Oh boy, this book wasn’t so much anything new, as it was a compelling reminder to eat whole foods, or at the very least, purchase food who’s full list of ingredients you’d have at home. There is a slow, but steady, understanding of these so-called Ultra-Processed Foods (UPFs), and their negative health implications.
I had an inkling about it beforehand, but I had thought the problem stemmed from a low fiber, high in fats, sugar, and salt diet that often goes hand-in-hand with UPFs. However, that isn’t it. When controlling for these variables, recent studies have still found negative health outcomes of ~25% increase risks for a whole host of diseases and cancers - including alzheimers! Clearly, there is something unnatural about these ingredients that interact negatively with our bodies.
The catch is, these UPFs are cheap, and pervasive. They’ve done well to deflect blame to poor eating habits, and align themselves with present day nutritional guidelines published by various governments. So although the packaging of these prepared snacks or meals might look healthy on the outside (think of cereal labels claiming high fiber, low salt / fat, high vitamins, etc.), they’re actually made with the help of UPFs. So eating a diet free of UPFs is quite challenging, and expensive.
Everything in moderation is probably true, but best to try and avoid these foods. Here are a collection of my favourite quotes and moments from this book:
“You might recognize the names of some of these: guar gum, locust bean gum, alginate, carrageenan, and the near ubiquitous xanthan gum. The last of these is, revoltingly, a bacterial exudate: slime that bacteria produce to allow them to cling to surfaces. Think of xanthan gum when you next scrape the accumulated gunk from the filter on your dishwasher.”
“The classification system is now called the NOVA system, and it divides food into four groups. The first is ‘unprocessed or minimally processed foods’ - foods found in nature like meat, fruit and vegetables, but also things like flour and pasta. Group 2 is ‘processed culinary ingredients’ including oils, lard, butter, sugar, salt, vinegar, honey, starches - traditional foods that might well be prepared using industrial technologies. They’re not things we can survive on, because they tend to be nutrient-poor and energy-dense. But mix them with stuff from the first group and you’ve got the basis of some delicious food. Group 3 is ‘processed food’, ready-made mixtures of groups 1 and 2, processed mainly for preservation: tins of beans, salted nuts, smoked meat, canned fish, chunks of fruit in syrup and proper freshly made bread. And then we come to group 4, ‘ultra-processed foods’ (UPF). It’s long, perhaps the longest definition I’d 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.’ That’s just the first bit. It continues: ‘Processes used to make UPF include the fractionation of whole foods into substances, chemical modifications of these substances…’”
“Processes and ingredients used to manufacture ultra-processed foods are designed to create highly profitable (low-cost ingredients, long shelf life, emphatic branding) convenient (ready-to-consume) hyperpalatable products liable to displace freshly prepared dishes and meals made from all other NOVA food groups.”
“It is the ultra-processing, not the nutritional content, that’s the problem… there is evidence that increased UPF intake is strongly associated with an increased risk of: all-cause mortality (i.e., death), cardiovascular disease, cancers, type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, fatty liver disease, inflammatory bowel disease, depression, worse blood fat profile, frailty (measured by grip strength), irritable bowel syndrome, dyspepsia (indigestion), and dementia” [references in the book]
“In 2022, a study published in the journal Neurology looked at data from over 72,000 people. Increasing intake of UPF by 10% was associated with a 25% increase in the risk of dementia and a 14% increase in the risk of Alzheimer’s disease.”
“the majority of visits to paediatricians during the 1920’s were about fussy eating. The profession responded sensibly…by advising parents to let children go hungry and to treat them ‘firmly’. Alan Brown’s 1926 book, The Normal Child, Its Care and Feeding, provides a good example: ‘Force is necessary for children who spit out their food or those who vomit at will. Give such a child a small amount of the food, if he vomits give him more; continue until he keeps the food down.’” -> this led one doctor to test children’s abilities to self govern their food intake, as young as 1 years old. The moment the children were done breastfeeding, they were fed all their meals by nurses who put 12 bowls of ingredients in front of the kids. Whatever the child pointed to, or tried to eat, was given to them. Amazingly, and somewhat expectedly, they’d identify the foods they were nutrient deficient in, to the point where one kid consumed straight fish-oil until they had their vitamine D back in check.
“Nearly a century later, in 1959, an English physiologist called G. R. Hervey began a series of experiments using the parabiotic pair technique to understand weight control. The study is tough reading. Ninety-three pairs of rats were sewn together, only thirty-two of which survived long enough to be used in the experiment. These rats then had a small electric probe inserted into their skulls, which was used to specifically damage a part of the brain called the hypothalamus, which maintains homeostasis in the body, controlling temperature, water intake, how much you sweat and so on. Hervey found that the rats with a damaged hypothalamus lost control of their eating and often developed obesity. So, he started damaging the hypothalamus of just one rat in each parabiotic pair, and if anything , the results got even more horrifying. The rats with the damaged hypothalamus ate so much so quickly that they sometimes died by choking on their food: they were no longer able to detect the ‘stop eating’ signals coming from their bodies. Meanwhile the other rat - entirely normal apart from being attached to the rat with the hypothalamus lesion - started wasting away. It was getting a signal through the shared circulatory system telling it to stop eating.”
“If, like me, you’re surprised by the idea that doing more won’t allow you to eat more calories, it may be because the opposite idea, that you can burn off excess calories, has been promoted by companies like Coke all the way from the scientific papers through to policy initiatives like Exercise is Medicine. It took me some time to accept that, despite having a medical degree, part of the way that I have understood my body and its energy requirements has come from the Coca-Cola Company.” -> Interesting take on a few studies showing that energy use is roughly constant regardless how physically active we are. When we do more, we simply use less energy for other things later on, i.e., rest more thereafter.
“Apple juice, which is typically around 15% sugar, behaves much like any soft drink. But so does the apple purée, even though it contains all the constituents of the apple, including the fibre, and was made moments before consumption. Fiber is important, but the matrix, the structure of the apple, is key.”
“Schatzger’s proposal is that just like Doc Holliday’s cows, we may be eating more food to compensate for becoming increasingly deficient in micronutrients. Ultra-processing reduces micronutrients to the point that modern diets lead to malnutrition even as they cause obesity.”
“These four tastes - sweet, salt, sour, and umami - are probably handled by basically four receptors. But bitterness is a different story. Bitter signals ‘potentially toxic’, and a huge number of different chemical structures taste bitterness. We need twenty-five different genes to detect bitterness, which gives us a great ability to detect toxins. But we can learn to love bitterness too. Bitter coffee will make a child gag and retch, but you can learn to associate the bitter taste with the exhilaration of the caffeine such that it becomes essential for making adult life bearable.” -> Some other interesting things here were that although we don’t smell as well dogs, for example, our taste receptors are more complex.
“When Cola was invented, the aim was to make a drink to perk people up, and the original formula contained extract of coca leaves and caffeine. Cocaine and caffeine are both extremely bitter, so the company added lots of sugar to mask this. But that initial bitterness was actually an advantage. It was the extreme bitterness that allowed the addition of more sugar to the drink than would otherwise have been possible… But why does Coca-Cola want us to drink all this sugar? Remember those rat studies who learned to like flavours paired with calories? Well the same is true in humans… This may explain a bizarre pricing phenomenon first noticed in Central America but common in low-income countries around the world. Sweet fizzy beverages are nearly as cheap or cheaper than bottled water. Obviously, it’s more expensive to make cola, but once people buy one, they will buy more. Water is cheaper to produce, but it’s hard to get people to drink lots of it.”
“So, by using additives that affect taste and combining sensory experiences, UPF sneaks more rewards (such as sugar) past our tongues than we would otherwise tolerate. It makes us crave UPF more than we could ever crave home cooking. And, by creating mismatches between the sensations in the mouth and the nutrition in the gut, the companies have (if only accidentally) arrived at a method for driving increased consumption.”
4/5.