The Junk Food Doctor: "THIS Food Is Worse Than Smoking!" - Chris Van Tulleken Ultra-Processed People

I ate a diet that's very normal for a British person I gained so much weight got in this vicious cycle of overeating anxiety sleeplessness scanned my brain and if I'd continued for a year I would have Dr Chris Van toin doctor researcher and a b award-winning broadcaster Chris forensically examines the effects Ultra processed food have on us all 75% of the calories that are consumed globally come from six companies a food mafia they are controlling our food and what we eat engineers to be consumed to excess whether it's a burger from a fast food chain

or a supermarket bread everything is adjusted so that Things become irresistible and a pandemic of diet related diseases has taken over the world one in five people in this country get 80% of their calories from ultral processed food poor diet has overtaken tobacco as the leading cause of early death on planet Earth and for the age of five kids in this country will be that much shorter 9 cm compared to other countries and it is all diet now you can't stunt a body by 9 cm and not also stunt them intellectually why don't we just

all make better choices I have almost no interest in personal responsibility this is about social justice and people without money they're forced to eat bad food if you got rid of poverty you would get rid of around 60% of the problem of diet related disease what about the people that say this is just about calories in calorie out there are two very big problems with that and this is very good robust science the first is that and if people are listening and they want to lose weight the evidence says I just want to start this

episode with a message of thanks a thank you to everybody that Tunes in to listen to this podcast by doing so you've enabled me to live out my dream but also for many members of our team to live out their dreams too it's one of the greatest privileges I could never have dreamed of or imagined in my life to get to do this to get to learn from these people to get to have these conversations to get to interrogate them from a very selfish perspective trying to solve problems I have in my life so I

feel like I owe you a huge thank you for being here and for listening to these episodes and for making this platform what it is can I ask you a favor I can't tell you how much um you can change the course of this podcast the the course of the guests were able to invite to the show and to the course of everything that we do here just by doing one simple thing and that simple thing is hitting that subscribe button helps this channel more than I could ever explain the guests on this platform are

incredible because so many of you have hit that button and I know when we think about what we want to do together over the next year on this show a lot of it is going to be fueled by the amount of you that are subscribed and that tune into this show every week so thank you let's keep doing this and I can't wait to see what this year brings for this show for us as a community and for this [Music] platform Dr Chris vanel you wrote a book ultr processed people I know from firsthand experience

that writing books is a painful experience it takes a long long time to do it and you have an extensive experience across medicine um across different sort of scientific disciplines why does this book and this subject matter matter to society and maybe even more importantly why did it matter enough to you it matters to all of us because for a very long time we've been incredibly confused about what to eat and we've called the foods that harmless junk food and processed food and high fat salt sugar food and we've we've not had a way of

labeling Foods even as a pandemic of diet related disease has take taken over the world really and this is particularly true now in low-income countries and particularly true with low-income people living in the UK so poor diet which means a diet high in ultra-processed food has overtaken tobacco as the leading cause of early death on planet Earth for humans for the animals we farm and for wild animals of course because ultr processed food is produced by a food system that is the leading cost of cause of loss of biodiversity the second leading cause of carbon

emissions and the leading cause of plastic pollution so about 12 years ago the definition was developed to describe a western industrial American diet and it was done by a team in Brazil and much of the best work on this stuff has been done by teams in Central and South America because what they saw in those countries whereas this is crept up on in the UK in places like Mexico and Colombia and Brazil obesity was essentially unheard of and within a decade it went to being the dominant public health problem in towns in Mexico you wouldn't

know anyone who was living with obesity and within a decade everyone would know someone who'd had an amputation for type 2 diabetes the only thing that had changed was the influx of broadly an American diet industrially processed foods so the definition was invented 2009 20 2010 and we've had a decade of evidence now that is very clear that it is ultr processed food that is responsible not just for pandemic weight gain and obesity but also for a long list of other health problems including early death why did this matter so much to you what is

the personal reason here I've I'm an identical twin I've got a a brother who lived with obesity for a very long time and I would my weight would fluctuate I'm I'm insulated by by privilege by my surroundings by education but I'm always on the brink of weight gain and I recognized in myself uh that I lived with an addiction to many ultr processed products and my brother particularly did and so at the core of the book is it was this sort of moment of understanding where I there are several sort of fulcrums in the book

I suppose but but two of the key elements are first of all for many of us ultr processed food isn't just harmful it is addictive and it makes all the criteria for addiction and it has there's so much evidence that for some people these products are as addictive as tobacco products drugs of abuse alcohol gambling but that nagging people is really really harmful so I'd had a very toxic relationship with my brother and in fact our the whole family we're very close family but we had for the better part of a decade been nagging him

to lose weight and I took him to see a behavioral change expert who said to me I don't need to speak to to sand I need to speak to you I said no no he's the fat one you got to speak to him he said no you are the problem for your brother to lose weight will be to lose an argument that's been a decad long with you you are the barrier and so because I'd been nagging him I owned his problem and he didn't own it and so at the heart of the book is

this this idea that nagging people generally pushes them toward doing things that that are harmful it generally makes them more likely to do the thing you're you're naging them about and I've tried to engage with these products when we come to individual Solutions I've tried to engage with ultrapress food as an addictive substance a substance that I was addicted to what is the balance there between personal responsibility and being a victim of circumstance in the in the sort of food landscape and society that we live in because there's a there's obviously been a huge debate

around obesity and and weight you know there's one school of thought maybe over on the more extreme side that says just get out there and you know make better choices in your life and go I don't know go for a run or something and then there's another school of thought that says weight gain and obesity are a byproduct of genetic the our genes and the environment we live in what is the truth in your view and in the case of your brother I think we have really really good evidence that personal responsibility that these arguments

around will parent personal responsibility are morally scientifically and economically redundant they they have no value so when it comes to population Health there are loads of different ways we can argue this if we look at willpower in so far as it's ever been operationalized for research and there's not a huge amount the research and you will know some of this the research is quite nuanced but broadly it serves as a proxy for poverty so the original marshmallow experiment which I think you've talked about where you you offer a child a marshmallow and say you know

we'll give you another one if we come back in five minutes and you haven't eaten this one that experiment those children who were unable to resist the marshmallow went on to really suffer in life they had much uh across all kinds of different indicators their lives were much more troubled they had lower achievement economically and and socially what it turned out is when you adjusted for maternal education the effect went away in other words the kids who were taking the marshmallow were from poor households and they were making a sensible choice they were taking an

opportunity when it arose because if you come from a situation of uh deprivation or disadvantage often things that are promised never materialize so once you you controlled for that in the studies broadly your ability to resist a marshmallow age4 predicts the household you're from you might be from a low education low income household doesn't predict anything else so that's one way of looking at willp Power and there's lots of other evidence the other thing is that if we look at weight in the mid 1970s and this is um you know American government data there was

a sudden inflection in weight gain where that the Obesity pandemic took off around 1975 and you look at a graph it's bumbling along it's suddenly everyone goes up when I say everyone black white hispanic men women you know 5ye olds 50y olds 90y olds everyone starts gaining weight so unless you're going to propose when it comes to weight gain that there was some failure of moral responsibility in young hispanic men and older black women and middle-aged white people you know that just doesn't Stack Up what changed was the food environment so my feeling is the

only thing that is interesting to talk about is the structure of the society around us and and we have really good evidence that when when you simply give people money we've done this this research has been done by economists by doctors by social scientists when you give people money they make smart choices rich people don't eat bad food because they don't want to eat bad food and people without money eat bad food because they're forced to eat bad food and the the cognitive dissonance that you and I were talking about quite often we will find

people with low incomes making quite cogent arguments about the food that they eat appearing to side with the companies that are predating on them because otherwise how could you live with this dissonance in your life otherwise you're just a powerless victim of of transnational food corporations so I I have almost no interest in personal responsibility I think you if you give people technical knowledge and you give people income and opportunity most people want to be healthy and live good lives 1970 the food environment changes can you tell me exactly how the food environment changed that

caused multiple demographics to to to gain weight there are two answers to that one the the sort of approximate reason is the invention of ultra-processed food so the industrialization of of food supply you can you can talk about why that happened in a lot of different ways part of it was to you know a a booming population post-war uh and these products were extremely convenient they allowed women to continue to be in the workplace of course women had entered the war entered the workplace in the war so there were a lot of things that were

immediately appealing about these products TV dinners Swanson TV dinners appear in the in the 50s and by the time of the s these products had become very widespread so in the same thing we were a decade behind in the UK but this this stuff is now our national diet why exactly it took over is the subject of a lot of the research I'm doing at the moment so now I work much more with economists the nutritionists and what we see is the financialization of the food industry so the primary uh determinance of almost every action

that happens in almost every food company that supplies say 90% of our calories all the indicators are Financial they're not to do with public health and so we can use Financial indicators we can use Financial research to to show that the food industry does these things like buy cheap debt use that to do uh share BuyBacks rather than generating value we can show that they vote down uh activist investors will vote institutional investors we'll vote down Public Health proposals at uh shareholder meetings and so part of it is the Takeover of the food system from

being a system where people would grow a lot of their own food make food at home they buy ingredients from local shops to a small number of companies supplying food so now uh 75% of the calories that are consumed globally come from six companies there are about 15 to 20 companies that make most of the food we eat in the UK that that primary that process the food so we've got a very small number of Agri business produc juers that make more or less 12 things that you know we eat broadly pigs cows and chickens

those are our Meats we don't really eat other meat maybe a bit of lamb maybe goat maybe Goose not really duck perhaps so we eat really three meats and then our main sources of calories come from four or five crops corn rice wheat soy Palm bit of sunflower so the human diet which should Encompass thousands perhaps tens tens of thousands of different species of thing has now because of the pressures of of commercial efficiency become reduced to a very small number of companies with enormous power um producing making a very small number of food products

and needing to generate intellectual property it's kind of like sounds like a mafia of sorts like a food Mafia I'm going to let you say that yeah well [ __ ] no don't let me say it don't want them coming for me um I think it's I don't mean it to sound malevolent so the argument I've just made can sound a bit neo- Marxist or anti-growth or antic capitalist and I I really don't mean it to sound like that but it is important to understand the incentives within the system and if the incentives are Financial

you'll end up with ultra processed food so the logic of the food is the cheapest possible ingredients with the longest possible shelf life and maximum intellectual property what is ultr processed food so broadly there are three types of food there's unprocessed a whole food which might be like an apple or an oyster or you can drink milk out of a cow you shouldn't because you get brucelosis but you can do it that's whole unprocessed food then there's processed food so there's uh butter so we can take whole milk we can process it into butter or

cheese now we've been doing that so North African pastoralists started doing this in the Sahara region maybe 7 8,000 years ago started making Dairy and if you can make butter you get all the vitam fat soluble vitamins uh from milk you get very high calorie and it almost never goes off it's really long shelf life similarly cheese add a bit ferment it add some salt you get a long shelf life very nutritional product so those are processed foods and we've been eating processed foods for over a million years I mean humans are the only animals

that have to process their Foods we it you know food processing has shaped our Jaws our teeth our guts so compared to any animal of similar size we have tiny little teeth minuscule fragile Jaws very short guts because we've extended our digestive tracts out of our bodies and into our kitchens we chop food rather than chewing it we cook it rather than uh digesting it so our food is is pre-digested so processed food is good tinning canning concentrating fermenting salting smoking all these projects techniques were invented really by women over hundreds of thousands of years

working in cave and huts and shelters and then kitchens they produced modern food and diets from the high Arctic to you know sea mamal diets from the high Arctic pescatarian diets in East Asia vegan diets of South Asia any traditional diet you point to is basically associated with good health all of them they've all evolved in different ways same is true of French cuisine rich in butter and red wine the only diet that we've studied that really seems to bring Health harms is an ult ultr processed diet so that is the American financialized industrial diet

so ultr processing is about using these commodity ingredients that I just listed you know commodity ingredients like soy corn rice and a bit of meat reducing them into powder form basically so if you grow corn the market I mean you understand all this much better than me you you get money in finance the market for cobs of corn spread with butter and salt is pretty limited if you grow cobs of corn you can sell a few of them but if you can turn the rest of them into corn starch which you can modify and turn

it so it's like you can create any chemical property that starch you want you can turn it into corn oil and you can turn it into high fructose corn syrup suddenly you have the ingredients for every single food product on the planet so the logic is to take your corn break it into pastes and powders with an infinite shelf life then recombine them with additives texturize them flavor them put aown brand on it and then you can add just enormous value and a lot of the ingredients we see in ultr processed food are waste products

from old food processing so whey what the Whey proteins we see in our nutritional powders I mean this was a waste product from dairying you know we used to be spread on fields or fed to cows but now the value you add instead of it being used for fertilizer the value you add when you turn it into a nutritional supplement is a thousandfold probably more than a thousandfold um Citrus fiber you'll see Citrus fiber is an ingredient in a lot of bars sounds healthy doesn't it like it's um you know citrus fruit fiber what could

be and it probably is reasonably healthy it's left over from the juice the juicing and tinning Industries where you have to get the peel off fruit and if you put it through a set of chemical processes you can extract the fiber add it to the human food chain and create enormous value so the logic of ultr processed food really is about creating products with intellectual property that use the cheapest ingredients you can that will last for a long time and from what I understood there the that last process s step three so you had Whole

Foods then you had processed foods then you had Ultra processed foods and in the ultra processed foods category what they're doing is taking the good stuff out and putting some bad stuff in is that a simple way to think about it I would think I think that is a very simple way that's a straightforward way of thinking about it the additives are not really the problem so the problem I would say some of the additives we think are harmful we've got some quite good research around some of the artificial sweeteners some of the modified starches

uh zanam gum um the emulsifiers and some of the colorings and textur and then we have some research that says the fact the food is is mechanically processed so hard it's generally very soft so think of any ultr processed food you can whether it's a a burger from a fast food chain or a bref bref cereal or Supermarket bread um uh generally these calories are soft and and they're energy dense because they're dry and so dry frood is important for shelf life the softness and the energy density means you consume them very quickly and so

you essentially consume them before you become full and so that's one of the ways they drive over cons excess eating so so if if you like the laundry list of the ways in which the food harms us is softness energy density some direct harms from the additives a lack of phytonutrients so it doesn't contain much real food and real food real plants and animals should have a great variety of molecules and chemicals that we don't understand very well but vitamins from a plant seem to interact with you very differently from than vitamins in an extract

but the main thing is the way the foods are developed so I spoke to so many people in the food industry who were all Wonderful by the way you know I I I've really enjoyed most of all talking to them but the food scientists all said the same thing that the products are generally put through um a focus group so you start with your box of cereal that you've been making for for decades and you have formulation a and then you make a new formulation formulation B you put it through the focus group if the

focus group eats box B quicker than box a box B is the one that goes on the Shelf because if they eat it 5% quicker you'll sell the boxes 5% faster and that's that's the financial indicator and so it's not any one aspect of the food that's harmful so much as when the intention is to create products that people will use as much as possible then you end up with addictive food interesting it Evol the food is put through if you like a almost a darwinian evolutionary process where every single thing every dial is tweaked

on every product every few months everything is adjusted from the sweet salt sugar ratios to the texture in the mouth to the color of the packet and everything is DED up to 11 so that Things become irresistible and you maybe you don't live with this but people who many people listening will recognize in themselves that there are products that they cannot stop eating they fantasize about them they think about them and once they start eating them they will consume five adult portions and my I've got a six-year-old and a three-year-old and my six-year-old can eat

five adult portions of any sugary breakfast cereal in about 20 minutes I brought some food along with me today I'm looking at it cuz I wanted to get distracting I wanted to get your opinion on it so I brought um a group of food products on the left here now these are things that I I think growing up I thought were good yeah so you're very bold with these Brands I mean you're really limiting sponsorship opportunities well you know you know I do think about that sometimes but I also they don't really care I I

think like I'm in The Pursuit Of Truth here so much of why I do this is to educate myself and I I think if I educate myself then I'll help educate other people that's why I'm also okay being a total idiot on this subject matter because that is the truth so here I've got four products that are typically seen as being quite healthy breakfast cereal Cheerios I grew up thinking good for me um actal good for me Diet Coke great cuz there's no sugar in there and then this is whole grain whole grain bread 50%

of your daily whole grain in just two slices great perfect so for a start I have a slight une EAS I am going to talk about these products I have a slight une talking about any one product the evidence applies to the category of food and this kind of stuff in a sense I think you're ABS these are such brilliant choices because this is the foundation of our diet and one of the things that's happening at the moment is is the food industry exploring painting me as a snob because I'm I'm critiquing these sort of

core things you know tins of beans with flavoring or Supermarket bread fish fingers I think this stuff is at the shallow end of the pool in a way it's not by any means the worst stuff but in a way it presents the biggest moral hazard because we think it's so healthy can I have the diet coke y so Diet Coke is my is my favorite example because this is the Ultimate Health Food according to the way we label food at the moment it has four where's the camera it's all green on the um it's four

green traffic lights right what what does what do they call that that traffic light system on the so this is the way we describe healthy whether a food is healthy or not in this country at the moment and this system is quite influenced by the food industry and it breaks all foods down into fat sat saturated fat sugars and salt and says that you know if those are the bad things and if a food is behind them it'll it'll have oranges and greens so if you look at the Cheerios they're most they're mostly on the

front it's on the front it's optional by the way so it's not always on every packet but the Cheerios are oranges and greens yeah now part there is a baked in confusion for this because what do you do at a traffic light that's orange and green or red orange and green do you go do you stop is it on the ACL is it is it on it's not on there no I couldn't see it on there it maybe on the bottom it's optional so who knows if you know we we don't we don't have any

way in this country of describing either healthy food or unhealthy food other than these traffic lights anyway this is a healthy food now if we look at the ingredients on the diet coke carbonated water fine now there's a color called caramel e150d caramel makes you think of you traditional it's it's a French 19th century invention burned sugar Creme Brule it's like it's a bit naughty but it's fine caramel e150d has nothing to do with caramel it is um carbohydrate treated with a mixture of acids and and uh and heat to produce uh things that contain

ammonium and sulfite so it's it's it's a food additive color um with no no benefits nothing to do with caramel um artificial sweeteners aspartame and asame K now sweeteners are tricky because we know sugar is harmful because it rots teeth and it promotes weight gain because it makes you eat more the weird thing about sweetness is they don't seem to help with weight loss at all they may some of them seem to be more metabolically harmful than sugar itself humans are quite good at eating sugar when we eat lollipops continuous continuously as kids or have

sugary drinks it's not good for us but human societies have for Millennia existed with a huge amount of honey and refined carbs so sugar we can handle although we should reduce our intake sweeteners are quite weird because they're a nutritional lie you put sweet taste on the tongue which says to your body sugar is coming so maybe put up some insulin maybe um start preparing in other ways physiologically to receive refined carbohydrate and when that refined carbohydrate when the sugar never arrives it seems to be physiologically confusing so the World Health Organization now says sweeteners

aren't better than sugar when it comes to weight loss and there is there is an anxiety about aspartam and cancer that I'm I'm personally not not in a big sweat about there's some there's some evidence but not not at normal dosage then we've got natural flavorings we've got caffeine flavoring an addictive drug and phosphoric acid and citric acid natural it said natural flavorings I mean you know that's good well flavorings are flavorings flavorings should signal nutritional content when you eat a tomato it has flavor not for fun it has flavor because it signals the nutritional

content of the Tomato when you put flavorings out of context e even if you extract them from the tomato or the strawberry or the peach it's very confusing for you phys biologically you've you have a very sophisticated internal system to link flavor molecules which are broadly smell and taste molecules salt Sweet Bitter sour and some Savory ones you you your body has a way of linking all that information with nutritional information that you get from your gut subconsciously when you muddle it all up in a product like this it's very confusing the phosphoric acid will

dissolve the minerals out of your bones as well as dissolving your teeth so what we have here is a solution of flavorings an addictive drug an acid that will Lee stuff out of your bones and sweeteners that seem to be metabolically confusing and certainly aren't better than sugar and yet we think of this as a health product so that for me is the archetypal confused way of thinking about food I um and what we also know is that when it comes to kids the age of my youngest so the age of three they are drinking

on average one can of artificially sweetened drinks every single day so we've we've taxed sugar sugar has come out of our diet we've seen no weight loss no indication that it's helping health and what we are doing is consuming huge numbers now of these artificial sweetness which we also know affect our microbiome what is a a better alternative that's popular on on the market than because it appears to me that all of the drinks in the bloody Supermarket have artificial sweeteners and flavorings and they do because of the sugar tax so it's almost impossible now

to buy fizzy tax without sweeten to to buy fizzy without sweetness um bet so for kids I try and not give any advice to anyone ever but my kids um my kids eat a lot of UPF but they don't have fizzy drinks I think I think fizzy drinks are really quite harmful across the board so so kids should just drink milk and water milk if they can have it and grown-ups um can do pretty well on milk and water if you drink milk what about breakfast cereals and Cheerios and things like that so breakfast cereals

are really convenient I mean let me see the Cheerios so I think these uh so these these probably do meet the def yeah these do meet the definition oh they are yeah so we've got things like um uh palm oil caramelized sugar syrup uh colors and Aton noxin and an antioxidant and so this is ultr processed it'll have some Fiber you'll have it with whole milk I don't want to demonize breakfast cereals my kids eat eat uh breakfast cereals for breakfast but it's not like eating porridge which is just whole grains or real bread this

is this is and what you will find is if you give this to a kid um compared to porridges they will be able to eat much much more of this and there is there's a lot of marketing that this is a really really healthy product and I would say the evidence says that this falls into a cat category of foods that we actually know are associated with negative Health outcomes it says on the side there doesn't it the list of all the health benefits a really good way of telling if a food is ultr processed

is if there is any health claim on the packet it's almost certainly ultr processed and part of that is to do with this intellectual property thing that the only food you can make lots of money out of is is a branded product so there's no money in broccoli milk steak eggs um supermarkets quite often make losses on all those things there's no heal claim on broccoli or on plums or on milk there's no Health claim on on steak it's only the ultra process things that you get marketed to you in this way because there's enough

money to do it the acl's interesting as well the immune support well it says immune support and it says vitamin D and B6 so that rich in Vitamin D immune support that is definitely healthy I mean this is this is a this is where we need we we we should have done the maths and shown how much sugar there was in each pot these are very high calor shots of sugary liquid that will harm teeth and I don't know why you'd have this if you could just have real yogurt and or milk and the reason

they back add the vitamins is to be able to make Health claims so generally foods with added vitamins um real food doesn't need added vitamins and we're again we're pretty sure that and I'm I'm conscious who I'm talking to here I've got to I'm I'm uh uh uh I probably have to tread a bit carefully supplementing vitamins into food doesn't seem to have many health benefits for healthy people so we've got quite a lot of very big data on this um and there are lots of studies that show benefits that are funded by people who

make vitamins but broadly the independent evidence shows that um when you get vitamins and minerals in the context of food they're really good for you and when you take them in pill or supplement form they don't seem to have many benefits if you are healthy and this food here this bottle of coke I've got can of Pringles and uh cocoa pops Kellogg cereal this is the stuff that I typically think of as like bad processed Ultra processed stay away from you would but give me the cocoa pops so the cocoa pops we look at these

traffic lights okay green green orange orange pretty healthy I mean there is a there is a monkey on the pack selling it to my to my kids yeah it says high in vitamin high in fiber vitamin D iron yeah iron supporting your family's health right s goodness I mean everything about this tells you that this is a product not just safe for kids but intended for kids and we all know you like you can't sell things if they're not healthy there must be some regulat dealing with that and this is the thing that my six-year-old

will eat five adult portions of so when you eat five adult portions the the the traffic lights only apply to a 30 G serving for you now a 30 G serving is is a handful like that it's it's one big spoonful okay so this is the product that I I recognize addictive behavior in my kids and frankly myself I mean I could eat you know 300 grams but and the other thing that I I went and got from the supermarket because I was thinking about what I typically think is ultra processed and good for me

I went and got this frozen pizza here and then I went and got a Tesco finer so this is high-end you know much more expensive not frozen pizza and I thought surely this pizza here is better for a lot better for me than this one here so again that there's a complexity talking about is one better than the other because we've we've never done a trial testing them against each other they're both Ultra processed I know because I looked at the ingredients they both contain ingredients that you don't have in a domestic kitchen like um

Palm fat or dextrose um and they're both made really in a sense by the same company so both of they're both made by plc's who will be owned by institutional investors with requirements for growth so they come from the same food system with the same incentives about production and my bet is that you or I would be able to eat the entire pizza at a single sitting um and we'd be still licking the pack of both of them so this is food that in essens is is engineered to be consumed to excess you did an

experiment didn't you quite a famous experiment now where you put yourself on an ultr processed food diet can you tell me about that experiment and the symptoms that you saw when you did lived off Ultra processed food pretty much exclusively so I I ate a diet that's very normal for a British teenager I ate 80% of my calories from Ultra processed food so for for a teenager in in you know the my kid school for example that this would be a completely normal thing to do one in five people in this country get 80% of

their calories from UPF so I wasn't really putting my body on the line um I was switching from 20% to 80% um kind of two really big things happened there was some health effects so um in terms of the physical effects on my body I gained so much weight and I wasn't it wasn't supersizing me I wasn't forcing it in this was done as part of a um a scientific experiment for a big study that I'm now running at at University College London where I where I work as an academic I gained so much weight

that in if I'd continued for a year I would have doubled my body weight we scanned my brain before and after I work with colleagues at the National Hospital for neurology and Neuroscience so neurology and neurosurgery so this these were scans done very expertly and while I'm only one patient you can you can subtract the noise you can be very sure that what you see is real we saw enormous in increases in connectivity be between the the automatic Behavior habit bits the back of the brain and those reward addiction bits right in the middle of

the brain so we can't exactly say what's happening but certainly behaviors and rewards are getting much much more connected most significantly I think we saw a change in my hormonal response to a meal so when you eat real food whilst you're eating you're chewing all kinds of hormonal and neurological changes happen in your body that will come to a point they'll say look you've had enough Stephen you're fine you can stop eating now and that's called satiety and we've evolved this mechanism since living things first started eating food hundreds of millions of years ago and

uh all animals have it and humans have it too what we saw is that the at the end of a standard meal at the end of this month my hunger hormones remained Skyhigh so this is food that is interfering with our body's evolved mechanisms to say I am done it's time to stop eating but there was there was this other thing that happened kind of the most important thing and it's at the core of the book is that Midway through this diet which I was quite enjoying you know if you're if you're a sort of

middle-aged man trying to you know the quest is always to lose lose weight and I could go back to eating the foods of my childhood and I was eating hot wings and all this stuff that I hadn't eaten for years I was really enjoying it but I was also doing all this research partly for the book and I'm you know as a scientist I study nutrition and uh I was talking to a colleague in Brazil called Fernanda rbert and she just kept saying this isn't food Chris it's an industrially produced edible substance and I sat

down that evening to meet eat a a meal of of takeaway fried chicken and I I could hardly finish it and she had flicked this switch in my brain where all of this ultrapress food had become disgusting but I then had to keep eating it for another fortnite and so it was a bit like the very famous book the easy way to quit smoking where you smoke all the way through reading the book while you learn about smoking and by the end of the diet I I I mean I now don't want to eat any

ultr processed products so the the gift I'm trying to give the reader is if you're living with addiction my invitation at the beginning is eat along eat while you read don't forbid this stuff to yourself let yourself wallow in it immerse it taste it and you'll start to and read the ingredients lists while you eat and you'll realize that all the food is has the same flavor profile it's all equally salty and sugary and sweet it's all acidic um and you will gradually become disgusted and that's not a promise that seems to be what's happening

to a lot of people and that is a very well-evidenced technique when it comes to living with addiction so the World Health Organization who I work with recommends the easy way to quit smoking for quitting smoking uh as as being as useful as patches or any other technique so I'm For The Individual treating it as an addictive substance may be really useful for some people what was the impact on your sort of mental health and how you felt from a sort of psychology perspective because I you know we've seen this huge rise in sort of

mental health diagnosis across the board especially in younger younger people but it seems to be pretty consistent throughout different ages and demographics and I wondered if there's a link between ultra-processed foods and Mental Health crisis that we're living through we've got really good epidemiological data so we now have hundreds of perspective studies which are the best the kind of studies we use to link smoking to to cancer that it is not just associated with physical ill health metabolic disease inflammatory disease cardiovascular disease cancers early death it's all also associated with anxiety depression and also dementia

and um my experience of being on the diet was that um there was a there was a there was a thing that I think the research doesn't capture which is because it's salty I was getting up to pee more at night and I was I don't know if I can say this I was getting really constipated and uncomfortable because it's quite low in fiber and so I got in this vicious cycle of sleeplessness and I'd often find myself where at the fridge in the kind of small hour at the morning and the food felt like

the solution to the problem so I got in this spiral of sleeplessness anxiety overeating and we know that stress and elevated cortisol also generally increases your desire for for low quality food and makes people overeat so in a way that kind of middle-aged stress anxiety the sort of mild mental health symptoms that so many people live with often it is just driven by by the food I read this um stat in your book according to the world's obesity Federation 51% of the world or more than 4 billion people will be obese or overweight within the

next 12 years so I like to say they will live with obesity um rather than the rather than use obese as an adjective because I think the biggest problem for people who live with obesity is stigma it's that being obese is your identity and what we actually know is that the the world OBC Federation are doing some really good work work identifying this as the major public health problem the ticklishness talking about this is it's really hard to say that obesity is a problem without also saying that people who live with it are the problem

and if you're not careful a war on Obesity becomes a war on people who live with it and I think the evidence is very clear it's just about the food environment so yes you can make these very powerful economic arguments that we simply cannot afford to have a food system that's driving this rate of disease um I think the moral arguments are much more powerful that this is stuff that causes human suffering so I I would not actually tax Ultra processed food and I certainly wouldn't ban it I think all my arguments are about increasing

Freedom increasing Choice increasing opportunity and that's quite conscious I mean you you know this as a as a skillful Communicator you talk about kind of doing exactly this in your book where I'm trying to make an argument that will appeal to the political right that are much more on the side of of uh you know free market low regulation and in fact we can have regulations completely compatible with huge economic growth and what I'm asking for is a food system where people with low incomes have access to healthy affordable food because a lot of people

would say and this is sort of part two of your book that okay so the solution here is really just for people to make better choices when they're I don't know in their fridges or when they're walking through a supermarket why don't we just all make better choices I mean you you will you may have a much more profound I I think you're asking this question in a provocative way I think you will understand it much better than me I've always had choice and so when I choose to buy things I that are unhealthy it

is with a degree of choice I do my my patients um I run a clinic at the hospital for tropical disease where I work and most of my patients have no addresses they're very disadvantaged they're migrants Asylum Seekers um they come from very low-income families because those are the people who get infections now when I say to them go and eat some healthy food they all know what healthy food is they've often got very they very diverse community' got very rich traditions of healthy food from the the communities of the cultures they've come from they

are completely unable to buy it in the case of the Asylum Seekers they're on 8 pound a day and they can't work you can't you can't say to someone on spend your eight pound a day on apples and broccoli and me they haven't got knives to cut it with now we know a million households in this country don't have fridges freezers stove top cookers so there are a huge number of families that only have a microwave to cook and fresh food while there is always a politician willing to advance this argument like you can buy

a bag of lentils if you go to the cash and carryer you can buy rice or lentils for you know a couple of quid for 10 kilos it costs money to heat it it cost time time is the most expensive thing for for people with low incomes they need pots pans cutting boards knives Tupperware if you're going to batch cook which is the only way to make home cooking economical you got a deep freezer to store it in so saying to people with low incomes you know make healthier choices it is it is nonsense it's

just it's it's and so I feel very strongly it the world does not need another person like me saying that and in fact no one I mean we all people hate being told what to do there was a study done on toddlers in 1920 that you write about which is quite Illuminating where they got to choose their own food from a selection of un unprocessed foods and the children instinctively chose their own diet which met their nutritional needs and Cal calorie intake what was that experiment and what does that indicate to us about the nature

of this argument what as it relates to just being able to control what we and choose what we want if we look at the animal kingdom even if you look at something you might think has quite a simple diet like a like a big herbivore living in you know any of the big herbivores living on any of the big PLS of the world and you think well they just eat grass they don't we've done loads of experiments where you put sounds a bit unkind but you put a hole in the neck of the animal and

you put a bag on the hole and you collect the plants they're eating and you can do this in a way that's relatively Humane and what we discover is if we study goats or cows they're eating 50 or 60 different plants a day calories are abundant and what those animals are doing is balancing all their nutrition needs from all those different plants and selecting them and learning them about the flavor profile and the mineral content they're moving to avoid predators in the rains to different soils so animals are incredibly sophisticated at at perfectly balancing their

nutritional needs from their environment and obesity is uh non-existent in the wild animal kingdom in urban animals actually that start to scavenge from humans there is some evidence of obesity but in wild animals there is there is no obesity humans turns out obviously have the same ability and so a scientist called uh claraa Davis who's amazing woman she was she was a a gay woman uh one of the first medical graduates in in North America and she did this experiment where she was she was taking abandoned kids in ENT she was functioned almost like an

orphanage and each child got access to 34 different Whole Foods every single day and it was things like there was raw bone marrow and cooked rice and yogurt and milk and they had a little bowl of salt they could have as much or as little salt as they wanted and her question was could the kids balance their nutritional needs and the best example was a kid called Earl who she uh took in a few months old and he came in with Ricket so he had very bad vitamin D deficiency had bendy bones and they did

some X-rays and you could see the rickets on the x-rays and every single day he would glug an entire cup of cod liver oil which at the time was one of the only really the only source of vitamin D and he drink this every single day enthus I asically he always wanted his codli Roy and on the day his rickets were healed and you couldn't see them anymore on the x-rays he stopped drinking the cod liver oil never asked for it again and none of the kids without vitamin D deficiency would drink would touch the

cod liver oil so something in Earl's body was saying I will when I need this stuff I'll have it once I don't need it anymore I won't have any more of it and all the kids that she studied over many many years with access to a full range of foods perfectly matched all their nutritional leads they all grew really well they were intellectually welldeveloped they extremely healthy and they didn't have any of the sort of food refusal problems that that parents have nowadays so and she knew very well that the point was the kids only

had access to good food she wasn't giving them access to um industrially processed junk foods which were still slightly available in in the 20s it was a really cool experiment for me I take away from that that our bodies can kind of self regulate what we need if they're in an environment where the options are good so if I'm a parent and I'm sure I'll be a parent in the next couple of years I hope so um if I just make sure in my house all the food options are good for my kids Whole Foods

all the good stuff you've described presumably then I can just unlock the cupboards and let them run free I love talking to um people who might become parents about what they think I mean like wow you just I mean yeah good good luck to you let's can we have this conversation again in about six years can you tell me why I'm you're not wrong you're completely right it will be impossible for you to limit the influx of ultra processed food into your house so clearly I've written a book on this I study this I would

love to do that I want my kids to be normal being normal is really important as a kid and food isn't just stuff we put in to build our bodies food binds us to the people around us food is part of our community and our culture in the UK our food culture is ultr processed food and if you don't eat and drink Ultra processed food you become a slightly odd person and so I still eat it when I go to friends houses because otherwise I look like some you know uh fanatical food snob so and

it's the same with my kids so so uh grandparents friends relatives all bring it round you don't control what they eat at school um you know my youngest ones a really nice Nursery but still ultrapress food food from uh from the minute she gets there to to when she leaves so um very good luck to you but this is why I argue I I nod to if an individual wants to read my book I think they will come away with technical knowledge that they will be able to use and and I wish them well with

that the big argument of the book is about this this is about social justice you know it is it is really appalling that even for people with with a lot of means real food is incredibly affordable and unavailable as you guys may know this podcast is sponsored by one of my favorite brands in all the world which is whoop AI is a topic I've spoken about various times on this podcast and it's a topic that I'm pretty obsessed with but we don't often talk about how it could be used as a force to make our

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whole food ingredients in one scoop it's nice not to have to think about taking lots of different pills and vitamins in the morning I can just take this and I know that I'm giving my body a good dose of all the vitamins and minerals that it needs every morning it's a lot better tasting than having to force down some of the other green powders I've tried and it's really reassuring to know that I'm looking after my body properly unfortunately and currently this product is only available in the US so anyone in the USA head to

hu.com to get it before it runs out again but anyone that's not in the US and wants it to come to their country please send me a DM a direct message and I'll speak to the team at hu in our board meetings and I'll let them know that you want it in your country what about the people that say this is just about calories in calorie out the you know Fitness Community lot of the weight loss Community just say what you've got to do and I've actually got a friend that said this to me quite

passionately he says what I do is I just measure the amount of calories I'm taking in measure the calories that are coming out and I make sure that there's a calorie deficit and if you have a calorie deficit he actually said to me one day he goes you can eat whatever you want and you'll be fine mathematically he's he's not entirely wrong that there are there are some very very there are two very very big problems with that the first is that while some people can just eat to instructions many of us have genes that

uh lead us to engage with food in a more interesting way you know I care about food I love food I'm driven to it so you your friend should come around my house in the morning with a box of cocoa pops and try and get my daughter to eat one adult portion and good luck to him I mean they'll be screaming and crying and she'll be grabbing the bo so the food it's a bit like saying to smokers all you have to do is just smoke one cigarette don't smoke the whole pack just have like

one to be social or people who live with addiction to alcohol well just have one drink and that won't do you any harm the the food really is addictive for many people but there is this other bit of the equation which is really fascinating which is that when we do more activity of the kind that most of us do it doesn't seem to have an enormous impact on the calories that we burn and this is very very good robust sence going back to the going back to the '90s um the the most if I tell

this as a story which I think it's the way you'd do it um there was a scientist called Herman poner and he wanted to know how many more calories he'd burn if he went and lived as a hunter gatherer with the hadza tribe in Tanzania so he went and studied them and he put He used a thing called double labeled water where you can measure very accurately calorie expenditure and he put them in metabolic hoods and he studied them for months and months and he came back and he looked looked at his data and he

thought he' got it all wrong because the data showed that for um essentially if you or I went and lived in Tanzania and we walked 15 kilometers a day hunting Antelope and digging tubers out of the ground we wouldn't burn any more calories per day and he just could not make sense of this so then he went back and looked at all the data available in the literature we've studied animals we've studied different human populations there are um we've studied subsistence Farmers compared to secretarial workers in the states we've looked at miners the same thing

is true in all the studies when you do sustained activity over a long period it doesn't massively impact your calories now some exceptions if you do polar expiration if you cycle in the tur France if you go to the gym for an hour and a half every day six days a week you probably do burn a few more calories but activity of the kind we all do doesn't seem to and that explains why exercise is good for us because if you don't do exercise I burn 3,000 calories a day rough let's say we slightly different

body compositions but roughly you and I burn 3,000 calories a day if you do your hour and a half of exercise every day you're stealing energy from your other budgets you're taking it away from inflammation away from hormones and away from anxiety and that's why exercise seems to be good for us because I'm sitting here and I'm ready to live said said and TR with my two kids I don't go to the gym for an hour a day so I spend my calories but they're spent on inflammation and anxiety and relatively High hormone levels and

is this what we call the fixed energy model I read that in your book that term yeah so that's that's um that's that's the model and there are lots of exceptions um but what that model tells us along with all the other available data is that when we are talking about populations who live with obesity increasing activity will be really good for them but it will not have a significant effect on body weight so when we're talking about the pandemic of obesity um activity isn't hugely important and if people are listening and they want to

lose weight many people have the experience that um putting a healthy diet in the context of lots of other healthy things is often really a good way of bringing about behavioral change you'll feel good in other ways but the activity in the exercise if you think that putting in your slog at the gym every most of us can manage 40 minutes every other day tops and I I get nowhere near that it's not going to have an impact on your weekly calories e even if even if we accepted that the even if we did think

that it increased the number of calories you burn there's other evidence that says you you either eat more because your your body isn't just the mathematical uh machine that your your friend proposes um but also it's if you add up the calories and you go to the gym for half an hour four times a week it's just not very many calories in terms of your weekly calories unless even if you're cycling as hard as you can for the whole thing I can I can definitely relate I I work out every day because just because I

if I didn't you do it every day you set you seven days a week I have PT every single day and the reason I do that is purely because I am best disciplined when I have a clear routine so knowing that it's part of my habit and that it's actually today it's in my calendar yesterday it was in my calendar even I even have lunch in my calendar now because I'm just trying to make sure that I have some kind of routine um with my with my eating or else I just won't eat I remember

on Friday I my first meal was at 600 p.m. because I was podcasting had some stuff with the BBC and I don't want to do I don't want to eat before I do anything because my I'll slump my point here though is with my personal trainer every day if I don't change my diet very little happens with my body I actually I end up growing a bit more muscles I end up getting a bit stronger but in terms of weight loss the fast it just sits there yeah interestingly though from a psychology perspective I've spoken

to a lot of scientists and doctors who have said your body will basically overcompensate for what you've just burned if you went go for a five or 10 mile run your body wants to defend its weight because that's defending its survival chances for me one of the things that happens is if I go out go and work out in the gym because it was so painful I'll then come home and look at the flapjack or the cookie whatever and I'll think that's two steps backwards that's interesting whereas some people will come home look at the

flapjack and go I've earned that but to counteract my own point that also happens sometimes I go well I can have it because I just ran or whatever um what I what I might do is I might avoid the flapjack the obviously bad thing but then I might eat more of something that I think isn't bad you see what I'm saying you'll have a sort of nutritional bar or something that is sold to you as being part of that kind of accer yeah and I'll eat four of those and when you speak to one of

the really interesting things is when you speak to nutritionists and I've spoken to a couple who work with really Elite Sports Teams um those athletes generally eat food so they that they have chefs that make and they might make quite an elaborate Flapjack but it will be a flapjack made with the ingredients you would have in your kitchen and they will often drink milk while they're cycling or running and they'll eat pieces of chicken rather than other things this topic of willpower again we kind of started with it I love because willpower comes up a

lot in your stuff and it's been so interesting listening to your your stuff about it yeah I have to be honest I have evolved in my thinking about it because I've listened to both sides of the argument around will power and it does appear to me that there is probably something else going going on but with all these studies on Willpower it's hard to establish causation because there are other factors that are quite clearly could confound the variables in play so it's something that I've gone back and forward on you talk about twin studies in

the context of willp power and what that can teach us why did why did you talk about twin studies in chapter nine part of it was done by a colleague called CL lellan and um what CLA was looking at was the her this it's a bit convoluted let me see if I can do this the heritability of obesity genes so there's a weird thing we see this with with um it's bit easy to understand with IQ but it's it's true of IQ genes and obesity genes that in some places if your parents have genes for

obesity you will have a 90% chance of inheriting the Obesity but in other families it's more like 10% same is true with with IQ so um what CLA lellan showed was that if you came from a situation of deprivation if you came from a low-income household your genes for obesity are much more likely to be expressed so you would inherit those you'd inherit those genes and you would develop obesity now the the social importance of this was because IQ studies originally showed that intelligence was hereditary and this caused huge problems because um it was done

in the states and uh minority groups were measured as having lower in elligence and this provided that kind of core argument of saying well some people are genetically less intelligent and there's a woman called Sandra Scar and she did the first intelligence first studies and it was twin studies that showed it were that um whilst intelligence is heritable in some communities it isn't in others and basically it works like this if you come from a well-off household all your genes whether they're for a healthy body shape or for intelligence they're all maxed out and so

you all the variability is genetic in the population if you come from a low-income household you might have genes for height that never get expressed you might have genes for intelligence that because you have been poorly nourished you haven't been as educated as well those genes for intelligence never get expressed so you have a really complicated picture where genes can be inherited but not expressed in different communities according to how those populations are treated and so that's one of the crucial things in Psychology is when only study white middleclass populations when we only study psychology

students we get very very different answers to when we go and look at populations who live with disadvantage or low income so essentially what one of the big findings from clell's work is if you got rid of poverty uh you would get rid of around 60% of the problem of diet related disease and you and your brother because you are twins are quite a good example of this I guess because you reference how he went and lived in Boston and was having a stressful time and gained weight I mean every time I go to America

we we travel out there to record the podcast it's just absolutely [ __ ] wild like we I just feel terrible um I I always gain weight um I un avoid if you're doing work like you do in the states and you're you're at hotels and you're on the move and you're traveling you you cannot eat good food that mini bar in the bloody hotel which they just keep topping up I remember I was saying to the team I was like I put the cookies in the [ __ ] bin and then I came back

the next day and they' put two bags there like yeah they think you've eaten the cookie yeah they thought I enjoyed them I mean the marketing that's a form of marketing and if you think that you are struggling I'll come back to Boston but if you think that someone like you struggles in a hotel room when they've put cookies and all this junk there and you have to sort of put it out of sight for a British teenager this is true for teenagers in States Canada Australia they are saturated in marketing in a way that

you would be completely invisible to you and I it's I mean you you may remember this from childhood it's on your bus tickets when you buy stationary at the shop it'll be on your receip it's on your music apps because we pay for our music apps but kids don't it's on their social media um the companies get their phone numbers directly uh from they enter competitions and then they send them meal deals and messages ping ping ping to their phones so they it's 360 247 immersion in marketing of addicted products and so it's it's not

that confusing why 25% of British kids live with obesity not just overweight anyway so Boston yeah my twin my twin moved to Boston it was a situation of some stress he'd had a a kid um uh a son Julian uh with someone in a way that that wasn't planned I suppose Julian knows this uh I mean Julian's the whole it's all part of a very dear family now um but it was very stressful he went there to do a master's degree he lived above a burger shop and he he kind of ate his problems and

he he gained 30 kilos and that that is an example of we both have a genetic vulnerability but my life in the UK was very stable and I was in a different food environment in the UK you move my genes my clone genetically we're identical you move my clone to the states stress him out a bit he gains 30 kilos I mean it's it's nothing and oh has our willpower changed has our personal responsibility changed you know a set of um accidents and and uh uh coincidences and the food environment are what determine his weight

has nothing to do with willpower at all whenever I feel like I'm in a situation where I don't have autonomy and control I'm like G and when I hear about this sort of food environment we're living in and the the big food Mafia and the marketing and pinging me left right and center and all the products that are in some of these ultr processed foods that are making me feel addicted to them that I just it's just triggering my my brain in a in a way that I can't seem to control either I go I

want to be able to do something about it on an individual level I want to be able to take back control without having to wait for bloody Downing Street or the White House to change things I love that and what what I try and propose in the book is that you need to make that Journey probably when you start reading the book you're you're in this sort of unconscious stage if you don't think of yourself as either a victim or anything you're just eating your food and then Midway through the B book I think I

do propose to you that you are a victim and that's a hard thing for any of us to listen to most of us don't want to be victims and I think you have to make the journey from victim to activist pretty quickly and you can be an activist in your own life for yourself and you can if you have resources and money and skills you you can get rid of ultra processed food lots of people actually can't I just I just got to be really blunt here like there is there is an anxiety I had

write in this book that um for the core audience of readers who can afford books most of them will be able to buy sourdough from a fancy Bakery rather than you know the Loa of PR we just looked at but for the people who are most affected by the problem that it simply won't be a choice for someone like you yes you you need to take that kind of emotional reaction and turn it into um direct that rage rather than than directing it inwards it's directing it out to a food system that controls you I

mean one of the one of the political narratives we hear is is is that any kind of Regulation is Nanny statism it's about government overreach at the moment we live in a nanny State the nannying is done by transnational food corporations they don't pay any particular tax in this country they're you know they do employ some people but these these are not companies that are part of our sort of culture and yet they are controlling our our food and what we eat and I think we need to rest a little bit of control back off

those of th of those companies but that group of people that maybe weren't the majority of people you were speaking to with your book that don't have the privilege that me and you have to make better choices as it relates to food or to um buy the pots and pans and chopping boards or get a chef to cook it for us whatever what you say to them what do they do I mean this is why I don't give advice because there is there we are at this moment where we do have to politically treat the

companies like the tobacco companies now at the moment for many people trying to quit ultr processed food will be like trying to quit smoking in the 1960s is it really addictive so the do you want me to do a bit on the the evidence for addiction so the the the the definition of adct because people food addiction has been really scientifically complex for a long time because baked into the notion of addiction is that the only strategy that ever works is abstinence you cannot be adct abstinent from food and so food can't be addictive so

for a long time we said well food is a behavioral addiction where it is the the food Behavior not the food itself the definition of Ultra processed food allows you to describe the category of substances that are addictive and when we go and speak to people who say I live with addiction to food and you say what do what do you feel addicted to It's Always ultra processed product it'll be very different some people it's going to be the diet colors some people it's Biscuits some people it's pizzas but it's always UPF um the definition

of addiction is continued use of a substance despite knowledge of harms physical or psychological and despite repeated attempts to quit and you and I will both know people in our own lives who continue to uh eat this food I mean I was definitely one of these people uh despite knowing it was harming me and wanting to stop eating it so that's why I think I have two groups of readers some people are just going to want to cut down you you might be someone who's maybe eating a little bit more than you want and you

just want to go I'm going to maximize my health and I'm just going to I'm going to have it as a treat on a Friday night and that's fine it's like it can be like booze or or the occasional cigarette for some people that one cigarette that one glass of wine for for many probably 40% of people I don't know about your audience but across the country 40% of people will have a troubled relationship with it and for those people abstinence may be a an easier strategy so yeah I think it's addictive when we look

at scans it's addictive when we do surveys it's addictive when we um look at the profile of genes and the other um surrounding factors that lead to addiction it's caused by the same things and there's lots of basic science about um the the speed of consumption and addiction so addictive things are normally very quickly consumed shots crystal meth um tobacco products if you chew tobacco if you have slow release methylphenidate it's a treatment for ADHD it's not addictive um if you have weak session beer it's not addictive like tequila shots are so the speed of

hit seems to be important and that may be partly to do with the softness of UPF you get a you get a very quick hit of your nutrition is there a link between ultr processed foods and neurodiversity you know ADHD those kinds of things because there's some emerging evidence about ADHD I'm speaking to um there's a working group at the Royal College of psychiatrists who are really interested in the links between uh binge eating disorders and other eating disorders and um and ultr processed food um I think we we are only at the very beginning

of discovering the health effects but remember from from very early on in childhood a huge number of kids in this country are on a diet of ultra almost pure Ultra processed food but that's often in a situation where there is also other sources of um trauma of um there'll be other health factors there'll be poor housing um it will go hand inand with lots of other things so as an adjunct to other other problems I would think there will be a link but teasing it all out is going to be complicated a high UPF diet

is linked to More Death glob than tobacco high blood pressure or any other health risk 22% of all deaths that's a stat I got from your book and also increased consumption of UPF Ultra processed foods is linked to the following diseases all cause mortality cardiovascular disease cancers high blood presses fatty liver disease in inflammatory bowel disease depression worse blood fat profile irritable bowel syndrome dementia and I can't even say that other one F Frailty Frailty just fertility being weak and old CH part five of your book is what am I supposed to do about it

and I've kind of answered it I want to make sure I'm really clear of my own life here I can because I have the privilege of doing so I can make better food choices the first part of it is awareness knowing what Ultra processed foods are and I believe I've got that definition from you step two is I really need to do an audit of the things that I'm consuming frequently to make sure that I'm at least intentional about my consumption of ultra processed foods and then I can make better choices to bring in more

Whole Foods into my into my diet um because you're right there's so many things that I'm consuming that I thought were good for me I mean I I drank bloody orange juice for [ __ ] Sunny D for 20 years because I just thought it was great for me vitamin D or something I can't remember so Sunny yeah exactly and it was it was marketed at me um awareness is step one making making more informed choices I guess is step two for me um and then there's a broader point which is about trying to change

the system for others which I I can do by having these kind of conversations I guess I love that th those steps are coming from you that I I don't have a I I honestly don't care what people eat I I like freedom I don't like being told what to do and so I am not prescriptive about what anyone should eat nowhere in the book do I say you should like as a normative statement you should eat less up F so if you want to knowing what you know that's up to you I don't think

anyone has a duty to be healthy to generate economic growth I just think no one asked to be born you're born you should be able to live your life as you want what I do think is what I want for for everyone is that they can they have agency so that they are not subject to constant predatory marketing and they have true choice so all the policies that proposing and I'm part of a big group working on this are about making real food affordable and available so in terms of the the hierarchy of what needs

to be done for everyone the number one thing is tackle poverty poverty is a political Choice there is enormous wealth in this country and uh and people born into disadvantage should not have a different childhood than people who are born rich and and and it feels kind of almost revolutionary to say that but it's really obvious to me like what why I mean I can talk about this all day but but Health outcomes are so different for people born in poverty for people who live across the road from from from my kids so that's the

number one thing the second thing is um some very light regulation I don't want to tax things I don't want to ban things we need to appropriately label unhealthy food and at the moment the labels are so confusing as to be unusable we need to put in our national nutrition guidance that there is good evidence linking processed food as a category to all these poor health outcomes and we should recommend uh the government should recommend that people do try and consume less now there will be a real problem for the government doing that because the

government creates a food environment and it's really hard for a government to say look on the one hand don't eat all this and they go on the other hand that is all you can afford to eat so that's going to create a real political problem and that's sort of what we're up against um the most important policy step is to get industry out of the room when it comes to making policy so this is so the I just spoke at the world of obesity Federation in New York um they're a un aligned who aligned group

outside of the UK there is no discussion about the role of ultra processed food that pandemic obesity is primarily due to this Western industrial diet everyone agrees on this countries like Argentina a can of cola has three big black hexagons on it bigger than the logo of the company that makes the cola same with most of the breakfast cereals you know there are warnings in the National Garden so globally people are very very aware of this in the UK um there is real control of the public health n narrative by the by the food and

drink industry so as an example all our major Charities that influence policy and a lot of policy comes from charity they're all paid by companies that make by UPF so if we look at the British nutrition Foundation it is majority funded by all the major food companies you can name Coca-Cola Nestle Cargill all of them um cancer research UK diabetes UK the British dietetic Association all of them are funded by companies that make ultr processed food so we need we need to start treating the companies like the tobacco industry and saying no no your money

is is not good and we won't take it because it influences food policy that's kind of the most important step and so part of being an activist in this area for me is um not taking food industry money myself and so that that is a very painful weekly process because if you write a book about food you get offered you know I mean enormous amounts of money to go and to go and work for the food industry how how did how did your food consumption change from the beginning of this book Till the End of

This Book what were there any particular choices that you have unmade or made because of what you learned in the process of writing this book I think resist existing addictions if you live with addiction is almost impossible that's the whole point about addiction MH and what you need to do is to make the journey from being addicted to being disgusted and love and disgust are quite they're they're anatomically close in the brain they're neurologically quite related and many of us have experienced this falling out of love process where something you're in something or someone you're

infatuated with that is irresistible you want to spend all your time engaging with um suddenly becomes something you really don't want to do and smokers will describe it some people have this experience in human relationships um it it can happen that switch can be flicked quite quickly and I think if you're someone who lives with addiction you need to figure out how to flick that switch that at the moment if you're addicted to this food and you constantly trying to resist it it it will be too much so I I think that that is kind

of the priority if you're living with the addiction is to try and get to disgust and that's what happened to me is the food became you know this thing about the uncanny valley where if if um there's a thing in animations where if animations are very cartoony they're fine but if they become quite human they suddenly start looking weird there's some films where they get it a bit wrong um uh where the where the cartoon characters are too realistic they they become almost zombie or corpse likee and so this this uncanny valley that animation goes

through where it becomes weird and then when Ultra human that they're fine again the food for me was a bit like that it entered this sort of uncanny valley where it's it's similar to food but it it isn't food and so so now I just don't want any of it but I will eat it to be polite this stuff that I that I brought with me you know the the pizzas I got the cocoa pops I've got the the Coca-Cola here is this food I don't think it me so food is very poorly defined we

don't have a working definition of food sort of in law but I think food is substance that you eat for nourishment and it should be about nourishment culturally socially personally psychologically as well as physically and these products are uh developed to generate financialized growth for institutional investors they're not made by people who love you who want to nourish you and so I don't think it meets what I think is a useful cultural definition of food I think it's very useful to not think of them as food and I don't think a mixture of um coloring

addictive drugs and phosphoric acid could be called food in any sense of the word it doesn't have nutrition it only has things that will we're we're pretty sure that almost every ingredient does you harm in some way so I I don't see how that could be called food it's a way of commodifying your ill health for the benefit of a very small number of people are you optimistic sck oh that's such a great question like I live with and I want the real answer that's sort of oh you could ask me you get a different

answer each morning so at the moment uh here are my sources of optimism there is another way of doing this I have a friend who runs a not for-profit Drug Company works as a normal drug company has a huge quantity of Revenue only one person took a pay cut that was the CEO so he doesn't own it everyone else is paid exactly as if they're at a normal pharmaceutical company the purpose of and he paid back investors it's a really it would be cool for you to interview actually he's one of the the smartest people

I know he came from Big farmer and because he's not obliged to institutional investors he develops drugs for low-income settings he also sells them in middle and high income settings and does really a great job but the purpose of the company is to reduce Healthcare inequalities now there are lots of people who are working on a similar model that will sit within you know a capital capitalist structure that will pay back investors but where food needn't become so beholden to institutional investors so I think there are financial reasons for optimism there are economic models we

can we can propose corporate structures we can incorporate things in different ways that will serve the community in different ways that's one source of optimism the second source of optimism is we sort of did it with tobacco and the cool terrible thing about tobacco is we regulated the tobacco industry and got smoking rates right down and the um growth of equity value of the tobacco companies has continued more or less uninterrupted throughout now part of that comes from selling cigarettes in other countries some of it comes from the rise of vaping but nonetheless we did

manage to get control of tobacco so as a public health activist I have a template I know how to do it I know how to tackle marketing um and we we have a road map and we also know that people are Furious I mean people are enraged for 40 years we've watched particularly our children not just get bigger but get shorter so if you have kids if you have kids in this country by the age of five they will be that much shorter than if you had kids in Scandinavia or Bulgaria or the Netherlands okay

that at the age of five that much 9 cm that is the difference between a British 5-year-old and a Bulgarian 5-year-old and is his all diet so it's not just our kids live with the beasty they are stunted now you can't stunt a body by 9 cm at the age of five and not also stunt them intellectually so people are Furious we sort of know this is happening we know we can't stop eating this food we obesity is all around us and so I I think there is real real uh momentum for people to to

reclaim their foods and we do we do have a lot of amazing food cultures in this country that we can draw for kind of Rich phenomenal diets might explain why the US is so poor from an education standpoint to some degree you know what I mean because they always rank at the very bottom of the education tables it's the same in the it's about the same in the US the stunt the physical stunting and physical stunting once we once you get rid of cigarette smoking during pregnancy which is still far too high it's really it's

really all due to diet so there's all those causes of optimism and yet I also I'm up against the the power any one of these corporations has revenues equivalent to the GDP of a of a pretty decent sized country like Venezuela or Croatia yeah so and that's any one of the the companies do you know this is just such conspiracy theory that I just popped into my head about my own childhood um I'm the youngest of four right and if we just look at the brothers so there's three of us Brothers I'm the youngest brother

and Kevin my oldest brother is a monster he's like 65 or something even Jason is like 63 and then I'm short and I'm like short in comparison to them I'm 61 but they're so much there're so much taller than me and I did I was thinking about it as you're speaking my mother did make homecooked foods she was at home during my my older brothers and sisters um as they were growing up so she was cooking in the house the whole time African food lots of Whole Foods and chickens and vegetables and salads any traditional

diet like any traditional diet yeah and then she started businesses and stopped coming home so I was a scavenger and I had like free reain to go to the Sweet Shop and eat not not so good things so I was just thinking about I've always wondered why I'm why I'm shorter than them and I'm younger but maybe there's sted physically and intellectually maybe I think you're going to difficulty selling people on this but I mean it is an intriguing point we know about youngest people in in the in in Europe that youngest children are about

I don't know I don't know that D they're about five IQ points uh less smart because IDI of the family as well my brothers are absolute super they're like um they're like mathletes in the UK my brother was rewriting the textbook he was on the front of the Plymouth Herald because of his bloody the grades that he got I think it was the Plymouth Herald it's one of the newspapers he was in there and Kevin was even smarter he was a another Super Genius I got kicked out of school I was it is really I

mean that idea of eating a sort of traditional home-cooked whole food diet versus your probably quite High UPF I I mean I it was the datas you know you're you're one case but we build evidence out of case studies you know I love that idea I'm not sure I can really accept you as kind of intellectually and physically stunted sitting across from you no but academically they were just so much so they still are so far ahead of me in fact Jason now works in my company just to help me with everything because he's so

smart we there's there's a pair of twins I know who separated at Birth adopted in China separated at Birth they're quite well known I've interviewed them for for a podcast and one grew up in Norway one grew up in the states genetically identical and the Norwegian twin is is that much taller than the American twin so we we do see these natural experiments too it's crazy how's your brother getting on so he maybe the biggest effect of the book is he kind of I stopped a message in the book and I would say this because

people people are listening and listeners are selfish we like how do I lose the way how do I quit UPF well I've said that but the the bigger thing is don't beat your loved ones over the head with this so many people like I'm going to buy your book for my wife or husband or daughter or I'm going to tell my kids and and when we let people go and we stop owning their problems it gives them agency it empowers them and and then it's up to them to decide and they if they have the

resources and the opportunities generally they will and so a big a kind of core message of the book is stop nagging your loved ones about their food their food is controlled by forces that are far bigger than you they know what to eat nagging people about their weight only stresses them out and makes it worse so when I it was when I Let Go properly of what zand eats and stop really really stopped caring about him and and started to kind of not see him as an extension of myself because when he he would be

big in public you know we work together as television presenters and I'd be like God you're embarrassing me like we're trying to talk about health and medicine to kids and look at you and when I let all that go and saw him as like you know he's such a wonderful person I love him so much who who cares about his weight that enabled him to sort of engage with it then lots of other things happened he's just got married to a public health academic um uh he's got resources he got a bit older I mean

all kinds of things happen so much of life is is luck we can tell these narratives of how someone got from A to B but he's very fortunate and I think celebrating weight loss is just something I'm I'm so anxious about doing but he yeah he a big product of the book was an improvement in my relationship with him because I stopped caring what he ate I find it so interesting why people decide to make changes in their life and it's so different for everybody I've I've wondered and pondered whether sometimes we need a little

bit more pain you know I can't forget a conversation I had with a manager of one of the top music artists in this country that was struggling and this person was a friend of mine the person struggling and I kind of went to him and I was like listen how can I help and he goes you can't he goes um I've managed a lot of music artists that have struggled with addictions of various kinds and at some point they'll reach a rock bottom and they'll decide themselves that they need to make a change and it's

such a hard thing to accept just to kind of let someone in your view go into freefall in an area of your life you want to catch them you want to hold them up and support them that that Moment of clarity of decision that's when we've all had it switch suddenly flick that can never arise as long as someone else is telling it and the the clearest example of this is the washing up that my you know I you know we've got a family and everyone's and sometimes as I'm about to heroically at the end

of a meal get up and do all the wash washing up my wife will say to me could you clear these plates and do the washing up and I've gone from being an empowered person with agency about to heroically do my bit for the family to being someone doing the bidding of someone else and I it enrages me and we do it to each other so just allowing other people to grasp their problems um and deal with them or not is you know that's that's it's a really hard journey for a doctor because doctors are

all about telling you about yourself and I try and do it lesson it kind of reminds me a little bit of what I was saying earlier about um I don't like it when it feels like I'm being controlled yeah yeah and that's kind of what the food food environment we live in makes me feel like it makes me feel like I don't have a choice you don't and I want to have a choice you don't really have a choice I mean if you have enough money and you're really prepared to get up early in the

morning you have some choices but our our food food choices are severely curtailed and if you're on a Motorway if you're traveling around this country if you just if you try and go out on that High Street out there and just buy yourself a quick lunch there aren't a lot of choices the pain thing's interesting we need a little bit of pain in our diet we need foods that are bitter and real and chewy and crunchy and make us work for them and take time to prepare and one of the big switches is trying to

see food preparation not as a chore but as something that connects you to your ancestors I mean you know we've survived because we come from this long chain of people who just spent hours a day grinding and pulverizing and salting and mashing and figuring out how to make food to nourish this and it's a thing we should do with other people and it you know that trying to enjoy food prep is is is a big change for me second ago I asked you if you're optimistic and you you gave me I dodged it you gave

me the RE you did a little bit but you gave me the reasons for being optimistic what are the reasons you're pessimistic I think because when it came to Tobacco Control it took from from the certainty that tobacco caused not just lung cancer but but Strokes heart attacks and a whole range of other health outcomes including early death the same list of Health outcomes that Ultra processed food causes uh from that knowledge to proper regulation took 50 60 years and because around uh a signific a significant percentage of of women still smoke throughout pregnancy in

this country you know which is a good Benchmark of of not succeeding they're they're highly motivated to St anded and unable to and we see the rise of Vapes so it's an arms race you know I'm I'm a virologist by training my PhD is in studying how viruses compete with humans and in an arms race you never get ahead for very long it's like business business is a great example of an arms race you understand arms RAC is better than anyone you can't just build your company and be like well that's that's done home I

go let's watch the money flow you someone's always always trying to overtake you and so we're we're as a as a community of activists what we need to build is a is a sustainable form of activism that is you build regulation you build on that you keep generating evidence and there are some we have more and more ways of doing it with these sustainable non for-profit not for-profit food companies for example as a way of funding activism so are you optimistic I have to be I mean nothing worth achieving will be achieved in our lifetime

so this will not be just the work of my lifetime and I'm I'm inheriting this work uh many of us are inheriting this work from a generation of people who've been slaving at this since Nestle were indicted for uh aggressively marketing infant formula in very very low-income settings and really harming children in in low-income countries so you know that that was kind of the first engagement with big food where people were were angry and we could really point to a problem and those activists now they're my they're my they're 20 30 years older than me

and they're they're sort of handing knowledge to me and a whole bunch of other people across around the around the world people from the global South people from very diverse communities and so we're you know I'm going to hand this to my kids but you know there's a fight and you can be on one side of it I guess Chris we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who they're going to leave it for and the question that's been left for you is

what will we also has a little brackets and says you reget in 10 years about how we brought up our children today I can tell you because I already regret it and it's it's not spending the kind of quality time that I've just given you with them that you know to spend time with you today I prepared I thought about it I've read your book I've you know I've been listening to the podcast for ages and as a result we've had at least what feels to me like quite a meaningful engagement it's really nice I

leave kind of enriched and my kids get this these sort of snatches at time of time and you you talk about diarising lunch and I know this is this is a thing you you talk about in lots of places it's not just giving the crumbs to your family but it's like giving the investing in your family in the way you do in your work and I I don't do it because you know my wife's pregnant I've got two kids six and three and and it's just a scramble so that's what I will regret and and

it's great actually being given the opportunity to articulate that and go okay if I'm going to regret it who do I want to be and you know I love that question I'm going to go away and try and force time with them that that I'm present and often they don't want they're not interested but it's just being there listening to them and and uh investing in them regularly in the way that that I do with everything else in my life Chris thank you so much because you you um I feel like this book I think

it's been in the Sunday Times best seller chart for like 25 24 weeks was something mental um you you knocked me off number one oh listen you're I'm just visiting you live there so I'll be there for another 5 Seconds you I'm sure you'll be there for for many many uh many more weeks and you're starting a really important Revolution and conversation around what we eat a really important one and books come along once in a once in a while once every couple of years once in a generation that really meet culture at the exact

moment with the exact language with the exact appreciation of the reader the Nuance the um inclusivity um not taking provocative stances that are so far on the right or so far on the left that they alienate a certain group they kind of bring everyone in and they appreciate both sides of that nuance and that perspective and this is exactly what this book does perfectly timed written perfectly to appeal to both sides of the most tricky narratives um and that is why it's such a brilliant book and that's why everybody needs to read it because as

you said I think before we started recording it's starting a conversation that we really need to start and it's and it's these books that end up changing changing the world and changing legislation so congratulations first and foremost but thank you secondly for writing such an important book at such an important time I'm really blushing I mean this there there's very few people I'd hear that from the new it really means a huge amount so thank you we've got an exciting new sponsor on this podcast and I couldn't be more excited to announce that we're now

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