Ultra-Processed People

Every Wednesday afternoon in the laboratory where I used to work, we had an event called journal club. The word ‘club’ makes it sound more fun than it was. The ritual, practised in labs around the world, worked like this: one member of the lab would present a recent publication from the scientific literature that they felt was relevant to our work, and the rest of us would tear it to pieces. If the paper wasn’t of sufficient quality, then the unhappy person who had selected it would also be torn to pieces.

And Hackney Gelato are not alone in using these types of ingredients – they are nearly universal in ice cream you buy in shops but are not found in typical kitchens. I didn’t get exactly why they were all necessary from the manufacturer’s perspective. Surely it would be simpler and cheaper to use fewer ingredients?

Lyra put her ear to the bowl and shut her eyes, entranced. She then began to eat again.

And eat. And eat. As I watched her, it seemed she wasn’t fully in control. The pack said that a recommended serving for an adult is 30g (roughly a handful). But 30g in, Lyra had hardly taken a breath.

The classification system is now called the NOVA system, and it divides food into four groups. The first is ‘unprocessed or minimally processed foods’ –foods found in nature like meat, fruit and vegetables, but also things like flour and pasta. Group 2 is ‘processed culinary ingredients’, including oils,*3 lard, butter, sugar, salt, vinegar, honey, starches–traditional foods that might well be prepared using industrial technologies. […] Group 3 is ‘processed food’, ready-made mixtures of groups 1 and 2 […].

And then we come to Group 4, ‘ultra-processed foods’.

The involvement of UPF companies in challenging the association between UPF and poor health is unsurprising. But there is a wealth of data about the pharmaceutical industry, as well as other industries, showing that, when an industry funds science, it biases the results in favour of that industry.

Of course, not every single paper critical of NOVA has identifiable conflicts of interest. But all the papers that are critical cite evidence from those written by authors with conflicts of interest, and none of them presents an explanation that begins to undermine the strong evidence that UPF is associated with poor health.

It was while researching all of this that I started to understand these corporations as organisms in an ecosystem powered by money.

In the first age of eating, living organisms began to eat stuff that has never been alive, like rocks and metal. This process has continued since the dawn of time to the present day. During the second age of eating, living organisms started to eat other living organisms, perhaps after some processing. This has been going on for hundreds of millions of years (and for around 2 million years for humans).

During the third age of eating, a single species (and their pets and livestock) started to eat UPF, which is manufactured using previously unknown industrial techniques and novel molecules. By comparison, this age is just a few decades old. This is why it is useful to consider the effects of UPF by thinking about them in the context of the very long history of how we stay alive.

Consider, for example, the amount of water in your body. It may feel like it’s under your conscious control and indeed you can choose to have or delay a drink, but over the course of your life the amount of water in your body, and thus the concentration of the hundreds of thousands of dissolved chemicals that make you up, is precisely controlled internally, even as you drink, sweat and pee. The conscious control of fluid balance is temporary at best and largely an illusion. And the case of breathing is more obvious still if you try to stop doing it. Food intake is under little more conscious control than breathing or drinking, and this is why it is nearly as hard to limit food intake as it is to limit water or oxygen intake. What, when and how we eat is determined by complex systems that operate far below our conscious level.

Part of being a good experimental scientist is finding the balance between being paranoid enough at every stage to think of everything and do it right, without being so paranoid that you can’t trust your result. At some point you need to say: ‘I did this experiment. This is the result. This is what I think it means.’ Then you need to be big enough to have others tear it to pieces, and then figure out whether they’re doing that because you were wrong or because you’ve just shown their life’s work to be wrong.

These findings challenge everything about our understanding of how the body uses calories. It seems that people burn the same amount of energy each day whether they walk ten miles or sit at a desk. The significance of this can’t be missed: it means that we cannot lose weight just by increasing activity. Variation in body-fat percentage is unrelated to physical activity level or energy expenditure.

Food swamps of the type Xand found himself in are similar to food deserts. Fresh food may be available, but it is submerged in a swamp of fast-food outlets selling UPF.

Within forty-eight hours I was sleeping at night, my bowels began to function and work became easier. Of course, life has its own ebbs and flows, but nothing else seemed to have changed apart from the end of the diet.

But the biggest problem with considering food an addictive substance is that, logically, it leads to a strategy of abstinence when, of course, you can’t be abstinent from food. And addicts can’t be moderate with addictive substances. Food just can’t be addictive.

Apple juice, which is typically around 15 per cent sugar, behaves much like any soft drink. But so does the apple purée, even though it contains all the constituents of the apple, including the fibre, and was made moments before consumption. Fibre is important, but the matrix, the structure of the apple, is key.

Part of the reason we are consuming so much is in search of missing tastes and flavour, which also indicate missing nutrition.

To understand what is about to happen to Andrea and the Pringle and why he will find it hard to stop eating them, we need to understand taste properly. It starts with the tongue.

The moon’s surface is mapped more precisely than the surface of the mouth, and it has less confusing geography.

The Pret brand is relentlessly natural, ethical and wholesome.

That’s why I went there one day during the last week of my diet – for a little respite from UPF. I bought some red Thai soup, but immediately recognised a familiar tang. I looked through the list of forty-nine (!) ingredients, and spotted maltodextrin and spice extracts. I checked the ingredients on the bread in my sandwich, something that in years of eating Pret I had never done before: mono- and diacetyl tartaric acid esters of mono- and diglycerides of fatty acids.

It seems obvious to me that both in Europe and in the USA we should take a much more precautionary approach to the molecules we put in our food. The burden of proof should be on the companies that make and use additives to demonstrate long-term safety. And we need far more independent research on how these molecules affect our health in subtle ways in the long term.

The companies that make UPF either displace traditional diets, as they are doing in Brazil, or absorb them and recreate them with new ingredients.

I see the avoidance of tax as part of ultra-processing, as defined by the NOVA system and Monteiro. The legal teams involved in decreasing the tax obligations to increase the profit are a necessary stage in the processing of the food.

Everyone I spoke with in the food industry felt trapped between competing forces much more powerful than they were individually. Consumers might say they want healthy stuff, but they still buy UPF. Supermarkets – and, of course, shareholders – dictate what to sell.

The marketing budget of the formula industry is almost incomprehensibly large at around $3–5 billion dollars per year – comparable to the entire annual operating budget of the World Health Organization. This spend by industry means that the market for infant formula and follow-on milk is growing eight times faster than the global population.

This is a huge problem. If a family decides freely and with the best information to use formula, then it’s a good choice in a country like the UK. But in the UK the influence of industry over every aspect of infant feeding means that for women who want to breastfeed, there are barriers and a lack of support.

If you personally want to stop eating UPF, then you could try what Xand and I did: go on an 80 per cent UPF diet for a few days. You don’t need to do the full four weeks. Go and seek it out. Grapple with it.

We are ultra-processed people not just because of the food we eat. Many of the other products we buy are engineered to drive excess consumption; our phones and apps, our clothes, our social media, our games and television. Sometimes these can feel like they take much more than they give. The requirement for growth and the harm it does to our bodies and our planet is so much part of the fabric of our world that it’s nearly invisible. You may find that abstinence from some of these other products is helpful too.

Finally, make sure that, like Xand, you own what you want to do. And, whatever happens, don’t beat yourself up, but do get in touch and let me know how it goes.