30 August 2023 , 13:17
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Doctor Chris van Tulleken is looking at a Hula Hoop. “This is not food really. I would say there is no food in here,” he says.
What is in a Hula Hoop is dried potato and potato starch. The potato has been crushed and turned into two separate powders that have a long shelf life. It is then turned into a paste and reformed. Then sunflower oil is added along with sweet whey powder, soy protein and flavourings.
This is an ultra-processed food. And we eat a lot of it. Some 60 per cent of our calorie intake is now made up of ultra-processed foods. The bread you buy from a supermarket, the ready meals you eat, the chocolate snack you have as a treat - these are all ultra-processed foods.
They are cheap, convenient and, unfortunately, according to Dr Chris they are killing us. He explains: “Ultra-processed is a formal scientific category of food that we now know is associated with a huge number of medical problems which include weight gain and obesity but also inflammatory problems like Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, metabolic diseases like type 2 diabetes, heart attacks, strokes, cancers, especially breast and bowel cancer, anxiety, depression, dementia and early death from all causes.
“Ultra-processed food is the formal definition of junk food - food we should avoid or reduce our intake of. If you are in a shop and you want to work it out: if it’s wrapped in plastic and it has at least one ingredient you don’t typically find in a domestic kitchen like Xanthan gum or an emulsifier or a stabiliser or flavouring then it’s likely to be an ultra-processed food."
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Dr Chris says processed foods can cause some serious health problems (Adam Gerrard / Daily Mirror)
He said there is "no food" in things like Hula Hoops (Adam Gerrard / Daily Mirror)And the potential health dangers can’t be overstated, earlier this week it was revealed that new research suggests more than half of the typical British diet is contributing to heart attacks and strokes. Scientists have conducted a review of the impact of artificial additives in everything from bread to soups, yoghurts and cereals which are considered ultra-processed foods and found those who ate more were 24 per cent more likely to have a heart attack or stroke.
It is just one of the reasons the Mirror is this week investigating how we fix our food, looking at how our food has changed beyond all recognition in just a couple of decades to make the UK the sick man of Europe. Dr Chris is very clear he does not want to lecture people on what they can and cannot eat. One of the attractions of ultra-processed food is that is far cheaper than healthy food.
But he also wants you to know why it is so bad for you. Firstly, eating ultra-processed food makes you put on weight as it is deliberately designed to be dry and soft. “The dryness means it’s high in energy and the softness means you consume it quickly. So you consume more calories per minute than you do of real food,” Dr Chris explains.
“Real food - meat, broccoli, apples, proper bread - has a texture. You chew and it takes time to get it down into your stomach so your fullness hormones can keep up and you get a signal to stop eating. With ultra-processed food you eat calories at a rate that overtakes the body’s ability to say ‘I’m full, stop'."
“The softness is a result of the very aggressive mechanical processing so whether we are taking about pizzas or burgers it’s all soft. And it’s deliberate because we like soft food as it’s easier to eat.”
It’s also addictive. Studies have found ultra-processed food is more addictive than nicotine and heroin. Ultra-processed food is also designed to make you eat more. The ratios of fats, salts, sugar and flavouring enhancers are meticulously combined to make the product more palatable.
“We are pretty sure now artificial sweeteners are not associated with weight loss and may promote diabetes. One of the things we think may be the case is because they taste sweet they prepare the body to receive sugar and when the sugar never arrives your body goes looking for more sugar.
Dr Chris says your body doesn't know it's full if you keep eating processed foods (Adam Gerrard / Daily Mirror)
Ultra-processed foods tend to be more addictive (Adam Gerrard / Daily Mirror)“The same is true of the molecules in crisps. The glutamate signals there’s easy to digest protein on its way and when that protein doesn’t arrive again you are left going for another crisp. Xanthan gum tells your mouth there’s fat on its way, the fat never arrives. So these lies, we think, drive excess consumption,” says Dr Chris.
Ultra-processed food is not only addictive and fattening, it is also low in nutrients. Some contain glycerol, a chemical usually used in explosives. Almost all have emulsifiers which help bond the ingredients together. The problem with emulsifiers, as Dr Chris explains, is they “act like detergents that scrub out the gut.”
“There’s lot of very good data... that the emulsifiers at the dosage we eat them seem to be really damaging to the friendly bacteria inside us,” he says. There is also some evidence suggesting ultra-processed food is linked to the fall in fertility.
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“There are migrant plastics from the packaging and from when you cook things in the microwave. We think there are a lot of plastics that leach into the food. We don’t fully understand how they react with our body but we think they affect the endocrine (hormone systems) and reproductive systems a lot.
“So in the context of falling fertility we don’t know it’s causal but there’s an increasing suspicion that the ultra-processed food is driving a decrease in fertility,” he says. Dr Chris is not alone in comparing the food industry to the tobacco industry in the 1970s.
“I think it’s a reasonable comparison to say the food industry and the tobacco industry and the oil industry all have the same purpose: they have to deliver money to their owners. And the food industry cannot care about human health. It’s not invented to nourish us, it’s invented for profit. Food as we traditionally it ate it was invented by mainly women in huts and caves over more than a million years and it was done to nourish their friends, their family and their community.
“Ultra-processed food is made by trans-national food corporations who are owned by asset managers and pension funds and food is a way of taking money from poor people and giving money to rich people. Ultra-processed food is the leading cause of plastic pollution, environmental destruction and the second leading cause of carbon emissions. It’s a huge problem and way pay for negative health outcomes and environmental problems and companies don’t pay for any of that. They pay very little tax and we take all the risk,” he says.
Chris van Tulleken is the author of Ultra-Processed People: Why we can’t stop eating food that isn’t food (Adam Gerrard / Daily Mirror)So how do we change our national diet? How do we wean ourselves off ultra-processed food. Dr Chris says he’s not a big fan of taxing ultra-processed food as it would hit those on low incomes the hardest.
“The first step is grassroots change. People need to feel angry about the food they’ve been fed. They have been gaslit by the food companies for a long time. Education is really important but on its own it doesn’t change much.
“We have some evidence that labelling calories doesn’t work because people don’t eat to numbers (but) we have evidence from Chile that if you label ultra-processed food with a big black hexagon people stop wanting to eat it. Once they did it the children said to the parents, you shouldn’t be eating that.
“Putting warning labels on things does work, it worked with cigarettes,” he says. He adds: “I want everyone to have complete freedom of choice. I don’t want to ban this food. I don’t want to change the ingredients. People need more freedom and more choice, the freedom they need is to buy more real food and freedom from marketing.”
KP Snacks, the makers of Hula Hoops, did not reply to a request to comment.
Chris van Tulleken is the author of Ultra-Processed People: Why we can’t stop eating food that isn’t food.