways, so for a start, we can't necessarily demonize just this product, or at least not quite yet in this podcast. But for the moment,

Starting point is 00:10:22 what I say in general is there's no one thing that's poisonous. It's the eating an ultra-processed dietary pattern is harmful. So it's when the whole pattern of your diet, when 60% of your calories come on average from products like this, ultra-processed products, that's what we are sure is harmful. One of the things that everyone at the food company says is the way that they're all developed

Starting point is 00:10:44 is they're tested on very big groups of people. And they do A-B testing. So, you know, you get Coco Pops A, Coco Pops B. And the main thing you measure is how much do people eat and how quick do they eat it? Because we know that speed of consumption is very important for increasing intake. and so every year you try a slightly new ratio of sugar and salt a little bit more cocoa mass slightly different flavorings uh crispier rice softer rice you do all these different adjustments and the food becomes more and more palatable so with any ultra processed product you can say the emulsifiers harm you the non-nutritive sweeteners harm you it's the softness it's the

Starting point is 00:11:21 sugar fat ratio it's every single aspect it's the sugar-fat ratio. It's every single aspect. It's the combo. Saying bread is good or bread is bad is problematic. A good or bad is problematic anyway around food, but whether it's a health-promoting food or a food that isn't promoting health, it kind of depends how the bread is made. I think the key point for us to remember, like you've already emphasised, it's about a pattern. If you're having, I don't know, let's say a bowl of Cocoa Pops, let's say you're really fit, you love exercising, you eat well, but after one of your gym sessions

Starting point is 00:11:55 each week, your treat to yourself is a bowl of Cocoa Pops. Well, you know what? In the whole scheme of things, it's probably not going to be a problem. People go out and they have a cigarette and a glass of wine. Some people have difficult relationships with certain products and they may find abstinence easy. So for me, I have a real problem with ultra processed food. I've been very addicted to it, so I am abstinent. But that's quite an extreme position. And that's the position that someone who lives with a difficult relationship with alcohol or tobacco would live in. People, addicts can't be moderate. But I think most people don't become addicted and they can just cut down if they can afford to. So inside all of us, there's an idea that with an abundance of calories around, you know, humans are just sort of evolved to eat loads of calories.

Starting point is 00:12:47 And if there's too much food, we'll eat it and we'll gain weight. And that isn't true. We've had abundant calories for, you know, centuries. For a really long time, many populations have. Without any weight gain. And so inside us, we have this satiety mechanism. There's a long-term one that regulates the amount of fat on our bodies. And there's a short-term one that midway through the pizza eating contest goes, mate, you have to stop. You've eaten too much. Now that short-term satiety

Starting point is 00:13:11 mechanism is a set of, it's very complex. We don't understand it fully, but it's a set of hormones and nerve signals from the gut. And in simple terms, ultra-precious food is sort of pre-digested, if you like. It is so broken down. The particles are so fine that partly you can consume it without really chewing. So you don't get the hormonal release that you get from the chewing. And partly it seems to be absorbed in a part of your gut that doesn't release a fullness signal.

Starting point is 00:13:36 It never gets to the bit of your small bowel where the hormones come from that say, it's time to stop eating now. And so this is one of the reasons we think why so many people listening and have this experience of, you're sort of continuing to eat food and you know you should be full and you kind of are almost full and yet you can't seem to stop eating. It's that disconnect between, you know, your evolutionary expectation of when you should feel full and when you actually do. So this is how the food

Starting point is 00:14:05 is designed. It's not surprising when one of the things you're measuring in these design trials is how quickly do people eat it and how much do they eat? You famously did this 30-day trial where you would mostly eat ultra-processed food. 80% of my calories came from ultra-processed food for 30 days. This 30-day trial you did, at the end of it, you said your weight went up by six kilos. Your levels of leptin, the satiety hormone, went up five times. Your levels of CRP, the marker of inflammation, doubled. Those were quite remarkable findings in just 30 days. Those are the kind of objective measurements that you could do pre and post. But it was also interesting to hear

Starting point is 00:14:55 those more subjective things, how you felt, what happened when you woke up at night, how did your brain function? You're also very open in the book about what it did to your bowels and how quickly that returned or it returned back to normal when you return back to a whole food diet. That was really cool. The intellectual lesson was underlined by kind of overdosing on the problem and then suddenly going cold turkey because I didn't want it anymore. And it was like the clouds parted. So as a physician, I think we live often very different lives to our patients. We're generally more privileged just in pure finance, but we also generally make more money because doctors are paid. And so we eat different food.

Starting point is 00:15:38 We have different levels of education about food. And so what happened in the space of that month was I kind of aged 10 years and I developed all these problems that I hadn't had before. The sleeplessness where you wake up in the middle of the night and you go to the fridge, that was kind of new. And the piles and the general aching and misery, all of which at the time I didn't, it was weird, I didn't associate it with the food until I quit the food and it all went away. You've talked about this.

Starting point is 00:16:07 I think you understand this better than me. When we feel anxious or unhappy, we generally point at the thing in front of us and go, that's the problem. It's my work. It's my children. It's my marriage. And it was when I stopped the food, I went, oh, my wife didn't suddenly become an absolute pain in the neck for a month. In fact, the opposite was true.

Starting point is 00:16:24 It was me that had become unbearable and it was driven by the food. My wife didn't suddenly become absolute pain in the neck for a month. In fact, the opposite was true. It was me that had become unbearable and it was driven by the food. So I was very inflamed and the sleeplessness was, you know, you get into, it's that vicious cycle. I mean, you took, it was your pillars.

Starting point is 00:16:35 It was like I destroyed those pillars one by one, starting with the food and that interrupted everything else. I mean, Chris, hearing that is really powerful because I almost do the opposite with my patients. So you went onto a specific diet, which then gave you a whole host of non-specific and specific symptoms, right? General malaise, moodiness, low energy, low vitality. Stopped exercising.

Starting point is 00:17:00 Stopped exercising, work was hard, all these kinds of things. But you also had const you know, constipation, anal fissure, all these things that you write about. And I'm going to draw this into another part that you think that we shouldn't be looking to the industry for the solution. The solution has to come from government and doctors. I want to talk about that in just a moment. I, like many doctors, when they finished medical school, thought that they had been taught all the tools that they need to get their patients well. And then I started practicing and I thought, well, what I've learned is fantastic for maybe 20% of my patients, but there's a whole 80% of people with chronic symptoms, sometimes vague, non-specific symptoms that I can't quite put a label on, that I don't really have many tools to help. And listeners to my show will know I went on a journey from 2010 or so. I've been

Starting point is 00:17:52 going around the world, going to conferences to try and learn about nutrition and movement and sleep and stress and the gut microbiome and how did these things affect us? And I would say around 2013, I made quite a significant change in the way I practice, which is with a lot of patients who came in who had chronic symptoms, whether it was sometimes autoimmune conditions, sometimes fatigue, energy, irritable bowel syndrome, even vague things I didn't know what it was, I would try and suggest to them that they go on a whole food diet for two to three weeks if they could. And I remember on a scrap of paper from the printer, I'd write down, I said, look, if you can, what I'd recommend for the next few weeks is just see what happens if you're only consuming whole foods. Now, I recognize it can be hard.

Starting point is 00:18:48 I recognize there's a poverty issue. I recognize all of that. But I started to get truly mesmerized when people would come back a few weeks later and go, oh, my mood's better. Oh, I don't have that anymore. Oh, that sort of vague arm pain, I don't have that anymore. I've got more energy. I'm sleeping better. I'm not talking about weight. Blood sugar measurements. Blood sugar, I'm not talking about weight.

Starting point is 00:19:11 My hypertension, my high blood pressure's gone. And I thought, wait a minute, how many of the problems that we're seeing that we're taught to diagnose, give a label to, and then give a treatment to, how many of these are downstream consequences of the way that we're eating? I still don't think across medicine, across the population, we understand that the food we're eating, and I get it's hard, right? I'm not saying

Starting point is 00:19:39 this is easy. It can impact all kinds of different things, right? It's not just your weight. It's so much more. Because when you do that with patients, it's just like your experience of 30 days of doing it. And then within 48 hours, your sleep, your bowels, everything starts to return back. I think that's a very powerful experience for a patient to go, wait a minute.

Starting point is 00:20:00 I had no idea that this was impacting me that much. Hope you enjoyed that bite-sized clip. Do spread the love by sharing this episode with your friends and family. And if you want more, why not go back and listen to the original full conversation with my guest. If you enjoyed this episode, I think you will really enjoy my bite-sized Friday email. It's called the Friday Five. And each week I share things that I do not share on social media. It contains five short doses of positivity, articles or books that

Starting point is 00:20:33 I'm reading, quotes that I'm thinking about, exciting research I've come across, and so much more. I really think you're going to love it. The goal is for it to be a small yet powerful dose of feel good to get you ready for the weekend. You can sign up for it free of charge at drchatterjee.com forward slash Friday 5. I hope you have a wonderful weekend. Make sure you have pressed subscribe and I'll be back next week with my long form conversation on Wednesday and the latest episode of Byte Science next Friday.

Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - BITESIZE | Why You Can’t Stop Eating Ultra-Processed Foods | Dr Chris Van Tulleken #480

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