ARE YOU AN ULTRA-PROCESSED PERSON?

By SHAGORIKA EASWAR

Michael Pollan famously said, “Don’t eat anything your great-great grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.”

But grandma didn’t know desiccated coconut, she didn’t have the sheer convenience of frozen or canned foods or even our ubiquitous masala blends and pastes, you might well argue. But you get the point.

Specially when you open a bottle of a cooking sauce you discover at the very back of a shelf in your pantry. Well past its expiry date, several years past, in fact, but it smells and looks just fine when you open it. How is that even possible, you wonder. What are they using that makes it virtually indestructible?

Our busy routines make it almost okay to order in take-out several times a week or pick up a meal at a fast-food place. We find ways of justifying it to ourselves by saying it saves us time, time we can spend with our children, for instance, instead of doing the dishes.

But if we stopped to think about just what that so-called food actually consisted of and its effects on our physical, mental and emotional health, we might re-evaluate our choices.

The scary thing is that even those who read labels and give processed food a wide berth are often intimidated by the scientific jargon and unintelligible formulae that actively dangerous ingredients hide behind. 

Award-winning broadcaster, doctor and leading academic Dr. Chris van Tulleken breaks it down into bite-sized pieces. It’s not you, it’s the food, he writes, in Ultra-Processed People: Why We Can’t Stop Eating Food That Isn’t Food.

Ultra-Processed Food (UPF), to be precise.

Which 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, he writes.

There are other definitions. The short one, first: UPF is likely to contain more than five ingredients.

And the longest, he says, he’s ever read of a scientific category: “Formulations of ingredients, mostly of exclusive industrial use, made by a series of industrial processes, many requiring sophisticated equipment and technology”.

If you’re surprised to find the word ‘industrial’ used twice in the above description, hold the thought. Tulleken, who spoke to leading experts on food and processing from academia, medicine, agriculture and, most importantly, the food industry itself, circles back to it. And how.

As for the five ingredients part, I now get the significance of messaging I’ve noticed on some packaging but not really paid much attention to.

I read a label again. The Simple Check symbol appears on No Name products made without 10 ingredients such as synthetic colours, artificial flavours and artificial sweeteners. Which sounds healthy, right? But then there’s this on a packet of bread:

Enriched wheat flour, water, sugar, yeast, vegetable oil, salt, defatted soy flour, calcium propionate, sodium stearoyl lactate, vegetable monoglycerides, sorbic acid, enzymes, ascorbic acid, l-cysteine hydrochloride*. *Ingredients may vary.  May contain sesame.

That’s 14 ingredients (not counting the ingredients that may vary, but be additional, and also the sesame that may or may not be there). So which of these are not an “ingredient” for the loaf to qualify for the Simple check?

I know junk food and I steer clear of it, you might think. But did you realise that there’s “plenty of organic, free-range ‘ethical’ UPF which might be sold as healthy, nutritious, environmentally-friendly or useful for weight loss”? Many of them contain guar gum, locust bean gum, alginate, carrageenan and xanthum gum, all used to replace expensive molecules and give foods a longer shelf life.

Over the past 150 years, we have entered a new ‘age of eating’ where most of our calories come from an entirely novel set of substances, writes van Tulleken.

Our calories increasingly come from modified starches, from invert sugars, hydrolysed protein isolates and seed oils that have been refined, bleached, deodorised, hydrogenated – and interesterified. And these calories have been assembled into concoctions using other molecules that our senses have never been exposed to either: synthetic emulsifies, low-calorie sweeteners, stabilising gums, humectants, flavour compounds, dyes, colour stabilisers, carbonating agents, firming agents and bulking – and anti-bulking – agents.

These products have been engineered to drive excess consumption, with UPF now making up 60 per cent of the average diet in the UK, Canada and the US and each of us ingesting 8 kg of food additives per year. That’s not a typo. Eight whole kilograms of food additives per year.

They are now the leading cause of early death globally and the number one cause of environmental destruction. He cites studies that show the links between UPF and increased rates of cancer, metabolic disease and mental illness. That UPF “damages human societies by displacing food cultures and driving inequality, poverty and early death, and that it damages the planet”. It also absorbs traditional diets and recreates them with new ingredients.

“Externalised costs of UPF” he writes, include “environmental destruction (including climate change and land use), antibiotic resistance and plastic pollution.”

Think of all the TV dinners in the freezer sections of groceries – everything from samosas and butter chicken to pizzas, fries or Thai veg curry.

The list of health issues linked to increased UPF consumption is long and frightening.

It includes cardiovascular disease, cancers, high blood pressure, fatty liver disease, depression, irritable bowel syndrome and dementia.

Drawing on his own experiment of eating an 80 per cent UPF diet for one month – he explains why – Tulleken explores the invention of UPF and its impact on our health and weight including altering metabolism and appetite.

Tracing the history of nutrition science, he explains that it began with studying the diseases of deficiency. We’ve all read of scurvy in sailors and of rickets caused by vitamin deficiency.

Our understanding of how the body responds to excess lags far behind.

Writing that human beings have an internal system that allows us to self-regulate and balance our diets, Tulleken describes a fascinating nutritional study in which infants were allowed to pick their food from an array of options. With zero adult interference or guidance.

All the infants succeeded in managing their own diets, and all met their nutritional requirements as if they’d been reading all the latest textbooks.

I recall my father saying our dog needed extra calcium when he began scratching the walls and licking the flakes. He was trying to fix the deficiency by consuming the chuna (quicklime) from the paint. Chuna produces calcium hydroxide when it reacts with water.

So all creatures would appear to come with this inherent knowledge. Why, then, do we consume UPF in such large quantities?

Because it’s cheap, it’s quick to prepare, children generally eat it readily and it lasts for a long time. And because it’s addictive. UPF is designed to be overconsumed.

But why can’t we just control what we eat? Tulleken answers this in the chapter titled How UPF hacks our brains.

He talks to experts who explain that “most UPF is reconstructed from whole food that has been reduced to its basic molecular constituents which are then modified and reassembled into food-like shapes and textures and then heavily salted, sweetened, coloured and flavoured... “Growing specific foods for specific communities is a hassle. It’s much more profitable to grow a small number of things with maximum efficiency, then colour, flavour and market them as diverse foods. As we’ve seen, everything from chicken nuggets to ice cream can be made from the same base liquids and powders.”

Another reason ingredients such as palm kernel oil and reconstituted milk save money is that they mimic expensive – and real – ingredients like milk, cream and eggs.

Without additives, these industrial ingredients would not be recognizable as food by our brains and tongues. It would be almost like eating dirt.

UPF, whether you consume it in the form of cereal or a burger from a popular food chain, is in essence so soft and so easily digested that it doesn’t trigger that fullness signal that in turn tells us to stop eating. Leaving you unsatiated and reaching for more UPF.

Tulleken takes on the weight-loss industry, and the claims that our genes and our levels of activity – not calorie intake – decide our body size, citing studies that show people burn the same amount of energy each day whether they walk ten miles or sit at a desk.

But how could that possibly be?

According to a hypothesis, those not burning energy in physical activity burn it elsewhere – on things like being stressed. Tulleken shares personal stories, that of his children and his twin brother.

Like all diet-related disease, he clarifies, “obesity has deeper causes than UPF, including genetic vulnerability, poverty, injustice, inequality, trauma, fatigue and stress”.

He and his twin share a genetic code and yet, his twin, born seven minutes earlier, is also 20 kg heavier. Stress and having lived in a food swamp where it is difficult to access healthy food being two factors that might have caused the weight difference – the biggest in any pair of twins studied in the UK.

We’ve had years and years of being told how bad fats are for us and of, therefore, decoding good cholesterol and bad cholesterol. Of denying ourselves. Because our bodies crave fats. Think roasted papad versus fried ones, or better still, take popcorn. The non-fat version tastes like cardboard compared to the buttery one.

But before you decide to go for a run to compensate for an indulgence, read what Tulleken has to say. Diets and exercise are great, but there’s more at play here, he explains. Exercise and willpower cannot prevent obesity and ill health due to UPF.

He cites studies in which diets based on carbohydrates, rich in fruits and vegetables and sparing of oils, salt and sugar – a shift towards better diet, not worse, in other words, as conventional wisdom would have us believe – still resulted in an explosion of obesity.

And shows that UPF isn’t harmful only because of its higher salt, fat and sugar content. It’s the ultra-processing, not the nutritional content – or lack thereof – that’s the problem.

But because our national health and dietary guidelines do not factor in processing, “it’s perfectly possible for someone to eat a high-UPF diet that is actually relatively low in fat, salt and sugar”.

Artificial flavouring may also be behind obesity and overconsumption.

“Flavourings signal that something is UPF, and the need for flavouring tells us a lot about some of the ways UPF does us harm,” writes Tulleken.

Like Vani Hari did in Feeding You Lies, Tulleken reveals how Big Food influences research outcomes. And like her, he doesn’t shy away from naming names.

Or from describing how addictive UPF is. I think of the young woman, a cancer survivor, who downs several cans of energy drinks a day. When I tell her about WHO listing the artificial sweetener aspertame as a possible carcinogen, she does her best to avoid rolling her eyes at me.

“I know,” she says. “But my whole family is diabetic. We have to choose our evil.”

Maybe so. And yes, other reports point out that one would have to guzzle it by the bucket for it to be dangerous, but it does give one pause for thought.

And now her 10-year-old is eager to start energy drinks.

“This is so satisfying!” she gushes, opening a can of diet pop. “Just like mom’s drink.”

I think of a line from the book: Whether an additive causes issues that are detectable only after years of exposure – depression, increased suicidality in teens, weight gain in young adulthood, reduced fertility, inflammatory disease or metabolic disease like type 2 diabetes is difficult to discern.  

Tulleken lists solutions for individuals, policy makers and the food industry. He marshals the latest evidence and distils what we can do to stay healthy.

It’s not as simple as switching from white bread to whole wheat or even more virtuously, to making – gasp! – rotis from scratch. Because, as he points out, almost all our staple foods are ultra-processed. Bread, cereal, biscuits, desserts, dairy products and condiments. And that includes flour.

But this is an important book about the science, economics, and history of ultra-processed food and the industry’s effect on our health and that of our children.

One that will help us make informed choices.