Readers who pick up "Ultra-Processed People" might experience a flicker of deja vu, especially if they've seen "Super Size Me,'' the wry 2004 documentary about McDonald's and gluttony.
Both highlight the horrible way we eat today, both link processed food to serious illnesses and both feature a narrator who subjects himself to a 30-day diet of deplorable food to see if it wrecks his body.
If "Super Size Me'' were an introduction, Chris van Tulleken's book is the Ph.D. course. It goes deep on the history of eating, the biology of nutrition and addiction and the laboratory science that produced foods like maltodextrin and xanthan gum. Despite the technical material, the book is highly readable and van Tulleken — physician, scientist and popular BBC personality — writes with the confidence of a doctor who has a reassuring bedside manner.
The book begins by explaining what he means by ultra-processed foods (UPFs). They are those side-of-food-packaging ingredients with incomprehensible names such as modified palm stearin or mono- and di-glycerides. He explains how food scientists discovered they could break down certain fats and starches and recombine their molecules to create inexpensive substances with desirable qualities such as creaminess or crunchiness. These ingredients explain many of the creepy aspects of processed food: milkshakes that never melt or margarine that requires no refrigeration. These, he says, aren't foods but "industrially produced edible substances.''
Van Tulleken argues that we have entered an unprecedented era of eating, one in which most of our calories come from foods that the planet — and our bodies — have never seen before.
Though a scientist at heart, van Tulleken isn't afraid to take sides on some of the most controversial topics surrounding nutrition. He rejects the idea that obesity is a failure of will power — he says it's the only disease for which we blame the patient — noting that to believe that you would also have to believe that the entire developed world experienced a sudden failure of moral character at the same time in the 1970s, when the obesity epidemic began. And he offers a stinging indictment of packaged-food companies, arguing that they knowingly created addictive, unhealthy foods in the pursuit of profit.
Van Tulleken systematically builds a case that UPFs aren't just practical additives or cost-saving substitutes, but proven causes of diseases such as diabetes, high blood pressure, cancer, depression and irritable bowel syndrome. In two fascinating passages, he explains how UPFs short-circuit the body's satiety response, causing us to keep eating even when we're full, and interfere with the invaluable microbes of the gut.
To balance the science, van Tulleken weaves in charming anecdotes about eating breakfast with his young daughters, one of whom gorges on five bowls of Cocoa Puffs, and recounts his own struggle to complete the 30-day diet. Without giving away the ending, let's just say he discovers that the diet has corrupted almost every organ of his body.
Read his book and you'll never read a food label quite the same way again.
Ultra-Processed People
By: Chris van Tulleken.
Publisher: Norton, 363 pages, $30 pages.
