ZOE Science & Nutrition - Recap: The truth about ultra processed food | Dr. Chris van Tulleken and Tim Spector

Episode Date: October 1, 2024

Today we’re discussing ultra processed food. Ultra-processed foods (UPFs) are everywhere. Many of us eat them over and over again without really understanding the detrimental impact they’re having on our health.  But why are these foods so addictive? Here to help us identify the ultra-processed parts of our diet are Professor Tim Spector and Dr. Chris van Tulleken. 🥑 Make smarter food choices. Become a member at zoe.com for 10% off with code PODCAST 🌱 Try our new plant based wholefood supplement - Daily30+ *Naturally high in copper which contributes to normal energy yielding metabolism and the normal function of the immune system Free resources from ZOE: Live Healthier: Top 10 Tips From ZOE Science & Nutrition  Gut Guide - for a healthier microbiome in weeks MenoScale Calculator - learn about your symptoms 📚 Books from our ZOE Scientists: Food For Life by Prof. Tim Spector Every Body Should Know This by Dr Federica Amati Have feedback or a topic you'd like us to cover? Let us know here Listen to the full episode here

Hello, and welcome to Zoe Recap, where each week we find the best bits from one of our podcast episodes to help you improve your health. Today we're discussing ultra-processed food. Ultra-processed foods are everywhere. Many of us eat them over and over again without really understanding the detrimental impact they're having on our health. But why are these foods so addictive? Here to help us identify the ultra-processed parts of our diet

are Professor Tim Spector and Dr Chris Van Tulleken. If it's wrapped in plastic and it contains at least one ingredient that you don't typically find in a domestic kitchen, then it's ultra-processed food. That's the shorthand way of figuring it out. This was a definition that was developed by a group in Brazil in 2010. And since then, we've had now over a decade of really, really good, increasingly robust research, including a very good clinical trial that has linked ultra processed food to early death, cancer, weight gain, and a whole host of other problems. I think this is the nova classification

is that right that you're referencing could maybe the two of you help step us through a little bit from uh stuff that i think we all feel pretty comfortable isn't processed because it's like a fruit or something you know you're eating it completely off the tree to the other end where i think we all sort of know that if it's got 50 ingredients in it and it's bright yellow and it lives for 100 years and you can still eat it, that's probably at the ultra-processed end. And I think we're all deeply confused about everything, which is like 95% of what we eat, right? Which is somewhere in between. Could you maybe just help us to step through? Because I think they have a few classifications, don't they, to help us understand a bit more how that works?

I would say that the boundary between ultra processed food and just processed food, which we think is fine, is quite a blurry one. And particularly in the UK, we have a huge number of products where you can buy a lasagna lots of places and it's wrapped in plastic, but the ingredients, while it's a long list, there will be nothing you wouldn't have in a normal kitchen there. And there are these questions about, well, is that ultra processed or not? And I think this is the discussion that a lot of people who've read my book come to me with is going, what about this product? Is this OK?

And those products, in a sense, the most interesting because the classification system wasn't invented to decide about one particular sausage roll or another, but there is the shorthand of the ingredient is a pretty useful one. If it has an additive that you don't typically find in your kitchen, then I think it's useful to say it's ultra processed. I find that for me, what I'm interested in, and I think there will be some of your listeners who are living with significant obesity or living with a diet-related disease, and they may want to take an approach of abstinence. And so for those people, having a definition that allows them to exclude this entire category from their diet would be useful. And I think it is possible to do that. And my rule of thumb is if I'm in doubt, it is ultra processed. If you're wondering about this biscuit or this lasagna or this bread, it probably is. But one of the arguments that the food industry is starting to mount, and there's a huge opposition to my book and to a lot of my work by the food industry,

is that, well, humans have been processing food for millions of years. And this is absolutely true. Since we first cut a chunk of meat off a mammoth and we started cooking probably over a million years ago, that is food processing. And we've been pounding and grinding and extracting and salting and smoking. And all this has been happening for hundreds of thousands of years. And it seems to be fine. But ultra processing is a very different thing. Ultra processing is about broadly taking traditional foods and designing them with the cheapest possible ingredients to be very hard to stop eating and doing that for profit. That's the very important part of the definition is ultra-processing is about profit. It's not about nourishment. And giving some examples here is useful. So cheese is a processed food. Okay. So we're not talking about those as being problematic because virtually all our food is to some extent processed, but this has been done naturally.

And we've discussed some of those on previous podcasts, right? Things are ground and milled and baked and all these sorts of... It's when you're replacing the natural ingredients with the extracts of other foods and extracts of chemicals to mimic the original foods using what we call, you know, edible, industrially produced food-like substance. And I think it's that substitution... I was just laughing because I feel like food-like substance already. I don't really want to eat food-like substance. And I think it's that substitution. I was just laughing because I feel like food-like substance already. You're like, I don't really want to eat food-like substance, do I? I'd rather eat food.

And it's exactly right. So you have these ingredients you wouldn't recognize in your kitchen. They're all there to make that food seem like the original as much as possible, but using the cheapest possible group of ingredients that allow you to manipulate it, give it a massively long shelf life and make you overeat it. And so that's really where we are. And the food industry doesn't want a definition of it because that would make it very easy for them to be criticized. So they're always countering these discussions with saying, aha, we've got some examples of something that isn't, and you're saying it is. But it's quite easy to define, I would say, 98% of foods in this way.

There are maybe a couple of percent that we can argue over. So I think what you're saying is that there's this sort of clear scientific definition, though relatively recent. And I know from our own work, there's probably still more work to make that better, but it's quite complex. And so this is a sort of simple sort of rule of thumb, if you like, as a way to say, I'm navigating, you know, the shop as a way to under or my fridge to understand what is ultra processed. Tim gave the example of cheese as a brilliant example of a processed food that for a long time we've thought was a bit unhealthy. Butter also works as an example because butter is something we made probably 8,000 years ago, 6, 7, 8,000 years ago. Margarine was the first probably

mass-produced ultra-processed food. There was solid fat shortening. And it was a way of turning waste oils, cottonseed oil, into an edible product that you could put in the human food chain and generate enormous value from. And so fake butters, margarines essentially, were the first set of these synthetic foods where almost all the molecules in the food product are synthesized. And we've never encountered molecules quite like this before. And is that a very important part of the story that these are, you know, new chemicals, if you like, that our body hasn't been exposed to for thousands of years, that our microbes haven't exploded. Is that a very important part of the story or this is not clear? Well, I think it's an emerging part of it. I don't think we've studied it well enough. And until recently, we just assumed that these chemicals were inert. So the food industry tells us that, oh, like saccharin,

it's completely inert, zero calories, just passes through your body straight out of the toilet. You don't have to worry about it. Absolutely perfect. And that's been the general theme of these industry produced chemicals. And most of the artificial sweeteners, for example, come from the petrol industry. So they're not made anything you'd eat. They're made in laboratories. And I don't think we know the answer to many of these things, but I think it's quite likely that these do have long-term consequences. We just haven't studied them properly. But it's just one part of the story. It's not just those substances. It's other things which we're still beginning to understand so we can unpack more in in a second then i think just before moving on we did uh we did a little survey of uh of the zoe community on social media to ask

how much ultra processed food they believe they ate, 84% said they eat little or no ultra-processed food. And my question is, is that typical? And is it possible they might be eating more ultra-processed food than they realize? Are your community lying to you? We trust the Zoe community. I think that they will be telling you what they think is the right answer. They're probably healthier than the average UK population.

People who listen to this podcast are more health conscious. So you might expect, which the official figures of, you know, 57% of the calories eaten in the UK are ultra processed is the latest. And in the US is? It's over 60%. And for children, it's higher. So we think 10% more in children. So the average person is going to have more than half their calories that way. So it's a slightly different question,

how many of your calories are that way, or I never have them. But I think that is an underestimate. And I think people, I don't think they're that healthy. I think it's very difficult to avoid ultra processed foods if you know what all of them are. And it may be that these people don't realize that in the morning when they drink their orange juice and they have their muesli and they have other breakfast cereals, for example, or their instant porridge, they're eating ultra-processed foods. That's amazing. So breakfast cereal is an ultra-processed food? I would say almost all commercially available breakfast cereals are ultra-processed.

Almost all supermarket bread is ultra-processed. Almost all flavoured yoghurts are. The areas they might be not noticing their consumption would be the very typical lunches that we go and have in the UK. Lunches, a packet of crunchy things, might be some popcorn, a sandwich and a drink. And particularly if you get it from the fancy shops, and we can all know the names of them, they're widely available up and down the country. That's still all ultra processed. It all contains maltodextrin, dextrose, the bread is full of emulsifiers, there are flavourings. So even the sandwich that you might think is like it's just bread and like this plain...

It might be a vegan falafel, organic whole grain, but the bread will contain emulsifiers and the condiments particularly will contain thickeners or maltodextrins. Even if it looks brown because it's been dyed brown, it looks like a granary, healthy, seedy loaf. Generally, it's been made to look exactly that, but underneath it, it's full of these chemicals. So yes, I think many people don't realise the extent to which they're surrounded by stuff, even with healthy veneers. Anything that says it's healthy on the packet is nearly by definition unhealthy. It's a great rule of thumb that, isn't it? If there's a health claim on the packet it is almost certainly ultra processed. Chris I read that in your book I

loved it because I thought for a minute and I was like that's actually so true every time these things say I haven't found an exception high protein or the one that actually my personal experience because I've been looking at this a lot more over the last year as as as you guys been talking about this more is sort of sugar-free and no added sugar, which I think like most consumers, that sounds really good. I'm buying this for my little girl who's three, for example. That sounds like the right thing. It's sugar-free or no added sugar. I've now started to learn to turn over and look at the ingredients. And instead of seeing sort of, you know, three ingredients, you suddenly find 15 and it's

stuffed full of sweeteners and they haven't had to put on the top. Like we put in lots of sweeteners instead of sugar. They've just said, you know, no added sugar or sugar free. So, you know, my favorite example of the, cause it's been the one that's been most shocking to me is actually just looking even at plain yogurt and plain yogurt should basically have milk in it right and what's amazing i've now realized is that most of the plain yogurt you go and look at when you turn over it's got like half a dozen or sometimes even 10 ingredients in it and it's right next to the one that only has milk in it and it's it's impossible to tell there's

nothing on the you know until you actually go and look into the ingredients they look the same so there is a there's a sense i think in which it's it says low fat you're more likely to have fake yogurt than if it's full fat but there's something really hidden i guess is what i'm saying about these ultra processed foods that it seems to have happened without it being very visible to us. Is that? That's completely right. And if you consider one of the things like the illusions of our sort of food supply system is that it exists to supply food to us. And that isn't the way it works. It exists to extract money from us. And so low-fat yogurt, the genius of low-fat yogurt is you can sell your yogurt at a premium price because it doesn't have fat in it and you can add a very cheap modified maize starch to give it a creamy feel

or a xanthan gum or a guar gum or a locust bean gum any of these gummy things that give a fatty mouthfeel and then some some other stuff as well meanwhile you've still got the fat and you can then use the dairy fat which is the highest price commodity fat you can have to do all kinds of other things with. And you can extract some of the protein and put it into whey protein. You can put it into muscle drinks. So you're adding much more value to your commodity milk by putting different aspects of it in the food chain. So yogurt's this brilliant idea of repurposing waste and extracting more value, but none of it's done with an eye on our health. Over half the people on the planet experience perimenopause and menopause. Yet symptoms are often misunderstood or dismissed. At Zoe, we're moving menopause research forward.

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