Ultra-Processed People: Why Do We All Eat Stuff That Isn’t Food … and Why Can’t We Stop?

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A fearless investigation into how we have become hooked on ultra-processed food ... will have you scurrying to your cupboards' - Anjana Ahuja, The Financial Times and Formerly Known As Food: How the Industrial Food System Is Changing Our Minds, Bodies, and Culture. A] compelling examination of ultra-processed food—or UPF—as a public health issue. . . . [van Tulleken] details how UPF companies are destroying traditional diets and critiques industrial food arguments around inefficiency. . . . [H]is advice is matter-of-fact . . . [his] scope and approach . . . unique.”— Civil Eats If you only read one diet or nutrition book in your life, make it this one.. . . Without a hint of finger-wagging or body shaming . . . Chris van Tulleken lays out what ultra-processed food is and why it is the single greatest problem with modern diets.” —Bee Wilson, award-winning author of The Way We Eat Now and Consider the Fork

A fearless investigation into how we have become hooked on ultra-processed food . . . will have you scurrying to your cupboards Anjana Ahuja, Financial TimesEveryone needs to know this stuff.” —Tim Spector, bestselling author of Spoon-Fed: why Almost Everything We’ve Been Told about Food is Wrong I recently consulted a dietitian, who recommended that I switch out my fat-free coffee creamer with milk. I was resistant to the idea until I read the ingredient list on the creamer this morning. Now I'm having difficulty enjoying my morning coffee. I was somewhat relieved to see that my preferred spaghetti sauce (for those days when I'm not willing to cook) has only two additives, but I was dismayed by the contents of my favourite cottage cheese. We all have to decide how much and how many UPF we are willing to consume. It's a definite advantage to be interested in cooking. I have to confess that, as a gluten free eater, I was horrified at what van Tulleken wrote about xanthan gum, a key component of GF baked goods. I have a jar of it in my baking cupboard. Microbial slime is not really something I want in my muffins! I think I must get tested for celiac disease to see if I can reintegrate wheat products into my diet. Chris van Tulleken bravely turns himself into a guinea pig to explore the ins and outs of ultra-processed food. . . . His account of what happens to our food during its trip to our gut, and the connection that bad food has to the epidemics of obesity and diabetes . . . is persuasive and scary.” —Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker As I scan through that list again I could be forgiven for asking what have I actually ingested?! What have I eaten?! And the answer as this fabulous book informs me -

I laughed out loud at one part in which van Tulleken is describing the squirrely rules used by the British government to determine what foods are luxury items that VAT is charged on (gingerbread men = necessity; gingerbread men with more than a couple chocolate decorations = luxury). It made me feel slightly less bad about the incompetence / deliberate corruption of my own country's rules. But it also made me kinda miss British UPF that's hard to get in the States - Greggs vegan sausage rolls, jaffa cakes, chocolate digestives - and that was not the point at all.The Omnivore’s Dilemma meets Fast Food Nation from a global perspective in this game-changing look at the science, economics, and history of ultra-processed food and the industry’s effect on our health and planet. It probably is. But Van Tulleken says: “Agonising over individual products is less important than your overall diet.” Can’t I just exercise more to counteract the effects of UPFs?

A tour of how the science of processing has allowed companies to produce goods that are no longer even faint echoes of the real food of which they are copies, and of what the evidence shows about the biology and psychology of eating in today's world. Van Tulleken is at his best when using his own scientific expertise to help readers through otherwise unnavigable science, data and history, explaining with precision what we are actually eating Jacob E. Gersen, New York Times Besides, dietary addictions of this kind long preceded the introduction of ultra-processed food. The Scottish poet and aphorist Don Paterson has a hair-raising chapter in his marvellous new memoir, “ Toy Fights,” about sugar addiction in the Scottish family and town where he grew up—just as intense as the kind of food addiction van Tulleken ascribes to contemporary techniques, though the processing here is the ancient one of sugarcane refinement. Such addictions of food or drink, if properly called so, hardly seem an artifact of our era. William Hogarth’s nightmarish “Gin Lane”—capturing a curse of the English working classes—was an image from the Enlightenment. This is an emergency,” Van Tulleken has said. “We need to think about the big food companies in the same way we do the tobacco companies.”In a fast-paced and eye-opening narrative he explores the origins, science, and economics of UPF to reveal its catastrophic impact on our bodies and the planet. And he proposes real solutions for doctors, for policy makers, and for all of us who have to eat. A book that won't only upend the way you shop and eat, Ultra-Processed People will open your eyes to the need for action on a global scale. If you only read one diet or nutrition book in your life, make it this one. It will not only change the way you eat but the way you think about food. And it does all this without a hint of finger-wagging or body shaming. I came away feeling so much better informed about every aspect of ultra-processed food, from the way it affects the microbes in our gut to why it is so profitable to produce to why it's so hard to eat only a single bowl of Coco Pops to why any food that is marketed as 'better for you' is almost certainly not. Bee Wilson A devastating, witty and scholarly destruction of the shit food we eat and why.” —Adam Rutherford, bestselling author of A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived PDF / EPUB File Name: Ultra_-_Processed_People_-_Chris_van_Tulleken.pdf, Ultra_-_Processed_People_-_Chris_van_Tulleken.epub Mindblowing. You’ll never see food—or your body—the same way again.” —Alice Roberts, author of Anatomical Oddities

We're being manipulated into overeating and then overspending on more tastiness to overeat, so a few big "food" companies can roll around in their trillions. We have forgotten what real food tastes like and what we feel like when we eat it. To be avoided … bought sandwiches. Photograph: Caziopeia/Getty Images To summarise, if you think it might be UPF … In Ultra-Processed People, a persuasive mix of analysis and commentary, [Chris van Tulleken] shows how [ultra-processed] foods affect our bodies and how their popularity stems in part from shady marketing and slanted science Matthew Rees, Wall Street Journal A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later. The education provided by this book is unreal. As someone who grew up eating what I now understand to be ultra-processed foods and having carried that habit into adulthood, I'm pretty disgusted at how terrifyingly naughty the methods used to make them are, how cantankerous they cat within our bodies and entirely aghast at the overall impact on health. Mind blowing stuff. Professor GreenAn eye-opening investigation into the science, economics, history and production of ultra-processed food.It's not you, it's the food.