Ultra-Processed People
Why We Can't Stop Eating Food That Isn't Food
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
New York Times Bestseller
Longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize
Shortlisted for the Waterstones Book of the Year
“A fearless investigation into how we have become hooked.” —Financial Times
A manifesto to change how you eat and how you think about the human body.
It’s not you, it’s the food.
We have entered a new age of eating. For the first time in human history, most of our calories come from an entirely novel set of substances called Ultra-Processed Food. There’s a long, formal scientific definition, but it can be boiled down to this: if it’s wrapped in plastic and has at least one ingredient that you wouldn’t find in your kitchen, it’s UPF.
These products are specifically engineered to behave as addictive substances, driving excess consumption. They are now linked to the leading cause of early death globally and the number one cause of environmental destruction. Yet almost all our staple foods are ultra-processed. UPF is our food culture and for many people it is the only available and affordable food.
In this book, Chris van Tulleken, father, scientist, doctor, and award-winning BBC broadcaster, marshals the latest evidence to show how governments, scientists, and doctors have allowed transnational food companies to create a pandemic of diet-related disease. The solutions don’t lie in willpower, personal responsibility, or exercise. You’ll find no diet plan in this book—but join Chris as he undertakes a powerful self-experiment that made headlines around the world: under the supervision of colleagues at University College London he spent a month eating a diet of 80 percent UPF, typical for many children and adults in the United States. While his body became the subject of scientific scrutiny, he spoke to the world’s leading experts from academia, agriculture, and—most important—the food industry itself. But more than teaching him about the experience of the food, the diet switched off Chris’s own addiction to UPF.
In a fast-paced and eye-opening narrative he explores the origins, science, and economics of UPF to reveal its catastrophic impact on our bodies and the planet. And he proposes real solutions for doctors, for policy makers, and for all of us who have to eat. A book that won’t only upend the way you shop and eat, Ultra-Processed People will open your eyes to the need for action on a global scale.
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In this scathing takedown, van Tulleken (Secrets of the Human Body), a doctor of infectious diseases, studies how ultra-processed foods harm the body and how the corporations that make them put profits above consumer health. He suggests that "UPFs"—which can be identified by their use of such heavily modified ingredients as "stabilisers, emulsifiers, gums, lecithin, glucose"—contribute to heart attacks, high blood pressure, and weight gain because they short circuit the body's system for regulating consumption. Because UPFs tend to be soft and "essentially pre-chewed," they're digested so quickly they don't "reach the parts of the gut that send the ‘stop eating' signal to the brain." Van Tulleken catalogues the misdeeds of the corporations that make UPFs, telling how Nestlé's aggressive door-to-door marketing of their products in rural Brazil played a part in the skyrocketing rates of obesity and type 2 diabetes there, and detailing Coca-Cola's covert financing of dubious scientific studies that refute the link between soda and obesity. The science puts into easily understandable language the toll that junk food takes on the body, and van Tulleken's interviews with industry insiders illuminate ("It's all about price and costs. Those ingredients save money," says a biochemist who worked for the British food company Unilever). This impassioned polemic will make readers think twice about what they eat.
