Instant Genius - Ultra-processed Food with Dr Chris van Tulleken

Episode Date: May 4, 2023

Have you ever struggled to put that packet of biscuits back in the cupboard after opening them? Or found yourself dialling for your favourite takeaway more often than you’d really like to? If so, it sounds like you’ve been under the influence of ultra-processed food. But what exactly are they and what are they doing to our bodies when we consume them? In this episode I speak to Dr Chris van Tulleken, BBC TV presenter and infectious diseases doctor based at the Hospital for Tropical Diseases in London. He tells me about the surprising discoveries he made about UPF when writing his latest book – Ultra-Processed People - Why Do We All Eat Stuff That Isn’t Food … and Why Can’t We Stop? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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so you can experience exceptional sound at home. Music just as the artist intended. visit name audio.com to learn more. And welcome to Instant Genius, a bite-tized masterclass in podcast form. I'm Jason Goodyear, commissioning editor at BBC Science Focus magazine. Have you ever struggled to put that packet of biscuits back in the cupboard after opening them? Or found yourself dialing for your favourite takeaway more often than you'd like to? If so, it sounds like you've been under the influence of ultra-processed food or UPF.

But what exactly is it? And what does it do in our bodies when we can? consume it. In this episode, I speak to Dr. Chris Van Tullochan, BBC TV presenter, an infectious diseases doctor based at the hospital for tropical diseases in London. He tells me about the surprising discoveries he made about UPF when writing his latest book, Ultra Processed People. Why do we all eat stuff that isn't food? And why can't we stop? Your book Ultra-processed people is all about ultra-processed food and the effect it has on our health. So I think the best place to start here then is what exactly is ultra processed food?

So we have processed food, which I think is a bit unclear in a lot of people's mind, but then ultra processed food, which is another layer. So can we unpick that first off? Absolutely. So food processing is ancient. We've been doing it as a species for more than a million years. It shaped our bodies. It's shaped our guts.

And the way we can think about food is there are broadly three types. There's whole food, which is like an oyster or milk. Milk is a really good example of a whole food. You can drink it straight out of the cow. You shouldn't do that because you might get brucellosis, but you can. You can process milk into butter, cheese, yogurt, and we've been doing that. We're sure for many thousands of years.

So there are these pottery shards found in the desert in North Africa, where they used to be pastoralists before it turned to desert, seven, eight thousand years old, and they've got traces of butter fats and dairy fats. So we've been processing milk for a long time. And that brings loads of advantages, and those processed foods aren't associated with diet-related disease. Ultra-processed food has a formal scientific definition. It's a category of food, and the definition was created to try and understand why our diet

is doing us so much harm, because diets now replace smoking as the leading cause of early death. So there's this very, very long formal scientific definition, very widely recognized by the UN boils down to this. If it's wrapped in plastic and it contains an additive that you don't find in a typical domestic kitchen, then it is ultra-processed food, also known as UPF. So you mentioned additives there. So what are we talking about when we talk about additives? So additives are the thing that everyone, as I've been talking about this book, people get very fixated on the additives because we all sort of worry about the additives. If you read on your label things like emulsifiers, stabilises, colourings, flavourings of any kind, sweetness,

flavor enhances, anything with an e-number, those are additives. And some of them, we do have some early evidence that they are associated with health problems. So there's some evidence with color and attention. And some of the emulsifiers, there's really quite robust research linking them to bowel inflammation and effects on the microbiome. Similarly, some of those stabilizers like xantham gum. So if you look at your supermarket bread, I mean, emulsifiers are in so many different things. You'll find them in your drinks. You'll find them in your supermuseum. market bread and sometimes they're called things like E472E, sometimes it'll be called datem, sometimes they're called tartaric acid esters of mono and dioglycerides of fatty acids.

Those additives, some of them do as direct harm, for the most part, they're just a sign that your food is ultra-processed. They're a proxy for loads of other things, and it's the other things that are done to the food that we think are more concerning. So ultra-processing includes the mechanical things that are done to our foods, so extrusion and maceration and the extraction of molecular oils. It includes thermal and chemical processing like inter-asterification or hydrogenation of oils making, turning liquid plant oils into solid fats, which as every bacon knows are much more useful. And it also includes things like marketing. So marketing is one of the things that we think drives excess consumption. And excess consumption is a big property of these foods. And the other thing

that's a little bit tricky for people who are science-minded to grasp about the definition of ultra-processing is it includes the purpose of this food. So with almost every traditional food you can think of, whether it's a butter or a lasagna, there is an ultra-processed version of it, a lasagna in a ready meal with a pack with Xantham gum and stabilizes in it, a butter would be a plant oil margarine. And the purpose of the lasagna and the margarine is about generating growth and profit it for food companies. The purpose of your traditional butter and lasagna is those things were invented by female scientists primarily over the last few hundred millennia, and they were invented to nourish and to provide nutrients for friends and family and communities. So the purpose

is really important of the food. So you mentioned their supermarket bread. So I think this is really interesting. I think a lot of people will see like a piece of plastic American cheese and they'll know. Straight off. That's ultra-processed. But some of them are sort of hiding in plain sight, aren't they? I think that's right. So there's loads of it. There's obvious junk food, you know, the high street fried chicken, the burgers, all the fast food chains that we all eat at. But lots of our staple foods are now processed. So there's been a really interesting

thing happening. Since I published the book, a big nutrition charity has released a statement saying, you know, some ultra-process foods can be healthy, and their example is beans on toast. And obviously, beans on toast is our national dish. And what's really important for me is not to demonize beans on toast and certainly not to demonize the people who eat it, because this is the only affordable, available food for loads and loads of people. It's intriguing, though, that our bread is not really bread anymore, and that our national dish, and beans on toast is a perfectly thing to feed kids. I feed my own kids two nights ago. they had beans on toast and fish fingers as dinner. All of it ultra-processed.

I'm not worried about our intake of that. It is a symptom of our food system in this country, though, that it would be absolutely impossible to imagine going and buying Haricot beans, mixing them with tomatoes and salt, and baking beans at home. And in fact, my mother did this the other night, and I was talking to a journalist this morning, and they just couldn't believe that my mum had done this. I mean, most of us don't even know where to get these beans. part of the replacement of our traditional foods with these ultra-process products has been about convenience and our whole diet has now been replaced to the extent that this makes up on average 60% of what we eat 60% of our calories come from UPF and kids it's much higher so a very typical

diet for a teenager might be 70 or 80% of their calories from UPF so the project is not to make everyone worried about beans on toast but we should be a bit concerned that our supermarket bread is not really bread anymore. The bread is such a great example because everyone's got it at home. And people can do this experiment. If you can afford it, go and buy a loaf of real bread from your local bakery, get sourdough or any, any traditional bread will do. The supermarket bread is a spongy foam. And that's partly because the amulsifiers and some of the stabilizers and the way the wheat gluten is added later in the process used to mix it. It's incredibly soft and softness we think is one of the main properties of ultra-processed food

that drives excess consumption. And it does lots of other stuff as well, but one of the most studied effects is it drives weight gain. It's so soft that we eat it before our gut hormones have time to catch up and tell us that we're full. And if you have an eating race of supermarket bread versus an equal amount of sourdough, you'll find the sourdough takes you at least twice as long to consume. And real food is much less energy dense, it's much wetter, and it's much chewier. And we know that the science is really incontrovertible on softness and texture. Physical processing of food massively affects our hormone response.

And so this is food that we think is interfering with our ability to feel full. So we're essentially being sold food that isn't food. So how did we reach this point? You know, how did we get here? You said, like, we've been processing food for millions of years. how have we ended up at this point? So it's happened quite gradually. Initially in the 19th century, butter was the first kind of staple food

where cost was a real public health problem, actually. So butter, you have to grow a cow, milk a cow, process the milk and then store the butter, and the butter goes a bit rancid relatively quickly. But it's always been expensive and people like butter because it makes all the boring carbs palatable. And what was happening in the States is there was a lot of waste plants. oil from cotton gin. So cotton seeds, like all seeds, are full of oil, but cotton seed oil is quite toxic, which is why we don't eat it. You never have cold virgin cotton seed oil. It contains things that taste foul and interfere with fertility. But a process was developed where if you refine the

oil, bleach it and deodorize it and then hydrogenate it. So you can add more hydrogen atoms to the carbon chains. You can turn it from this very bitter liquid oil into a solid fat and make margarine. So initially there was a sort of public health interest in making cheap widely available food. But as our food system has developed and become more what we call financialized, as the food companies have become more and more consolidated, fewer and fewer transnational companies feed us now. By some measurements, it's really four companies, by other, you might say there are sort of 15 to 20 companies, but it's a very small number of enormously, enormously powerful companies who aren't, it's not that they're not concerned with public health,

it's that they actually can't be concerned with public health. So they have legal obligations to make money for their owners, and that's the way they work, is what they have to do. And so considerations of whether or not particular ingredients are healthy are a bit irrelevant so long as they're acting within the law, but also there's now an incentive to develop these extremely convenient quasi-addictive foods. And so the food is kind of iterative, through these design processes where many of us find that we actually can't stop eating it anymore. So initially, the major changes happened in the states with the invention of the microwave, the widespread use of refrigeration, and also changes in the labour force. You know, women had

entered the labour force and people wanted convenient food. And as the arms race between the companies ratchets up to compete for a very tight margin market space, the products become more and more and more palatable, ever cheaper, ever cheaper ingredients substituted, and ever more aggressive marketing campaigns, which is why now, from the second you leave your house to when you go to bed at night, you are continuously sold snacks and foods and products that really are about driving excess consumption. We have enough food in this country. We've had enough food for a very, very long time, and the only way to generate financial growth is to sell people more food than they need. And I think lots of listeners, food addiction is really controversial. People have felt very uneasy with

food addiction because the only thing you can use as a strategy once you acknowledge something's addictive is abstinence. And so you can't be abstinent from food. What the research is really clear about now is the, and listeners will recognize this, the only foods that people really struggle to stop eating and binge on are ultra-processed foods. And for some people it will be pizzas, other people it will be, you know, this ultra-processed pizzas, biscuits, cakes, chocolate, confectionery, crisps. It could be a wide range of products, but those are the foods we feel addicted to. So I think it's sort of, we can't really talk about food without talking about the idea of calories. You know, so especially you mentioned the microwave meals. So a lot of them are called

healthy option, lasagna, low fat, low calorie. So what, what, what, what, what, what, what, do they fit into this picture? So it's almost a rule that if something has a health claim on it, it's very likely to be ultra-processed and therefore in the category of foods that we're really sure drive diet-related disease. Calories are really important. So it is pretty much an iron law of nutrition and metabolism. I don't think anyone's serious contests this, that if you eat more calories than you burn, you will gain weight. And so calories are the problem. The difficulty is not figuring out how many calories we should eat. It's that we eat too many calories. So the example I use is my daughter Lyra, if she has chocolate-coated rice puffs for breakfast of any brand,

she will eat if you let her free pour two or three adult servings. Now, if you could stick to a serving for a six-year-old. Now, that isn't on any of the packets what a five or six-year-old should eat or how much milk you should serve with it. Then she might be able to stay within her guidance for fat, salt and sugar. But the problem is because, as we said at the beginning, your body has a system of nerves and hormones that tell you when to stop. These foods get around that system, which is why they're so profitable. And so we end up consuming too many calories. And it is impossible for any normal person to keep track of their calories. Some Some people get quite good at it, but that's not how humans eat. It's not how any animals eat.

You know, we shouldn't need labels to eat. So kind of one of the hypotheses of the book is really that, and this is pretty well borne out by the evidence, if you eat what I would call food, i.e. traditional foods, it could be tinned, canned, could be processed in lots of ways, but your body will naturally respond to that and you will feel full, and there's some evidence that if people switch to a diet like that, they will lose weight. I'm very cautious about that because I'm not trying to promise anyone weight loss with this book. But there is, I guess, at the heart of the book, an invitation to the reader to try and undergo an experience that I had writing it, which is that I was developing a research project

with colleagues at University College London to study ultra-processed food. And I was the first patient in the trial. So I was getting pilot data. So I went on a month of 80% ultra-processed food in my diet. And this is a normal diet for a UK teenager. I wasn't force-feeding myself. And over the course of the month, I had lots of different things happen to me. But about three quarters of the way through the diet, I was speaking to a colleague in Brazil,

Fernando Raubber, and she kept almost like a tick saying to me, you know, it's not food, Chris, it's an industrially produced edible substance. She kept underlining this. I hung up, the call, went to order my dinner, which was takeaway fried chicken wings, I think, and I just couldn't eat it. And I recognized the taste. It hadn't changed. and yet I had been sort of freed from this addiction.

And that process is quite well evidenced. I immediately thought of the, we've got loads of evidence with smoking that if people engage with, continue to smoke while they read about smoking, it can flip from being an addiction into being discussed. And so because we're all part of this sort of big experiment we didn't volunteer for,

part of the project of the book is, you know, participate with this food, eat it, feel it in your mouth, become a connoisseur of it, and you may find that the strange lies that you experience in your mouth with gums replacing fats and sweetness, replacing sugar and flavor enhances, replacing proteins, you'll come to detect them and you'll sort of start to see through some of the lies on the box. And that, for some listeners, that may kind of release them from an addiction. Other people may just decide they want to cut down. Other people of course, are going to find they cannot afford to eat real food.

And that's the tragedy of this. I'm very reluctant to say to anyone, avoid UPF because we spend so little of our household income on food because the cost of living crisis has squashed us down to spending about six, seven, eight percent of our total budget. We don't have money for food, basically. So you mentioned there, sugar. And I think this is point worth investigating a bit further. because a lot of people, you know, we know we shouldn't eat too much sugar,

but what's the relationship between sugary foods and EPFs? For a long time, since the turn of the century, really, people have been feeling that sugar changes our metabolism, that by altering our insulin levels, it promotes weight gain and fat storage, and a calorie of sugar is not the same as a calorie of anything else. Now there's a bit of evidence for that and there's a bit of evidence against that. I would say actually that the evidence showing that that isn't true is extremely robust. And the jury is insofar as any juries are in on anything in nutrition science,

the jury is pretty much in that if you eat 500 calories of sugar, is the same as 500 calories of fat. Now if you go on a very low carb diet, you tend to lose weight if you can stick to the diet and most people can't, because food becomes a bit less palatable without carbs. If you go on a very low-fat diet and you stick to that, the same thing happens. So we've got loads of data on low-fat versus low-carp. I think the data shows that sugar is harmful in two ways.

First of all, it rots your teeth, and that's incontrovertible, and that is a very significant health harm. But the second reason it's harmful is because it drives excess appetite. So the way I'd think about it is you can make a bowl of porridge. home, you make a bowl of sort of fairly plain cereal, take out one spoonful of cereal, replace it with an equal weight of sugar. Now, nutritionally, the bowl hasn't changed. You've just replaced carbs with carbs. But the taste means you will eat much more of the sweetened bowl. So sugar is essentially a flavour enhancer. The other bit of evidence is that sugar in liquid

form, because it doesn't provide any satiating calories, so soft drinks, those are a good example of you get a very rapid injection of calories that don't make you feel full at all. They spike your insulin and they may drive excess eating, but it's not because of some fundamental metabolic change. It's just because you've fiddled around with your blood sugar levels. So sugar is a big part of the picture, but ultra-processed foods are not just fatty, sugary, salty food. So we have this concept in the UK of HFSS, high fat, salt, sugar as the kind of foods that we think we should avoid. It's really opaque what that means. So there is no list of those foods, and it's impossible for you to calculate from the packet whether or not a food is HFSS. You need a complicated

formula and you need information that you don't have access to from databases. So that's not very useful. There are traffic lights that are non-mandatory on most of the foods and are somewhat confusing because lots of the junky cereals, for example, will have two oranges and a couple of greens, and those refer to an adult eating an adult portion, which is often unrealistically small. So fat, salt, sugar, the big question for the scientists who've studied UPF has been, is it just junky, fatty, salty, sugary food? Do we just need to take out the salt and take out the sugar? So all of the epidemiological studies have made these statistical adjustments

to try and understand that. And in fact, when we look at dietary patterns, if we adjust for fat, salt, and sugar, all the effects of UPF on our health remain the same in significance and magnitude. In other words, the study doesn't change. So when we look at risk of dementia, early death, cancers, inflammatory bowel disease, metabolic disease,

like type 2 diabetes, heart attacks, strokes, and weight gain, the proportions of fat, salt, and sugar in the UPF don't seem to make any difference. which is a clue that reformulating, I mean, you brought up these kind of weight loss products, that's probably not going to work and we're pretty sure that won't work. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank.

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I usually eat fresh food. But I do eat fast food. food sometimes. And I always find when I do, I'll be full for a very short amount of time and I'll become hungry again. So what's going on there? So got actually really good data, going back to the 90s, that when your food is soft and energy dense, you eat it at a rate that's much higher than real food. And there are lots and lots of studies showing this is one of the most kind of important things determining appetite. Now, ultra-processed food broadly, There's this huge range of products. But one of the ways of thinking about it is you take waste from animal crops.

So you grow corn and soy at massive scale. They're phenomenally cheap, you know. But you know, you price them at pounds per ton. And you crush those crops down and extract the oils and the carbs and the proteins. And then you have these basic molecules that have an infinite shelf life and you can ship them around the world. And you can recombine them, add additives, and create any shape. or texture that you want from these sort of basic materials. And you can mix them with a bit of meat and some flavourings and you can make sweet things or sour things. And if you start to look at your

breads, your protein bars, your breakfast cereals, your ready meals, the list of ingredients is often quite similar. Now, because of the physical processing, the food is soft and it's kept very, very dry because that leads to shelf life. And shelf life is really important for profitability, because it means your supply chain can be very prolonged. It can be nice and slow. and cheap. And lots of the food will feel wet like a burger will often feel it's juicy and there be gums and slick things in there and oils, but it's not wet at all. There's almost no moisture content. Similarly, all those chewy bars that feel moist and wet, they're not. It's things like glycerol. So you're just eating foods at a rate that your gut can't keep up with and you consume calories

and they're digested. Some of the research shows they're digested so early in the gut. They never even make it to the bit of the gut that releases the hormones that tell you to stop eating. So it's not just the rate of consumption, it's that they've been reduced to such elemental forms. They're absorbed very quickly and you never really get the fullness signal. People will recognise this from their own experience. They don't satisfy you, like if you're fortunate enough to have grown up in a household that did have good proper home cooking. And unfortunately, lots and lots of people were not able to grow up in a household. like that. Yeah, so if say I'm out and about, I'm in a pinch, I haven't got much time,

is there a good choice of fast food, you know, what would be like the sort of the top tier option to go for? I think one of the most kind of intriguing things about the takeover of UPF in our diet is it's entirely displaced lunch. There is, so I work in the hospital in UCLA in London, and there is not one single shop, whether I look at the fast sushi chains or the fancy sandwich shops or the shops that sell nice boxes of vegany food or the hospital canteen, it's all ultra-processed. And that very standard British lunch of a sandwich, crispy, crunchy packet of stuff and a soda pop, every single thing in there is ultra-processed. And there is almost a kind of moral hazard where you go to the sandwich shop, you get your

organic whole-grain sandwich, and it might have some falafel between two pieces of bread, and you get a fizzy pop and maybe some baked crisp. or some popcorn. That lunch is a solid 850 to 900 calories. It's more than if you just went to the well-known burger chains and just had a burger. The sandwiches are often 650 calories. The double-tiered burgers, the big ones, are often only 500 calories. So the burger might make you feel a bit less full, but you do know you're eating a burger. You're sort of going, okay, I'm engaging with something a bit unhealthy here. There's a hazard with the sandwiches that we've come to think of that as a healthy lunch,

it will predispose you to weight gain every bit as much as that burger. I'm not recommending everybody eat burgers for lunch. So my, what I didn't do is give you a tip. I hate giving advice because I don't know how your life works. I haven't got a life hack for you, and the book is very low on advice. I'll tell you what I do is I bring a pack of nuts and some tomatoes and a couple of bananas, and that's my lunch now when I, you know, if I'm that organized or I have to run out and try and get some nuts. But yeah, you lose weight

because you can't really buy lunch. So we've talked a lot about what UPFs are and things like this. And you have touched on this briefly. But what are the major sort of harmful effects that we get from consuming UPS? So there are several effects. I mean, weight gain is one because of the the flavor enhances, the sugar, the calorie density. You know, we tend to consume calories at a high rate. marketing is a big part of that. The additives do have effects on some direct effects on our brains and also on our microbiomes. So we think the emulsifiers, emulsifiers, as lots of listeners will know, are molecules that bind fats to water. And some of them are gums and some of them are chemicals that are a bit like detergent. In a simple way, and this is a bit of a simplification,

the emulsifiers a bit like detergent scrub out our guts. They remove the layer of healthy mucus, and they foster the growth of the less friendly, the more inflammatory bacteria living inside us. A lot of that work has been done in mice and people are not mice. It's important to say. But I do think when we're thinking about food additives, to say that something is safe, we should have a much higher threshold of evidence than to sort of worry about something being dangerous. So I personally think emulsifiers are a bit of a concern. I think there's a big project now. The food industry have, I think maybe I flatter myself, partly in response to the book.

I mean, the food industry have started quite a major pushback campaign, which they push through the charities that they fund that appear to be legitimate independent commentators, but really are entirely funded by the major food corporations. And what they're proposing is that they want to sort of reformulate this food and, you If it's too soft, they'll make it chewier. If the additives are doing harm, they'll repose them with safe add additives. If they're damaging the microbiome, they can add probiotics. That isn't going to work because these foods have been put through a process of design that requires them to be overeaten. So for the book, I spoke to loads of people within the food industry. And they were

really decent, interesting, intelligent people, all of them. And many of them high and closed doors will say, we know this stuff is addictive and we would rather not make it, but we can't be the first to act. We need a sort of level playing field. And many of them told me about a design process, which I'd also seen doing an investigation of the baby food industry for the BBC. The food is put through focus groups. And one of the things that is, you know, you've got box of cereal A and box of cereal B, and the scientists are trying to figure out which one goes to market. If the focus groups eat 5% more of Box B, that's the one that goes to market because it's going to sell well. So it's not with the commercial realities of the way the companies run, they can't manufacture

foods that people eat less of. And that is in the end what real food is. It's food that you just eat a bit less of. And the companies can't pivot to just making money from real food, because without the intellectual property there, these foods are just completely. commodities. So several, I spoke to lots of beef and dairy farmers and they're all like, look, we make fancy organic, grass-fed, waggo beef, but it's priced the same as the cheapest possible intensively farmed beef, because when people go into the supermarket, beef is beef is milk, broccoli is broccoli. So there's a market price for those things and the margins are so tight. So the way the food companies create money is by having brands and intellectual property they can

charge money for. So they're sort of compelled to make foods that we can't eat. So there's not going to be any one thing we can fix. It's a mixture of the marketing, the labeling, the fats, the additives, the palatibility, the softness, all of it comes together to make a product a bit like I'm quite addicted to my phone. It's not one thing about the phone. It's the whole synesthetic experience. It's the camera and the apps and the feel in my hand and what I've been told about it. So we're not going to be able to fix the problem by simply adding more additives. So one thing that I've noticed is getting more and more popular is these meal replacement drinks for want of a better word. And they'll all come with claims like complete nutrition,

this is all you need. I mean, is there any truth in that? I love this question. I feel almost a kind of visceral rage about the marketing of some of these things. Here's a really interesting. thing is there's certain foods that we're very sure associated with good health. Walnuts, oily fish, lots of fruit and veg, the traditional Mediterranean diet of a colorful plate. And red wine has appeared to be associated with good health. Whenever we go to those foods and extract the vitamins, the molecules, the minerals, the resveratrol from the red wine or the polyphenols from the fruit and veg, the vitamins, whatever it is, the fish oils. And we do experiments on them, there is no benefit to having the molecules out of context. So food, real food,

is a very complex substance that your mouth must process and as you chew it, you stimulate bone growth in your drawer, you start releasing gut hormones, some of the molecules are absorbed in the mouth. And then the individual vitamins and minerals are bound up with other molecules that carefully regulate the amount of them you get inside yourself, and your body has evolved to handle real food. When we dismantle this food, even if all the ingredients are there, it's not real food. So we have loads and loads and loads of data on this,

that the nutritional supplements are almost always inferior to real food. And whether we're giving them in hospital or to children or to athletes, top athletes, eat real food. If you go and speak to the nutritionists who advise our best sports teams, and I've spoken to lots of them, they just feed them food. They're not taking weird supplements. So those products are a very, very good example of using a sciencey type thing to add enormous value to basically waste. So a lot of them contain things like weigh protein or soy protein isolate. You'll read the protein isolates.

These are just waste leftovers from dairy processing or making animal or pet food. And the project of the food industry has always been like, we've got these leftovers. We've got snouts and tails and these weird fats and seeds. And how can we add those things to the human food chain? And if we can add them at a premium and turn them into a nutritional drink, you know, beef collagen is something you'll see in loads and loads of things. So that's from tendons. Tendons are not things in this country that we like eating, for whatever reason, some cultures do.

But if you can take, so you can either feed them to animals or you can break them down and turn them into a bodybuilding supplement and charge literally a thousand times more. So repurposing waste is a big part of the UPF story. The misconception I think is that we think, you and I probably think there's a food supply system that delivers food to us in exchange for money. And that's not the way it works. There is a money extraction system, and the food is the byproduct of that. And we've got more and more evidence, you know, my scientific collaborators all around the world, are building a very, very persuasive case that the food industry in economic terms doesn't really function as a food supply system.

Food is a sort of byproduct, but it's very, very good at doing commodity trading, intellectual property hoarding, franchising, rent-seeking, all these different. different share buybacks, this process that we see in a lot of different industrial sectors, that it's good evidence of money making. And food is, they're sort of money making specialists, they happen to produce a bit of food. So having said that, is there any role that the governments could play? Could we have stricter regulations or anything like that to help this problem? I think one of the narratives around food that's been so poisonous and almost the only, if people read the book and only take one thing away, it's that diet-related disease, particularly

obesity, is not the fault of those who live with it. We do not choose the food we eat. We eat the food that's presented to us. So the only way, people who listen to this podcast, people who are able to buy the book, some of those people will be empowered to, you know, do my project of like, eat along, maybe quit the food, cut down, they'll have money. Lots of people can't. And we need government to do several things. We need to put this in our national. nutritional nutrition guidance. We need to limit the marketing of this food is really important, and we need to change institutional food. But if there is only one thing that needs to happen, it's that we change our cultural understanding of what the food industry is. It's not that the

companies are evil, but they will have to behave like the tobacco industry. And as long as doctors and scientists and our major food charities all partner deeply with the food industry and take money from them, we will never, ever solve the problem. So we need to see, I think, you know, and I have lots of colleagues who don't partner with the food industry, and we are essentially the regulators, and we are able then to evaluate the evidence independently. But at the moment, the food industry pretty much writes UK food policy, all of our activist charity, or many of our major activist charities, and lots of our health charities that people will recognize if you and look at their corporate partners, they will be the food companies that you will recognize

as supplying what you think of as junk food and that is ultra-process food. So that, very hard to legislate around that, but it's going to happen. I mean, this is coming down the pipeline, right? Part of the reason the book has some traction with people and people are talking about it is because I think actually the public are ready to go. Yes, I feel like this is being forced down my throat. I can't seem to lose the weight. I feel addicted to these products. I'm confused, and they're recognizing that these companies are comparable to the tobacco industry. So in the book, you lay out in some detail, your own experience with UPFs as in your diet and as you were studying more and more about them and how you change your own dietary habits.

So I know you said you don't like giving advice per se, but is there anything that you would suggest if someone's listening to this and they're thinking, well, you know what, I'd like to either cut out EPFs or just eat, eat fewer UPFs. So I would say, first of all, if you're, I don't have advice for anyone because I don't know your life, I don't know your budget, I don't know where you live, I don't know if you own a deep freeze, if you have storage space, if you have kitchen nights, a cutting boards, a fridge, I have no idea. And so advice is, my mother-in-law says it's an uneasy commodity.

And, but I would say, first of all, if you are struggling, you have my kind of love and support, and I'm sorry, and that is, we live in quite a violent food system in the sense it does physical harm. And you should feel a bit angry about that. You may find that whether you are listening to this podcast or you want to buy the book, and my proposal is join this experiment. So you're doing at the moment the experiment that you're taking all the risk in the experiment of all these new molecules and new formulations of food. And my proposal is do the experiment for yourself. So the companies get all the benefit. Start to taste the food, eat as you read, and you may find you stop wanting it. Because I think the real struggle for the, I think about half the listeners will recognize addictive-like thoughts and

behaviors around the food. And that's pretty well evidenced. The difficulty is if you're trying to really quit an addiction that you still have, you're trying to quit smoking in the 1970s. You know, everyone around you eats this constantly. It is available, constantly. It is available, it's in your cupboards at home, it's in the supermarket. There's no way of avoiding it. So the way I found it easy was just, you know, I was given this gift of being disgusted by this. And so I did it to my twin brother as well. And I think that is the way out. Now, those people who aren't sort of struggling with the food or binging, those people may find moderation is fine. And I would think of this stuff as if you can afford it as being more like a treat on a Friday night,

you know, having one glass of wine. And there are plenty of people. who, maybe I shouldn't say this, but there are people who can smoke two cigarettes on a Friday night and enjoy them and just sort of savour them and then they don't have them the rest of the week. There are lots of moderate smokers. It's when you're smoking at 11 or drinking at 11 o'clock on a Tuesday morning, that's when you're being controlled by the product. So lots of people will be able to cut down. You know, my wife's quite a moderate person.

I was very addictive to UPF. My wife will still just have a few pieces of chocolate on a Friday night. She's one of those people who can wrap the bar back up, you know, and put it back in the cupboard, whereas I'm someone who that isn't impossibility for me. I would have to eat the entire supersized bar or the whole bag of crisps. Dinah will have like three crisps, roll the crisp back down and put a bulldog cliff on it, which is, I don't understand. I have no idea what's going on in her brain.

So some people may recognize that. Children are a real issue. You know, kids don't choose what they eat. They're very expensive and inconvenient to feed. and I spend a lot of my weak batch cooking now. But I also feed my kids a lot of UPF. You know, I personally think this should not be banned. And a lot of people, when I want to really nuance that tobacco industry idea, the companies are behaving like the tobacco companies. They should be regulated. We can't tax this food. Yeah, taxation would be incredibly regressive

because it's all people can afford. So we need to make real food much, much cheaper. And that This is a complex project, but that's going to have to happen. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius. That was Dr. Chris Van Tulligan. To read more about the fascinating science and history of UPF, check out his book, Ultra-Processed People. Why do we all eat stuff that isn't food? And why can't we stop?

The current issue of BBC Science Focus magazine is out now. Pick up a copy wherever you buy your favourite magazines, or visit sciencefocus.com. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name Audio believes you can have digital precision with analogue warmth. Alongside French acoustic specialist focal, Name creates high-end audio systems combining innovation with craftsmanship, so you can listen to music, just as the artist intended.

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