5 Ways To Identify Ultra-Processed Foods with Chris van Tulleken

Poor diet is now the leading cause of early death on planet Earth for human beings. The science is now really clear that the more ultra-processed food you eat, the higher your risk of early death, cancer, heart attacks, strokes, inflammatory diseases like Crohn's disease, metabolic disease like type 2 diabetes, mental health problems like anxiety and depression, and finally, and perhaps most worryingly of all, dementia. Hi, I'm Chris Vantoliken and these are five ways to identify ultra-processed foods. Step one, read the ingredients. You know, until I started writing this book and started studying ultra-processed food as a scientist, I'd never read an ingredients list and almost none of my colleagues who are scientists and doctors had either. The really important thing about reading the ingredients lists is that's how you can tell if a food is ultra-processed. So there's a very long formal scientific definition of ultra-processed food. It goes over several pages because it has to encompass this huge range of products and all the different industrial technologies that we use to make everything from a diet drink to a margarine or a cake. So the kind of additives you're going to be looking for is this very wide range of molecules, things like emulsifiers, humectants, stabilizers, gums like xanthan gum or guagum or locust bean gum. But there's also things that sound a bit harmless like fruit concentrates or natural flavorings or natural low calorie sweeteners. All of those are still signs of ultra-processing. And the thing you're worrying about is partly those additives themselves. We know that some of them are harmful, but those are also signs of lots and lots of other processing and design technologies that have gone into the foods that drive excess consumption and health problems. So step one is read the ingredients lists. Step two, keep on eating ultra-processed food. Now this sounds a bit counterintuitive, I know, but it's actually really important. So as you're reading my book or as you're consuming any information about ultra-processed food, including reading those ingredients lists, just keep eating it for a while. You're going to start to realize that so much of what you eat that you thought was healthy is in fact ultra-processed. You'll notice flavorings in your breakfast cereal. You'll notice that your supermarket bread contains things called tartaric acid esters of mono and diglycerides of fatty acids. This is also known as datum. It's an emulsifier. It makes bread smooth and spongy. You're going to notice flavorings and emulsifiers in all your condiments and you're going to start to worry about it, but don't stop eating yet. So this technique of consuming something harmful while you learn about it is really powerful. It works very well for smoking. So there's lots of evidence that if people keep smoking whilst they learn about how bad smoking is, they find it much, much easier to quit. They gradually become disgusted with the cigarettes and the same is going to happen to you and your consumption of ultra-processed food. You'll start wanting it and enjoying it much, much less as you learn about it. You're going to see these themes emerge as you eat it, as you read the ingredients list, because lots of ultra-processed food is made in exactly the same way. The point of ultra-processed food, remember, is not about nourishing you. It's invented for profit and a lot of the time it's taking the cheapest possible materials, almost waste products from the rest of the food industry and repurposing them and trying to get them into the human food chain where they become really valuable. They can be turned into addictive ultra-processed foods and that makes far more money from them. So you'll see on the ingredients list, you start with a staple crop. It's often grown for animal feed, things like corn and soya and that crop is disassembled into its molecular parts. There'll be some starchy powders, some flour, some protein isolates and then you read about fats and oils and most crops can be broken down into those three things. Those three things then can be reassembled to generate almost any texture and mouthfeel that you want. You then add colourings, flavourings, emulsifiers to glue the whole thing together with some stabilisers and you create the illusion of food. It might be a reformed meat product, it might be a vegan sausage, it might be a cake, it might be a pizza, but they're all broadly made in the same way and they all have the same basic taste. So you're going to start to notice that whether you're eating this pudding or a pizza, that actually there are themes emerging that you can start to detect in your mouth. You're going to notice the strange gumminess of xanthan gum that isn't quite like dairy fat should be. You're going to notice that modified starches in your yoghurt taste a bit weird. You're going to start to sense the difference between artificial sweetness and you're going to notice the strange umami taste of flavour enhancers that are out of context. So as you eat you're going to read the labels, keep eating and you're going to notice the first thing you're going to notice is that it all tastes more or less the same. Step three, don't worry too much about fat, salt and sugar. If you're eating real food your body will actually take care of your intake of those molecules pretty well. Now obviously if you are an amazing cook and you make nothing but cakes and you fry your own chicken and you eat incredibly fatty sugary food at home, it is possible to gain weight. But the modern obesity pandemic, the reason that I live with overweight and many of you listening will as well, is because of ultra processed food almost exclusively. And this food interrupts our body's ability to regulate our nutritional intake. So let's think about fat for a start. We started worrying in the 1980s that it was fat that was making us all fat. And so food companies started to replace the fat in lots of their pre-packaged ultra processed products with things like gums and starches. They feel fatty in the mouth, they don't deliver so many calories into the body. What happened was we all kept gaining weight, in fact we started gaining weight faster. In around 2000 we started worrying about sugars and so we started to replace lots of the sugars in our food with artificial sweeteners and this happened now on a very very wide scale in the UK. What's happened? Absolutely nothing, our weight hasn't fallen. And in fact there's very little evidence that replacing the sugar in our food with artificial sweeteners really drives a lot of weight loss. And this is really weird. It should be telling us that we don't understand something about how the body works, that when we replace sugar, which is around 400 calories per 100 grams, with something with zero calories it doesn't support weight loss. This is a big clue that we failed to understand something about the way our body takes in food. When we experience a taste in our mouth it signals to our gut that particular nutrition is on its way. So umami tastes from molecules like glutamate signal that fermented easily digestible protein and amino acids are on their way into our body. When we have sweet taste it signals sugar's on the way. When we have fatty taste it signals fatty fat is on the way. When we replace the sugar the protein and the fat with synthetic molecules we create this mismatch where what we experience in the mouth doesn't signal nutrition that arrives. And that may be part of the reason that we can't stop eating because of this internal confusion where our body is expecting nutrition to arrive but it never comes. When you eat homemade food that's cooked by yourself that food interacts very differently with the body. It will make you feel full and it won't be full of those confusing taste sensations that give a false signal to the body. If you put parmesan cheese in your homemade lasagna there's lots and lots of glutamate in that parmesan cheese but it's not telling your body a lie. So when the glutamate is tasted as umami in the mouth protein arrives in the gut. There's no mismatch. When you put glutamate on a potato crisp there is a mismatch and that's what drives excess consumption. When we think of junk food we have this sort of list of ice cream, pizza, fried chicken, cake that those things are junk but actually pizza is a traditional food. If you eat a sourdough pizza covered in mozzarella cheese and tomato sauce with a bit of basil even a bit of meat on it it's a perfectly healthy meal. There's nothing bad for you in it. It's the frozen ultra-processed fake pizza that will drive weight gain. Step four start to learn how the additives affect your health. Lots of the physical and chemical processing techniques end up creating these foods that are very hard to stop eating that do us harm but there's also the question of all these additives. Now in Europe and the UK most of the additives that we eat all the additives we eat are pretty tightly regulated so they're all non-toxic they don't do us any harm at the moment we eat them but what we have not studied in any detail is the effects of these additives on the bugs that live inside us that keep us alive and the long-term effects on our metabolic health on our risk of obesity and our risk of type 2 diabetes and we simply don't measure these things because they're really really hard to study. We also don't study what happens when we combine lots of additives together. The science is still emerging then but it's pretty clear that the emulsifiers that are nearly ubiquitous in so many different products from your soft drinks to the cakes to the pizzas to the bread that those emulsifiers act a bit like detergents so emulsifiers are chemicals that bind fat to water so your washing up liquid is an emulsifier and it helps you scrub the fat the butter the grease off your plates. Emulsifiers in food do a similar thing and we think that they scrub out your gut cleaning out those friendly bacteria that live there cleaning out the vital mucus that protects the delicate lining of the gut they promote and allow the growth of bacteria that drive inflammation and they start making your gut leak so when your gut leaks bacteria the blood from your gut flows from from your gut carrying all the food that you've eaten the nutrients to your liver to be processed and if that blood contains bacteria as well those bacteria then cause liver inflammation we're pretty sure that ultra-processed food is linked to liver cancer and fatty liver disease and that may be because of the leaky gut that those emulsifiers are causing. The peculiar thing about emulsifiers is there are lots of natural emulsifiers if you make a salad dressing use mustard as an emulsifier and it binds the oil to the vinegar you could also add egg yolk it does the same thing lots of the lecithins are naturally occurring there is something about the emulsifiers when they're extracted from natural sources whether it's soy or egg or whether they're synthetically made something about the amount we're eating and the exact chemical composition changes the way they interact with our body and the studies that show they affect our health are published in really good journals by very expert scientific teams there is a whole theory of ultra-processed food that almost all of the harms are driven by emulsifiers so the emulsifiers do all these different things but they're about creating an illusion of stability they create smoothness in the mouth and they bind ingredients together. Step five what can you do about it? When it comes to what you personally can do I think there are two types of people there are people who are basically healthy and just want to cut down their intake there's lots of things you can do if you just want to reduce the amount you eat so you can change breakfast is a great place to start most of us are in control of our breakfast you can just buy all the whole food equivalents of all the ultra-processed stuff you probably have at the moment so you can replace your chocolate spreads with honey your ultra-processed bread with real bread you can even bake your own bread replace your breakfast cereal with homemade muesli or with porridge. Lunch is trickier because almost all the food that's around us is ultra-processed where I work all the restaurants the canteen it's all ultra-processed so for my lunch either I go out and I can usually find some nuts and a banana or an apple to eat for lunch or I try and prepare my own lunch I'm pretty badly organized I don't always manage it and sometimes I go hungry because I've decided that abstinence from ultra-processed food is the easiest thing for me there's an important kind of caveat here which is that for many many people in the UK and around the world ultra-processed food is the only available affordable food and so we have to think about it really clearly when we're thinking about policies and how we talk to other people we don't want to stigmatize anyone for eating this food it's it's marketed to us very often as healthy it's all that's available as we move through the world and we don't want to increase anyone's stress around the fact that lots of people have to eat it eating real food is incredibly expensive not just in terms of buying it but you need equipment to cook it you need to pay for an energy bill to run that equipment you need freezer space to store it you need skills you need knives you need chopping boards so it's really really much more expensive to eat whole food if it's a choice you can make then that's what I suggest you do you shift your diet as much as possible to home cooking if people only take one thing away from my book it's to understand that particularly obesity all the diseases we associate with diet they are caused by predatory transnational food corporations turning our ill health into money obesity is not caused by lack of willpower by failure of personal responsibility by misunderstandings it's caused very deliberately by companies who engineer food for us to overeat so we should stop shaming people who live with obesity who live with overweight and we should look to our government and our doctors and our scientists to stop colluding with the industry that is driving ill health there is a really close parallel between the food industry and the tobacco industry both of them make harmful addictive products the addictive products made by the food industry are now the leading cause of on planet earth and the food industry needs regulation the final point is the food industry are going to say they want to change they want to make healthy foods that they're already making healthy foods they've reformulated foods they're going to take sugar and calories and salt and fat out all the food will still be ultra processed the only way they can stop making ultra processed food is if they're forced to by governments if you can afford to cut down or be abstinent from ultra processed food i really hope this advice has helped you if you can't frankly your only choice is to vote for change thanks very much for watching you can buy my book ultra processed people in hardback ebook or audiobook form by clicking the link in the description below and don't forget to subscribe to penguin for more videos just like this