Ultra-Processed People

April 17, 2023
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.