Is What You’re Eating Actually Food?

By Kevin Kolodziejski 

A speed trap is questionable traffic enforcement. Too often, it’s designed not to ensure safety for motorists but income for backwater towns.

An ultra-processed food is a questionable food product. More often than not, it’s designed not to ensure health for consumers but revenue for food producers who are anything but backwater. 

The National Motorists Association, an advocacy group for U.S. drivers, posts on their website that speed traps are a win-win situation for everybody except the “poor saps” who get caught in them and suffer fines, points, and insurance surcharges. Chris Van Tulleken, an advocate for eaters everywhere, writes in his book, Ultra-Processed People (W.W. Norton, 2023), that ultra-processed foods are the ultimate lose-lose situation for you.

Is What You’re Eating an ‘Addictive Substance’?

And you lose-lose because UPFs are “specifically engineered as addictive substances” designed to lead to excessive consumption and unwanted weight gain. Yet “irrespective of weight gain,” consuming them increases your risk of inflammatory bowel disease, dementia, heart disease, and stroke — as well as early death.

Van Tulleken, best known in the U.K. as that doctor who doles out health and medical advice on the telly for the BBC, writes many other things in his first book that’s become a bestseller in the U.S. about the world’s now-heavy reliance on UPFs. How heavy? Typical Americans, for example, now receive more than half their daily calories from them.

An intriguing other thing he writes about is the term itself. Van Tulleken claims it’s a misnomer. In fact, he states exactly that in the book’s subtitle: “The Science Behind Food That Isn’t Food.” You learn in part why he feels that way when he recounts a conversation he had with Fernanda Rauber, a researcher who worked on the famous 2010 NOVA study that coined the now-ubiquitous abbreviation.

During the conversation, she explains UPF is often bleached, deodorized, hydrogenated, and interesterified (an alteration of fatty acids to change the melting point and texture of fat) and contains starches that have been modified and proteins and seed oils that have been hydrolyzed. So Van Tulleken asks what all this processing does to the food. And Rauber corrects him.

“Most UPF is not food,” she stresses. “It’s an industrially produced edible substance.”

Is It Ice Cream If It Doesn’t Melt?

To illustrate Rauber’s claim that becomes the crux of Van Tulleken’s book, he shares a story about treating his family to ice cream in a park on an unusually warm autumn day. Soon his three-year old wants to play on the swings, so she hands daddy her barely eaten bowl of pistachio. Even though the bowl is warm to the touch, the ice cream has not yet melted.

So Van Tulleken later asks Paul Hart, a food production expert trained as a biochemist, about this.  Hart explains that to make shipping and storage of ice cream easier, food producers add a combination of stabilizers, emulsifiers and gums. Things like monoglycerides, diglycerides, locust bean gum, guar gum, carrageenan, and xanthan gum. That last thing truly is a thing — “a slime that bacteria produce to allow them to cling to surfaces” — something that Van Tulleken likens to the “accumulated gunk” found on the filter of your dishwasher.

Yum!

The Way to Become as Fat as a Whale

Now I use “Yum!”to be facetious, but Van Tulleken could use it to be truthful about most of a month-long experiment he conducted on himself, an experiment that became a BBC documentary. In order to mimic what’s “typical for [British] children and adolescents” as well as about 20 percent of British adults, he ate a diet consisting of 80 percent UPFs. A number of notable negative health consequences occurred, such as his body fat more than doubled, putting him “on par with those famously fatty sea mammals.”

Whales.

Now whether or not this additional blubber led to actual blubbering, Van Tulleken does not say. What he does note, however, is that as the experiment progressed, he found consuming UPFs to be “less enjoyable, but not less desirable.” That he felt addicted to UPFs.

But the medical world told him he was mistaken.

You Can’t Be Addicted to UPFs . . . Unless

First, a comparison of the MRI scans of his brain taken before and after the experiment found changes, but they were “physiological [and] not morphological.” They also showed the “actual wiring [in Van Tulleken’s] brain had not changed.” Second, according to the medical definition of addiction, it’s impossible to be addicted to food because part of it holds that abstinence from the addictive substance ends the addiction to it. Ergo, since you cannot stop eating food, no form or type of it can truly be addictive.

That’s one of the reasons why Van Tulleken argues UPFs are really not food, yet he does far more than argue that point in his book. If you read it, you’ll gain a better understanding of what UPFs do to your body, why food producers are so keen on producing them, and how “governments, scientists, and doctors have allowed transnational food companies to create a pandemic of diet-related diseases.”

---

Kevin Kolodziejski began his writing career in earnest in 1989. Since then he’s written a weekly health and fitness column and his articles have appeared in magazines such as “MuscleMag,” “Ironman,” “Vegetarian Times,” and “Bicycle Guide.” He has Bachelor and Masters degrees in English from DeSales and Kutztown Universities.

A competitive cyclist for more than 30 years, Kevin won two Pennsylvania State Time Trial championships in his 30’s, the aptly named Pain Mountain Time Trial 4 out of 5 times in his 40s, two more state TT’s in his 50’s, and the season-long Pennsylvania 40+ BAR championship at 43.