Book review: Ultraprocessed People
“In terms of nutrition, a pizza is a pizza. Flour, tomato, cheese. You can buy one from Sweet Thursday, the pizza restaurant at the end of my road, for around £10. It’s made with about six ingredients and is not UPF. But it has approximately the same nutritional profile as a £1 UPF pizza from the supermarket next door that contains preservatives, stabilisers and antioxidants. Both pizzas have roughly the same number of calories, fat, salt and sugar. But one is a traditional food not associated with obesity or diet-related disease, while the other isn’t.” Chris van Tulleken
This is a book about the most important aspects of human life: food and the modern day over-processing of it. It’s an eye-opening look at what chemicals and substances are being put into our food and a heartfelt message to be conscious of what you eat and drink.
Van Tulleken manages to blow minds on the first pages, recounting the discovery that the “junk” DNA that makes up a proportion of our genome, comes from old “dead” viruses and that our genomes must constantly evolve to keep those genes dead, lest they awaken. Our DNA is in an evolutionary arms race to keep part of itself silent, kind of a gnarly way to open a book. Just as prey/predator relationships in the wild have led to evolutionary arms races for survival, so humanity has entered its own arms race between the predatory manufacturers of ultra-processed foods who consistently refine and evolve their products to extract money from consumers, their prey.
Food. It’s kind of important. The sustenance we survive off is understandably an issue worth scrutinising, and the idea that what we eat might be making us unhealthy has been raised many a time, whether it’s Michael Pollan turning his keen eye on the industrialisation of food in The Omnivore’s Dilemma or Gary Taubes making The Case Against Sugar. Information on diet has always been messy and conflicted, with advice changing, evidence refuted, studies corrupted.
Our food has always been processed to a certain degree but the industrial complex has taken that to ultra processed, questioning its ‘nourishment’ at all. Much of what we eat, especially snack foods (but also most things that come in a packet), aren’t what we think they are. Most ‘breads’, once the simplest staple of all foods, contain things you simply don’t find in a kitchen: preservatives, emulsifiers, acids, and treatment agents; many foods contain few things resembling anything you might find in a kitchen. We ultra-process our foods now, with a range of chemicals and industrial processes that are so far removed from the normal process of food preparation that we barely know the effect that it might be having on us. And the effect doesn’t seem to be positive.
Van Tulleken calls these foods "Ultra-Processed" (UPF) because they are more like chemical creations than real food. They are grouped with things like artificial flavours, sugars, and fats: all things that trick our bodies into wanting more and more. It is not just our fault that eating too much UPF leads to bad stuff like obesity, diabetes, and even mental health issues. The book also points out how food companies make UPF super appealing and cheap, making it hard to choose healthy options.
We are living in a fast-food world, but this book gives you a map to find the fresh fruit and vegetable garden in the middle. Sometimes you just want to grab a burger, but you know you can choose how you do that now!