#1 Cause Of Disease & Weight Gain: You May Never Eat This Food Again | Chris Van Tulleken

I wanted to start off by asking you to lay it out why should anyone who stumbled across this podcast or video care about ultr processed foods and how much they're consuming because they are most of what we eat and because we have really good data that they drive a huge number of what we kind of euphemistically call negative Health outcomes which is everything from cardiovascular disease to metabolic disease to early death so we're pretty sure that ultrapro food is now the leading cause of early death on planet Earth ahead of tobacco now when I say pretty sure it according to some data sets in some places tobacco might still be slightly ahead in the UK tobacco might be ahead but it's it's really the leading cause of diet related disease and it's the leading cause of environmental destruction loss of biodiversity plastic pollution and the second leading cause of carbon emissions so you you have to care about it and it's just a way of describing the industrial food that makes up what we eat I think when a lot of people think about their diet and the foods that they're consuming they think about it through the lens of weight so you know yeah Chris you're talking about uh Ultra processed feed but I'm fine my my weight's completely normal and one of the really interesting things that you viate on in your book is this idea that ultr processed food consumption is harmful to us or has the potential to be harmful to us irrespective of its impact on our weights so we've got let's say there are probably over 2,000 peer-reviewed Publications that we could use to bring evidence to this question of are we sure that ultrapress food harms us and that it isn't just food eaten by people who are disadvantaged in other ways among those 2,000 papers are 70 prospective uh clinical studies so these These are the kind of studies that we use to to prove that tobacco causes lung cancer and among all that data the most studied effect is is weight gain but most of the studies on other health outcomes like cardiometabolic disease dementia anxiety depression inflammatory bowel disease uh cancers early death they adjust for weight gain in other words even if you are at a at a what we probably shouldn't call a healthy weight but let's say that that that is the term we use even if you live at a healthy weight if you like most people in Britain eat an average of 60% of your calories from ultrapress food you're still vulnerable to all those harms and the other thing about that is that the new weight loss drugs if you continue eating an ultrapress diet whilst you take some magti for example or Bovi uh you might not gain weight but you'll still be exposed to all the other harms of the food so this is food that's driving uh disease in in a whole number of different ways when was it that you thought this is an issue I need to explore this a little bit deeper so we in 2014 I made a a horizon with my brother and it was about fat versus sugar because we'd had in the 1980s fat became the demon molecule we stripped all the fat out of yogurts and industrially processed food and replaced it with modified cornstarch and gums and then in 2000 Gary tabs wrote this piece in the New York Times saying that no sugar we got it wrong and all the sugar that we've used to replace the fat that's the problem and so in 2014 this sort of debate was raging and zand and I did this thing where I I ate a very high fat diet and he ate a very high sugar sugar diet we tried to figure out the difference and we went and visited a guy uh called Paul Kenny in New York who was studying rats and he had figured out that if you feed rats cheesecake which is a 50/50 mix of fat and sugar um the rats put on lots of weight and so where we kind of resolved that program was it seems to be mixtures of fat and sugar that are driving excess consumption and we there's a there was a famous donut at the time the um the glazed ring from I can't remember Dunkin dinos or Crispy Cream one of the big dinos had this perfect mix of fat versus sugar and so we almost got there in 2014 going oh it's it's combining fat and sugar together that makes them makes them delicious and that's what drives excess consumption and then I kind of ignored it and then someone showed me these two papers in fact it was a television producer showed me these two papers we were doing a a big series on child obesity and one was from the team in Brazil that developed the definition of ultr processed food in 2009 and the other was a a clinical trial by a skeptic Kevin Hall from the NIH in the states and reading those papers I was like oh this explains all of the missing links about the the way we understand diet and nutrition and now we've got this this this mountain of evidence that UPF is the problem yeah I definitely want us to get to the definition of what UPF is at some point we should cover that you know you could probably do a three-hour podcast alone just on the nuances off that definition although I know you've got a really simple one which is very very practical and very useful before we get start though Chris I really want to pause on this point about Ultra processed foods and the relationship between us consuming them and other health problems beyond our weight because I I really want people to understand that that it's not just about your weights because I do see a lot of people whether it was you know patients or the public or friends frankly who will have large volumes of ultra processed food no blame or no judgment at all cuz it's what you're surrounded by right and of course we're going to talk about that but they think it's okay because they're of normal weight they're like yeah but it's fine you know I'm I'm naturally slim so it's not a problem but you have powerfully there's a there's a section near the introduction I think where you you show early death cancer inflammatory bow disase heart attacks Strokes metabolic problems mental health dementia all of these conditions are linked with that consumption I think in but you outlined some research showing that there's a dose dependent relationship between UPSR of getting cancer yeah so we when you what's going on well when you do the big population studies one of the things you have to ask you have to meet these criteria to say are we sure that people who eat ultrapress food don't just drink loads and smoke loads because that's always a risk and this was the problem with all the smoking data so there are this set of criteria where you say um is there a dose dependent relationship the more you eat the worse the effects get yes there is is this biologically plausible well yeah we actually have loads and loads of evidence about all the different ways that ALR process foods and their additives and their processing methods might be driving this so um and then we look is it perspective does it does are we sure that the effect happens after the cause and yeah we are because we follow people over time um and so we've we've and do we have other experimental evidence so these are the criteria we use to go yeah no we're sure this isn't just uh this isn't just an association this is causation and we've met that threshold now and in fact we've met it for all those other health problems uh before we've met it for obesity you know obesity is is is not arguably I'm an author on a on a big series we're publishing with the Lancet on Ultra prices food and we'll publish it early next year and I've always said obesity is the most well evidenced uh outcome in fact probably cardiometabolic disease has even more evidence controlled for obesity you're very careful in the book with your language around that was the lawyers that was the lawyers when I say language I mean more living with obesity rather than an obese person and I was really pleased to see that because I think it is such an important distinction isn't it you you've you've led a lot of the charge on this and I think you and I would agree I I suspect that what probably the main harm that comes to be people who live with excess weight is not actually from the excess weight on their bodies it's from Bad treatment by our profession and we have lots of data that doctors don't like seeing patients who live with excess weight we treat them badly they get fewer investigations they get less time and less treatment than patients who live at a normal way and so when we we've seen this move we don't talk about epileptics or cancerous people we don't even say diabetics anymore so much you know we've moved to people who live with problems you live with HIV you live with diabetes so it's it's not an identity it's a thing that it's up to the patient to pick up or put down when they want and I think that is if the book does only one thing it's try to reduce the stigma around diet related disease but especially obesity you know we treat people who live with excess weight terribly willpower is something that is often spoken about in relation to our well-being in relation to people's weights and of course you you tackle that what's your current view on Willpower and its relationship with obesity so I I spend whole chapter on Willpower because it feels so important to demolish it and even now I get a lot of people who live at excess weight writing to me and going I I think you're you I like the Burk or whatever but I think you're wrong about this one thing it is my fault I am choosing to eat these foods and there's a whole bunch of different ways we can tackle that problem when we look at populations as a whole weight gain started if we look at the states starts in the mid 1970s and it didn't just start in one group it's black white Hispanic men and women of all ages start gaining weight at the same time in 1975 as the food environment changes and so the the food we eat we think we're making a choice but we're making a choice you know about as much as we are when when we decide to drink something you know that for many people in this country the only food that is Affordable or available to them is ultr processed food it every petrol station for court every train station this is our food culture yeah I mean when I think about this and I like you have spent a long time thinking about these ideas and writing about them I think it's it's kind of ridiculous on one level to think that we just happen to be the laziest generation of humans ever to have been born right I mean people have been every generation has said that since records began haven't they yeah like because every every generation before us you can be damn sure if they lived in the modern western or Global frankly food en environment a huge proportion would also end up carrying extra body fats I think one of the problems Chris and maybe you faced this since the book came out that there are people who have struggled right they've struggled in the food environment and they've ended up let's say putting on large volumes of weight and maybe for whatever reason they they reached a crunch point in their life whether it was a book or a podcast or a friend d or something happened and they then they then did exert willpower over their food environment and they managed to lose weight get their energy get their Vitality back and so how do I explain them because the best example of that is my identical twin brother who has all my genetic risk factors for weight gain we both we've been studied and we have all these different polymorphisms these little genetic changes that put us at risk of weight gain he had a son in an unplanned way who's who's my very dear nephew and is very much a part of the family but it was stressful at the time he moved to America he lived AB above a burger bar and in a year he put on almost 30 kilos and zand then a decade a decade of me nagging him later I finally stopped nagging him and he he lost that weight he he married a public health academic uh now did zand exert willpower well I think all kinds of different things happened and it's his story to tell but the people who do manage to go on that Journey are often advantaged by uh education privilege money something changes in their lives it's not the raw exertion of Will and when it comes to a population so individuals I think I mean I send people to your you know my my patients all of us want short-term help I send people to your podcast I send people to all kinds of resources going it can be done I don't feel it's my role to inspire anyone to do that my interest is in the population as a whole and there's no way as in terms of the UK population we have the some of the the highest rates of obesity of any group of kids particularly in the world um you can't Inspire the whole population in the current food environment so I think there's a question between what individuals need to do and there are many many resources and some people will have just enough resources in their lives to sort of get over that point and recover and very good luck to them versus we just need to change the food environment for everyone so that that's I I mean I'm very conscious um wrong and that when when I speak look at the big voices in UK food all essentially privileged white men of a particular age you know I I don't think the world needs more people like me telling them what to do my my feeling is we need to change the environment and I'm happy to give people information and and and I wish them very good luck doing what they want to do yeah that's one of the things I really appreciate about the tone throughout your book is you're not telling anyone what to do you actually explicitly say what I often have said about my patients which is it's not my job to tell anybody else what they should or could be doing with their life because I don't think anyone responds well to being told what to do by any other human being I'm the same I think that's completely right and it's particularly true when you have people of one Dem graphic talking to people of another demographic especially when there's a sort of privilege Gap but your language around this and I I think you've been doing this so instinctively for such a long time and just to slightly blow some smoke here but in every one of your tweets there was a there's there was a message you sent out the other day and you kind of concluded going you know don't this is not me telling you to do this just do this if you want to I'm not telling them what to do because if you if you treat them like a partner or an adult I think actually it lands better they may not be ready for it right then but I think they reflect on it they think about things you know son and I went to see a behavioral change expert and I sort of wanted this person he was called aliser cantam me he was a remarkable guy and he he said um I said look can you change Zan and he said no I I don't need to speak to Zan I need to speak to you and he explained this thing to me that for Zan to lose weight would be to lose a 10-year argument with me that I had been nagging him so much uh and it was only when I stopped really kind of abusing him about this that he he he did all the things that he would he would talk about you know but it was nagging people isn't just uh not beneficial I think it really holds people back and I think there is a a tendency among lots of sort of media doctors to kind of Nag people on mass and it I don't think it works very well I think one of the most powerful times in my life which really changed the way I see Health was was the seven years I spent working in alen in North Manchester I worked in a very deprived area it would be an area that would be definitely put into the low socioeconomic status category huge numbers of immigrants a lot of single parent families a lot of um parents working two jobs a lot of poverty and when I started working there maybe 2011 2012 something like that maybe a bit early I was starting to get into changing my diet quite significantly I I was reading things I was thinking oh you know how much is this impacting impacting the way that I feel and I used to at the time you know I was single I didn't have children I I had a lot more time on my hands that I might do now I would generally take my lunch with me because I was trying to eat well and I I still remember one day I forgot to bring my lunch with me I thought all right I'm just going to buy something no word of a lie I can remember the walk from that surgery it was maybe about a 10 15 minute walk to the sainsbury so this big sabur I would have passed 7 to 10 fast food joints and I can still remember the signs in the window um where it would be like 150 eat as much as you can feed your family with a family bucket for £220 whatever it was that was one of the most powerful and I opening walks I had ever done as a doctor because I thought wow I'm spending as much time as I can with these guys trying to educate them on better choices but they're walking out into this food environment where unless they have the means the time the strongest will in the world and no other problems to contend with in life they're not going to be able to do it and that was a really eye opening experience for me I mean you look at people you know we know people living in this country there a million families without a stove top cooker or a fridge now you can't make real food without those items you know if you and I cook a meal we we sort of generally take it for granted that we bought a knife on some previous occasion we own a cutting board we own a countertop and if we cook a big batch we can stick it in a freezer in a piece of Tupperware you have to buy all that and then there's the time to prepare it and meanwhile the kids we're cooking for on their bus tickets of discounts for fast food restaurants on their Spotify on their YouTube uh on their games uh on their walks exactly as you say so they're they're sort of surrounded by this marketing effort and the the marketing budget of any one of the 15 or 20 companies that feed us uh the annual marketing budget of one of them is more than double the Entire World Health Organization annual budget so you know you're you're there doing you know doing your M count essentially you're doing counter marketing you're trying to flog stuff that people can't afford don't know how to prepare don't have the equipment to prepare whilst against you is a team of geniuses who spend 24 hours a day you know selling selling this stuff that that is addictive and and and affordable yeah what would you say to someone Chris who's listening and going okay Chris I'm hearing what you're saying the environment influences our Behavior it's harder for some people but of course it is possible because I did it I grew up in that environment my brother um struggled with obesity but I managed to exert my force over it everyone else should be able to what would you say to that person well I'd say you know good for you I I don't know your specific story I I don't accept that anyone should be a different weight so I don't I I wouldn't say this person is more worthy of Love or good treatment because they managed to lose weight I don't feel that weight loss is a thing to be celebrated you know it's a thing that person did and if they did it for them that's great I don't I don't feel the need to I don't feel the need to engage with it very much it's like if if you achieve anything in your life and you're happy with it then that's great but it's not that's not it's not of great interest to me I suppose I I I I know that you know many of our you know patients have lost their own body weight many times over they've got incredible willpower and and they're surrounded by this addictive stuff we also know that the vulnerability to food is very very genetic and people who live at healthy weight thin people have an entirely different set of behavioral genetics when it comes to food than people who live with excess weight you know and they and you cannot understand what it's like to be inside the head of a food motivated person if you're not that person any more than you can understand what it's like to be in the mind of someone who's addicted to a drug of abuse if you if you don't find them tempting I mean I've tried cigarettes I've tried alcohol on television I've tried other addictive drugs of abuse um just for disclosure there it was all done in illegal set I've never got addicted to any of them I've tried heroin after an operation when I was at Medical School you given diamorphine it's heroin I didn't become addicted so addictive substances are very very contextually dependent and if one person manages to throw off their addiction well good for you but that that shouldn't mean we then go and tell tell everyone else that they can do exactly the same does that seem reasonable I think it sounds very reasonable and I think I mean let's look at what you just said through the ls of the so-called diets Wars on on social media which have existed for many years now where what is the best diet for any human to eat for Optimal Health and there's a lot of different candidates and what I see commonly happen is a person has struggled with their health and all weight for a period of time nothing has worked it's impact to the quality of their life they then come across a particular way of eating whether it is pay paleo or vegan or local or carnivore whatever it might be they come across something that works for them yeah so because it's worked for them which is amazing that that individual has found something that works for them what I think then happens and I think this is a human tendency this is like our bias as humans unless we're aware of it is that oh I found the solution now everybody if they found my solution they would also we want to help other people it's often quite a generous place I get it totally and I and I've probably fallen into that trap in the past myself so I totally get it I think what insulates me from it somewhat is because you know over over the course of my career having seen tens of thousands of patients you actually end up going if you're open-minded oh wow people can thrive on all kinds of different diets that person crushed it on a vegan whole food diet that person crushed it on the paleo diet that they got last that they started last year and so by ex by being exposed to that many people you go wow well it it's not necessarily the diet or it could be for that individual but I think what is powerful about putting a lot of this on Ultra processed foods is I think it cuts through so many of the diet Wars because actually most of the diets people are going on to improve their health and well-being whether it's low carb or Carnival or pay or whole food plant-based generally speaking the ones who are thriving are reducing the amount of ultra process to happen I mean the data entirely support what you're saying in the sense that every traditional human diet we've ever studied whether it's fish diets in East Asia vegan diets in South Asia um sea mamal high fat diets in the high Arctic um the French diet of red wine and cheese the Mediterranean diet I me you can go on and on all these different diets all of them are associated with good health robustly they're all extremely different in terms of nutrio composition and and and and everything else the only diet we've ever studied that's associated with disease is an ultra-processed Western industrial diet so we you know we there all kinds I mean we're going to come to the definition but you know there's this very long 11 paragraph formal definition on the United Nations food and agriculture website but we can sum it up by going it's like food made by companies to generate growth for Pension funds that's a good working definition high fat salt sugar is sort of a it's it sweep if you use the definition as we as we do in law in the UK it sweeps up about 85% of the problem products we could say anything with a health claim almost all of those lowfat Prebiotic um supports your immune system has 30% less sugar all of that uh is ultr processed or most of it so we how we Define the harmful food we're talking about American food we're talking about a mod if your food is made in a big Factory owned by a transnational Food Corporation there is a good chance that it will cause you harm Ultra process there's two words there okay let's let's put the ultra to the side for a minute and just deal with processed right which is very important yeah good so let's maybe walk us through that what is the difference between you know an apple right we've got an apple and compare that to I don't know how do we Ultra process that app yeah so animals almost all life on Earth eat e a whole raw food they don't process it at all there are some very odd examples from the Animal Kingdom but broadly animals eat whole raw food humans have a very short list of whole raw foods that we can eat we can drink milk out of the cow you shouldn't because you'll get brucelosis but you can do it um you can eat apples oysters I mean we can come up with a short list you can pull certain stuff off a tree or a bush and just eat it fish you can eat raw and unprocessed um but for more than a million years humans and hominids have been processing our food so we started cooking probably more than 1 and a half million years ago we have good evidence for cooking 400,000 years ago and the signatures of food processing are written into our genes and our anatomy and our physiology so we've got all these genes for starch digestion you know that's because we've been processing and Milling our uh flour for ages and ages we've got genes for alcohol metabolism if you if you if your ancestors are from parts of the world where there was a culture of fermentation so and we think that you can't really live on a whole food diet you know people have tried that they get very ill so processing is very normal it's very ancient canning smoking tinning uh preserving fermenting salting curing you know grinding Milling extruding it's it's all all of that has been done for a very long it's heating he cooking processing yeah cooking is processing yeah everything you do to a food um uh before you eat it is processing Bas if you chop it up that's mechanical processing you put it through a meat grind grinder that's mechanical bre but that's not doing this is not a problem none of that seems to be a problem now there you could come up with some certain specific examples that you probably wouldn't want to eat loads and loads of smoked food but broadly all of those techniques they're ancient we've been doing them for ages and they form part of dietry patterns that are very broadly healthy so the there is a huge difference between processing which is ancient and we have to process our food and ultr processing which is new it's exclusively industrial and it is about making products that are convenient easily marketed addictive and very very profitable and and so there is some social theory in the definition of ultra processed food that it it um the shorthand is does the food have on its list of ingredients something you don't find in a domestic kitchen like a synthetic emulsifier xantham gum uh a non-nutritive sweetener these are industrial ingredients weak gluten you know all all these things but the the longer definition has baked into it an idea that this is stuff that is made for profit it's marketed and it's addictive and it it was an attempt this wasn't done arbitrarily it was an attempt by some scientists in Brazil who'd watched this terrible transition from where obesity was basically unheard of to where obesity and metabolic disease were the dominant public health problems and they wanted to describe the foods that seem to be driving this because they were very diverse it was biscuits and instant noodles and ice cream and confectionary and you know uh packaged Goods industrial bread all had come in and so the definition was to describe this new category of food you mentioned addiction there or addictive qualities that has been contentious in I guess a scientific world for many years you know can of food truly be addictive I definitely want to talk about that but this idea of processing and at what point this becomes process you know where is that boundary and I know it's it's very hard to to say for sure one of the things I found fascinating in the book was this idea that you could have a foods and you could have the minimally processed version and the ultra processed version and on the ingredient label it could actually look very similar yeah fat sugar salt whatever it can almost be matched but the fact that it was ultr processed in and off itself was thought to be causing s in a way that the minimally processed version wasn't could you maybe just talk us through that so one of the The crucial things is you can't if if we so so you want to an example let's take an Apple so that's a whole food now we can process it in all kinds of different ways we we can cook it and turn it into applesauce uh we can chop it up into bits we can blend it we can squash the juice out of it we can do all kinds of different things and all of those products will be more or less healthy now ultr processing it is when we break it down into its component parts and we put that Apple into a product for making money out of so the purpose of ultra process food is to generate money so if we think of an apple pie that's been frozen and it contains stabilizers to retain the water in uh in the pie it might contain Apple flavorings because we've used very cheap out of season apples um uh it might contain emulsifiers to glue the whole thing together and lots of other ingredients that may or may not be harmful they a sign that now those apples have been turned into a product that has to make money for its parent company so you can make an apple pie at home with sugar apples uh you know flour and butter you know you don't need a long list of ingredients the apple pie you buy in the shop might be quite similar in terms of the list of ingredients but it will have been designed with a very different intention and one of the things that's very clear when I you know I spoke to a huge number of people in the food industry when I was writing the book was to understand the design process when you make Ultra processed food how is it how is it working and there are two ways of thinking about this first is to imagine yourself as a farmer if you sell cobs of corn okay or soybeans the market is Tiny yeah how often do you eat a cob of corn with butter and salt on it I mean you might in a very D you might eat it once a fortnite maybe once a month you might never be that into it if you eat soybeans you eat edamama soybeans that that you know you grow them in the early season but again it's not a big Market if you can turn your soy into soy protein isolate soy starch soy oil if you can turn your corn into high fructose corn syrup modified corn starch uh corn oil and corn Protein Isolate now you have these commodity ingredients that you can add to anything and so on almost all Ultra process fied if you look the first ingredients are one of four different crops soy rice wheat corn there may be some dairy fat there there might be one of three meats but basically our food is made of of eight different things and those things are broken down and turned into pastes and powders with nearly infinite shelf life that you can then reassemble into proprietary products to make money out of so the the logic if you think how the food supply system exists to make food for you you've entirely misunderstood what's going on the food supply system in exists to extract money from you to supply money from you to intermediate food processes and ingredients companies that that's its function information is not enough to make change in your life you have to take action so to help you take action after watching this video I've created a free nutrition guide for you this contains the five most important practices I've seen in over two decades of seeing patients they work for you no matter what your dietry preference there's a step-by-step action plan to help you implement those changes in your life if you want to receive that free guide right now just click on the link in the description box below you're clearly very passionate about this issue you can read it throughout the the book I can hear it in your words has this been done on purpose well it can sound a bit anti- capitalist so a lot a lot of my research now is with economists so I've just published a big paper with a mainly with economists so yes it's intentional in the sense of the purpose of the companies that make our food is not to make food indeed many of them are not food companies they do lots and lots of things food is part of a diversified portfolio of ways of making money so if we look at Pratt for example Pratt is sort of the C coffee arm if you like of a thing called jaab Holdings which is a big uh family-owned investment holding company um Costa is the coffee arm of Coca-Cola uh Starbucks is part owned by Nestle so we have these these sort of very big corporations that do lots and lots of different things and they all have a coffee arm that sells some food and they all make other things as well so understanding the financial incentives isn't about going there's some massive Global conspiracy it's going if you don't understand what it's like to be the the chief executive of a big food company you will never ever be able to regulate them or you will never force them to change so for me one of the crucial things in the book was um an analyst at one of the really big institutional investors called Black Rock So Black Rock is has trillions of of pounds and dollars under management and they own a little piece of lots of different food companies and there are other big investors like this Jupiter and Vanguard and they they're where you and I have our pensions they'll have a bit of NHS pension they'll have state pensions in the states if you've got a private pension it's probably at one of those two providers so they exist to make money and they do that by owning a piece of lots of different companies and some of them are food companies now when the food companies try and make healthier foods so this happened at Danon most famously the chief exec was a guy called Emanuel Faber and he said I don't like making all this unhealthy food I want to turn Danon into a social Enterprise and make really healthy food the Danon share price went down nay went up activist investors who owned a big chunk of Danel called Bluebell Capital had had him removed Danon realigned its portfolio with Nestle and the share price went back up and everyone was happy so if you scream and shout at these big food companies and I do a bit in the book your misunderstanding that they are unable to change you know Nestle comes into a lot of criticism as does Coca-Cola but there are many good people at these companies who know exactly what they're doing but they are required by their board and their owners to make money and to make more money every quarter and this is sort of the way the world works it's not you can get angry about it but that's just the way everything is do you see what I mean it's like is it a conspiracy no it's just right there in the open that is the stated purpose of publicly limited companies how is knowing that relevant to to what do we do yeah or or a I don't know a 45y old mom of three who's listening right now going hey Chris listen I just want to make better choices for me and my children right how is mean knowing Coca-Cola's incenter structure relevant so you're the first person to ever ask me that and I think for that 45 M of three 45y old mom of three it is so important to know that because for for several different reasons like for almost too many reasons for me to get into the most important thing is we know when it came to Tobacco Control we know when it comes to dealing with addictive substances that turning your shame and your guilt outwards from yourself and having somewhere to focus it and direct it is really important understanding that cigarette companies knew they were harming people and were selling addictive sub products anyway was really important for smokers to get a hold of and many many smokers found that helping helpful to quit also understanding that despite what it says on the the can or the packet despite what it says on the company websites about their their support for traditional farming systems and their you know the the you know the fact they don't like child labor or you know they don't want to support um child slaves picking Coco in West Africa you know they want to reduce plastic pollution all these things they say on their website we can demonstrate that those things aren't true and so if you are minded to be an activist and by the way this hypothetical 45-year-old mom of three will need a lot of resources if if um if they're to to stop uh buying lots of ultra processed food because their life will become more expensive but knowing that they are supporting A system that is causing environmental destruction carbon emissions and so on I think is really important yeah it it strikes me that that's step one isn't it because what keeps so many people trapped and stuck in these cycles of yo-yo dieting and you know whatever it might be whatever changes they're trying to make with their health of having a bit of success and then falling back and then feeling even worse and how they never tried in the first place because they thought you know there's something wrong with me I can't stick to this I guess the real power of knowing that is listen it is not your fault yeah right you have got big corporations Big Marketing budgets very very clever people who are doing what they need to do to service their business that's their job right you as an individual sure you may be blessed with high amounts of willpower you may have had certain experiences in life that mean yeah you know what you are going to make a change now in a way that you never could do before whatever it might be but it doesn't change the fact that everyone is working against a very toxic food landscape and so I guess what's powerful about that is that anyone who has struggled the first thing it doesn't necessarily help them change that but what it what it does help them do is not necessarily feel shame and guilt about it that is you're framing this so so much more powerfully than I I have you know I've tried to articulate these things but I mean that that is is right if if you're feeling like you aren't in control it's like Well you aren't really and and what we also know is that people with low incomes eat a lot of this food when you give people lots of money by and large they make really sensible decisions we've got masses of evidence that that people who live in poverty are not stupider or don't have less willpower than people who live with wealth they are unlucky they're born into different circumstances in different countries in different parts of this country and so those people knowing that there is understanding the magnitude of the force they have to oppose is really important if you if you think that if you're someone who does want to lose weight and you think it's going to happen easily despite the very best efforts of some of the biggest companies on Earth you're you're kidding yourself you know I do think it's important to understand the scale of the challenge that people are facing and it isn't it is not impossible it is impossible if you don't understand yeah the incentives I can remember back to my time working in Alder I remember there was a family who I'm trying to think now I think the parents had type two diabetes I was seeing this middle-aged couple they were struggling with their health I think they were pre-diabetic and they thought yeah know my parents had it I'm going to have it and I was trying to explain well not necessarily and they they brought in I think to one consultation what they were eating in the morning and it was a breakfast cereal and it said heart's healthy on the packets did it now it it did I wonder if I know where this is going well what was interesting to me and I think it's really important that we all recognize this we all sometimes fall into the Trap of thinking that everyone around us knows what we know we forget that at one point we didn't know what we know now and yeah I know it's doers are amazing at doing that yeah but I think it's such an important Point mate because I remember explaining to them look I know it says heart's healthy but actually I genuinely don't think this is helping you with your health it's not helping you guys with your pre-diabetes and small pieces of chocolate or whatever yeah yeah and they were totally shocked now it was an immigrant family so they weren't from the UK they moved here but I I remember it so well because I thought oh wow we can talk about this stuff on podcasts and books and whatever it might be but actually there is a lot of people out there who believe that if the packet on it says heart healthy that someone the government checked this it was all right it is good for me but are you are reminding me that this is entirely what I believed for a very long time you know that we are taught at Medical School that nutrition the the nutritional composition of food is the important thing how much fat and salt and sugar is in it and there's lots of these breakfast cereals that have quite good nutritional composition if you don't eat too much of them I mean the same is true of cigarettes you know know if you only smoke one it's not all that bad for you you know alcohol if you only drink one glass it's fine it's it's um yeah and I think migrants and displaced people to the UK I and I run a clinic for for for Asylum Seekers and refugees and they have I think a very exaggerated idea of the extent to which the UK government protects its citizens from predation and so I can well imagine being the position of moving from a very low income state to to the UK and going well if it says it on the box it's probably true isn't it I'm sure I'm sure someone in in Great Britain has you know rubber stamped that heart healthy claim and said it was all fine yeah there really is a belief about that let's let's talk about these Ultra Pro let's get some examples I did something this morning which I haven't done in a long long time right I went to our local Corner Shop which I do go there to get certain things but I I came out with a um a bag full of shopping of things that I haven't bought in a long long time now I'm going to get them on the table Chris and through the lens of what you've been writing about and talking about so far I I really want I guess what I want is I want you to help us all understand how do we figure out whether that food product that we're buying is helping us or harming us okay ingredient labels are things that I've spoken about on this show for many years and you got to read ingredient labels CU otherwise you simply don't know what I had never read an ingredient list until maybe 20 19 or something you kidding me I just didn't I just assumed some it was probably all fine you know I was a molecular biologist I'm like well chemicals are normal it's fine to have chemicals in food I just hadn't read and then and now I assume everyone does read ingredients labels and when when I show you know all I mean you know you've worked in hospitals we all eat at the same we all eat it Pratt or Gregs or boot so we buy our sandwiches from nice when you get people to read the ingredients on on on a sandwich in these places and it's got 38 different ingredients people are like wow I just never looked so doctors we you know you're right we don't we forget what we we didn't we didn't used to know right okay what have we got I'm getting a selection some faves of things right I've got more this is just to start off okay so has anything got a heart on that would be quite nice um I mean cooco can we start with cocoa po please do Coco Pops is kind of my my favorite really partly cuz it was my favorite seral as as a child it's my daughter's favorite can I just say I know you had lawyers look through your books I don't have any lawyers on this show so be be careful with what you say I've been I've been legal here if you like so the book was read by three teams of lawyers Canada the US and the UK wow and there's a lot more other lawyers involved so I'm I'm I'm I'm quite careful um Coco box you know it's my is my daughter's favorite cereal she doesn't have it very often and it tells us it's not just safe for kids but it's positively intended for them I mean you know it's not it's not a grown-up thing right you and I do not respond to monkeys on boxes right so we've got a monkey source of fiber um supporting your family's health with iron and vitamin D um uh I mean you know I'm looking brain oh look supporting brain function with iron folic acid and riboflavin help reduce tiredness fa I this is wow they've really amped up this box this this is I haven't looked at a Coco box box in a few months they've they I think M for me you know it's the it's the yellow it's the brightness yeah added goodness but just turn it around supporting your family's health okay now out of everything on there I get there's a monkey on there with a smile on his face which is going to appeal to children I get that it says ion and vitamin D which of course is important but the fact that it says supporting your family's health now I'm a parent right if I was a young parent I didn't know anything about nutrition and I was trying to look after my family supporting your family's health that's a powerful phrase isn't it it's a very bold it's a bold claim source of fiber I and then if if we were to look at the nutritional labeling system which is optional but we look at these traffic lights two greens two oranges so this is maybe it's not it's not all greens but it's pretty healthy greens and oranges there are no Reds there we'll C do the traffic light system in case anyone so the traffic light system means that if you eat 30 gram of this cereal you pour out a 30 G Bowl then it's got a healthy amount of fat a healthy amount of saturated fat and not too much sugar and salt you know if if they were all reds it would mean you were over the limit on all of them and that's if you pour a 30 gr Bowl so this is so is this an ultrapress product well we we can tell it is because the ingredients are rice sugar glucose syrup we don't have that generally in our kitchens fat reduced cocoa powder we don't usually have that cocoa Mass we don't have barley melt extract you can buy but you probably don't flavorings flavorings are the big clue that this is this is made in a in a factory it's not made of of Real Food it's made of remember that list rice uh uh you know Palm soy corn this is this is deconstructed food so we' we've got you know rice as the first ingredient big commodity crop we've got sugar another big one glucose syrup probably from corn and then we've got and then all that alth that doesn't taste of anything it's then you flavor it and you add some chocolate when it said flavorings does it say natural flavorings it just says flavorings flavorings okay so natural natural flavorings I would say natural flavorings are a complete um Mis Noma because naturally natural flavorings occur in food right a tomato has natural flavorings in it if you take those flavorings out of the tomato and add them as a concentrated solution to a mixture of suar unnatural flavoring well it's like either flavoring is in food or it's added flavorings so flavorings natural it's like natural sweeteners it's like no that it's all a sign of and just to go back to what we were talking about before then so we've concluded from our forensic investigation of the Coco Pops ingredient label that this is ultra process right why is that a problem so in terms of the ways so for a start we can't necessarily demonize just this product at least not quite yet in this podcast but for the moment what I say in general is there's no one thing that's poisonous it's the eating an ultr process dietary pattern is harmful CU humans don't just eat cocoa pops we eat cocoa pops then we have some broccoli for lunch and a steak any you we eat all kinds of things so it's it's when the whole pattern of your diet when 60% of your calories come on average from products like this Ultra process products that's what we assure is harmful with any one of them it's pretty hard to do an experiment that proves that cocoa pops are harmful because you'd have to how would you do it you'd randomize people to what cocoa pops versus Rice Krispies well they're both Ultra process you know it's it's quite complicated and expensive to do that so but but we can say certain things about this product that are clues about how it might drive excess consumption so one of the first Clues can I can I open this yes please do pour it out so the first clue is to go what about that 30 gr serving now have you you might have done this have you ever weighed out a bowl of cereal I have actually many years ago and I was like hm that's one serving I could probably have six of those at Uni I would eat it straight from the pack so uh I'm going to pour out I'm going to make a rough so I'm getting Coco Pops in new floor I'm going to make a rough do that roughly I've done this a few times I think it's a bit less than that that is about 30 gram of cocoa pops okay now my uh six-year-old can eat four of these at a single sitting and not feel full so one of the things about this kind of food is it has properties that we're sure Drive excess consumption it's very energy dense it's a mixture of carbs and and fat there's no water in it it's bone dry we then mix it with fatty milk and this leads us to consume a lot of it the flavorings we think Drive excess consumption the sugary fattiness Drive excess consumption so if you eat if if we were to go and look at how much you and I would eat we're not going to eat 30 I mean I I I could probably eat five times I quite like so the traffic light is all based on a 30 G serving which probably no one stroke very few people ever have no well no one no one has a digital balance and weighs out their breakfast I mean I maintain that no one mathemat you know arithmetically no one does it you know yeah so so even if you believed that Coco Pops are supporting your family's health with the um iron and vitamin D that's been added in that would only be valid if it was at all valid for that 30 gram serving that's yes exact that's exactly right and no one eats the 30 gram serving therefore we can almost it's not black or white but we can semi ignore the claim because no one's actually consuming the amounts that they're giving you that information no about humans you know most of us lack the equipment people do not have digital balances and the ability to weigh out 30 G portions you need quite a good balance to do it so it's even if we were so motivated but then you you know try getting my six-year-old to only eat 30 grams you know it's it is literally saying to an addict you know you say to your smokers well if you just smoke five a week that'll get rid of most of the harms you can still it's like that that isn't how our relationship with these products works that's Co poops right so I'd love to I'd love to sort of understand what has changed in these products cocoa pops was around when we were kids if we were to have got a seral box of cocoa Pops from 30 40 years ago I'm making us a bit younger than we are um you could go back to the I think the 6S for Cocoa pops been around for a very long time what would be different in the 60s compared to that packet of cocoa pops today probably very little it might actually be somewhat less harmful now really it was then one of the things that the the everyone at the food company says is that the way that all these products it's not just cocoa pops they're all developed is they're tested on very big groups of people and they do AB testing so you know you get po Co Coco Pops a Coco Pops B and the main thing you measure is how much do people eat and how quick do they eat it because we know that speed of consumption is very important for increasing intake um and so every year you try a slightly new ratio of sugar and salt a little bit more Coco Mouse slightly different flavorings uh crispier rice softer rice you do all these different adjustments and the food becomes more and more palatable so uh I can't say without going back and getting a box but I would imagine it's much more edible now and and that is with any ultr processed product you can say the emulsifier harm you the non-nutritive sweeteners harm you it's the softness it's the sugar fat ratio it's every single aspect the combo of every like part of the ultra processing one of the things that makes you eat more is dis Claim about your family's health I'm sure that promotes for many many people they go supports my family's health well kids tuck in I mean there's also some concern about if you're eating many times more than you should what's happening to your intake of some of the added vitamins the B vitamins and the iron you know those the reason those vitamins are there is not because vitamins and minerals are intrinsically healthy they're there because they were all stripped out of the rice and everything else during the processing so they're just adding back in what would have been there potentially if the whole food was being consum if you ate porridge and some fruit for breakfast uh with some some some milk you'd get all all the iron and vitamin D and everything you need without uh it driving excess consumption you mentioned porridge I guess one of the themes I wanted to explore with you today is this idea that a food is not a food and what I mean by that is porridge is not necessarily porridge of course it is but there are many ways to do porridge bread saying bread is good or bread is bad is problematic a good or bad is problematic anyway around food but whether it's a health promoting food or a food that isn't promoting Health it kind of depends how the Bread is made right so let's just go to porridge for a minute this is a you know a quick and easy one ready in two minutes people are busy it helps lower cholesterol it says on the packet no added sugar so this all sounds good can I see maybe have a look and see how this Compares so this is just porridge CRA Hol grain rolled oats so this is that's just por so that is not processed no that's just a whole food so that's a whole food even though it's quick and easy because people talk about the difference between rolled oats and steel cut oats oh yeah I mean so so there's a I'm trying to sit in a in a in a in an evidence-based Public Health space so I work with the World Health Organization and UNICEF I'm on a lanet commission so I'm interested in sort of Health for for everyone now down at the the sort of micro level you can get into the benefits of like should you make your coffee with cold or hot water or seed oils or there's a whole is fructose worse than glucose and there's some interesting stuff there in general I'd say the from a public health perspective we are so far from worrying about whether steel cut oats are better than rolled oats that for me it's an irrelevance I think there are some people who are you know at the edge of performance you know they their their corporate Executives or their Elite athletes and they they may get some marginal benefits from cutting their oats in a different way I think from public oats or oats as far as I'm concerned so that one is not Ultra processed no it's just it's it's processed in the sense the oats are rolled I mean you can't eat a Roy worked and and this is the thing with the definition is with every definition of healthy food there is some blurring around the edges and in the UK particularly the food companies have got quite Savvy to sort of clean label food so there's a lot of stuff that I would think you know is probably going to drive you to eat more and would be a risk factor for obesity but it hasn't got emulsifies it hasn't got weird stuff in it so it's it's probably not going to do lots of that other stuff yeah so interesting because we've got to be careful here that we keep the big picture in mind don't we it is easy to get super granular on these foods and go oh well this is or this isn't I think the key point for us to remember like you've already emphasized it's about a pattern if you're having I don't know let's say a bowl of cocoa pops let's say You're really fit you love exercising you eat well but after one of your gym sessions each week your treat to yourself as a as a bowl of cocoa pops well you know what in the whole scheme of things it's probably not going to be a problem people go out and they have a cigarette and a glass of wine and you know it's some people have difficult relationships with certain products and they may find abstinence easy so for me I have a real problem with ultrapress food I've I've been very addicted to it so I I am abstinent but that's quite an extreme position and and that's the position that someone who lives with a difficult relationship with alcohol or tobacco would live in people addicts can't be moderate um but but I think Mo most people don't become addicted and they can just cut down if they can afford to the word abstinent is quite an interesting one that you use there in relation to food um a lot of people I think would say you know there are certain foods if I buy those foods and keep them in my house I'm going to eat them yeah but when you use the word abstinence that's typically a word we associate I think with drugs yeah or let's say someone who had a problematic relationship with alcohol and they now are choosing to I can't drink anymore ever under any circumstances why do you use that word abstance was is at the core of the Dilemma around food addiction so the the heart of the problem with calling food addictive has been the problem that we can't be abstinent from food bake it into your definition of addiction is the only therapeute therapeutic approach that works is to quit your addictive substance if you possibly can no there was no one has ever been able to have live with a problem relationship with alcohol and then drink moderately it just doesn't happen with ultr processed food with the definition comes the possibility of abstance because at least in theory it's discretionary food some people might be forced to eat it because it's all they can afford all they can afford all they can all that's available to them but in theory you don't have to eat it it's only been in our diet for less than 100 years so when we ask the questions to determine addiction and there are lots of different ways we can do it you'll have done it many times as a GP it's always a questionnaire there are the cage questions for alcohol control do you feel like you're in control when you're drinking do you feel like you're in control and and people listening should ask themselves these questions do you feel like you're in control when you're when you're eating eating certain products many of us feel like we're not do you ever feel anger when someone raises how much you're eating of particular things do you ever feel guilt um and do you ever have an eye opener now in terms of alcohol that means do you do you drink early in the morning but do you ever find yourself eating things at odd times of day when you normally wouldn't the definition of addiction is the continued use of a substance or behavior that you know is doing you psychological social or physical harm and despite uh many attempts to quit that's our definition of addiction and so the Yale food addiction questionnaire is broadly derived from the way we diagnose alcohol addiction and about the same number of people report addiction to ultra processed foods and it is always Ultra processed foods uh as do report problems with alcohol so the the rate of cessation is is lower with the food so we when it comes to addiction there were these headlines that appeared a few months ago you may have saw them you know alra Foods addictive as heroin there tobacco there drugs of abuse there cocaine and a lot of people that's a bit over the top isn't it the evidence is really good and people people listening to this will recognize they will have tried cocaine cigarettes alcohol and they'll be like no my problem is the donuts the fried chicken the frozen pizza the The Confectionary the chocolate and for the people who are addicted they are really addicted so we've got MRI data we've got population data we've got physiological data we've got we've got masses of data that for those who are addicted ultrapress food is is very addictive it seems to me for many years that there's been a real desire to say well food is not addictive it's ridiculous a you have to eat food as you mentioned so you can you CA something that you're having to have every day to sustain yourself addictive my feeling has always been that we're getting a little bit over academic with whether it is technically an addiction or not this is maybe six seven years ago I thought look what matters to me at that time was look so many of my patients are struggling with this whether you want to call this a physiological addiction a behavioral addiction it doesn't really matter to me because there is an issue here where people are really really struggling and to them it does feel like an addiction and the person who gets to say whether they're addicted is is the patient is the person who's living with the addiction there's no I mean you know we all know this you don't do a blood test you don't scan people if you do scan people you see the same part parts of the brain lighting up but we don't diagnose it addiction with MRI scans we diagnos it by looking at behavior and asking questions so that there's another really important aspect there you mentioned physiology Ashley Gart who who was at Yale and uh has done some of the most amazing work on this she's pointed out with with some of her collaborators the ultra prois food has in common this um refinement that lots of addictive substances do so if we look at methamphetamine extremely addictive drug but we give a slow release version of that to treat kids with attention disorders um nicotine nicotine gum we uh slow release not very addictive in fact we can use it to treat tobacco addiction the tobacco cigarettes have these accelerants they deliver nicotine incredibly fast ultrapress food because of that softness because of the energy density it delivers the rewarding molecules the sugar the fat and the protein extremely quickly into the gut and so if we look at all our most addictive substances they're all very very rapid delivery shots are more addictive than small beer you know snorted drugs or way more addicted than pills you you can go through the whole list so physiologically that's the other set of evidence is everything addictive is industrially processed to drive addiction and remember the tobacco we say should we consider the food companies to be like tobacco companies the tobacco companies and the food companies were the same companies from the 80s to the 2000s right the biggest food companies in the world were owned by the biggest tobacco companies in the world Philip Morris and R.J Reynolds bought Nabis craft and general foods and turn them into these food Giants and they took all their tobacco marketing technology and they applied it to the food you know and their flavor technology so it is fair and you say rapid delivery yeah that's what these Ultra process F these UPF do right they they are rapidly absorbed a lot of them rapidly elevate your blood sugar if you've ever worn a CGM a continuous glucose mon you must just see how quickly your glucose goes up often when you're consuming these Foods so it kind of fits as well doesn't it there's a there's an immediate feeling in the body you get from these things which of course makes it easier to get addicted and and the the prep time is nil they part of the definition is they're convenient you you just open the pack and they and they're gone so it and people the other issue with food addiction people always said well food doesn't contain any addictive molecules and aside from caffeine that is broadly true but the thing you get addicted to addictive molecules are only addictive in some cont contexts at some speeds of delivery The Addictive molecules in food are the sugar the fat and the protein if you eat them slowly in the context of normal food you don't generally become addicted it's when they are wrapped up with accelerance in in in products that you can virtually inhale that's when they become addicted because they're giving the same physiological reward you can virtually inhale them yeah I remember in uh first year at University in Edinburgh maybe it was second year but in the end of the 90s one of these big pizza chains in Edinburgh would have either on Tuesdays or Wednesdays it was eat as much as you yeah one for I don't know five quid or something which was quite appealing to a students and I remember going with my mates I remember once saying it's my best mate cuz I was very competitive back then and I would always try and eat the most slices of pizza back then and I remember saying to my is there any footage of this I mean I'd love to see I think this is pre- social media pre Mighty Ro chaty chowing down I've gone the other way now but I I remember telling my mate Steve mate you're eating it too slowly you've got to get it in before you realize you're full oh how to win an eating competition yeah but I this is a whole separate podcast man it is a separate podcast but new audience it totally relates to what's in the book right because well you can perhaps tell me how it relates to what's in the book but I had figured out that the way you actually get the the most pizza slices in was do it so rapidly because if you do it slowly your brain starts to realize oh yeah you're full I don't want anymore so I would actually go really hard early can't believe I'm saying this but but that's exactly what I did can you explain to me yeah through the length of what you've been writing what was going on while you were doing this in Edinburgh in the late 90s someone called Barbara rolls was doing uh proper experiments uh in the late 90s on exactly this and I I definitely didn't sign up for her trial so it wasn't on me well you had intuited exactly the same thing so inside all of us we there's an idea that um with an abundance of calories around you know humans have just sort of evolved to eat loads of calories and if there's too much food we'll eat it and we'll all gain weight and that that isn't true we've had abundant calories for you know centuries for a really long time many populations have without any weight gain and so inside us we have this satiety mechanism there's a long-term one that regulates the amount of uh fat on our bodies and there's a short-term one that Midway through the Ping Pizza eating contest goes M you have to stop um you've eaten too much now that shortterm satiety mechanism is a set of it's very complex it's and we don't understand it fully but it's a set of hormones and nerve signals from the gut and in simple terms ultrapress food is sort of pre-digested if you like it is so broken down the particles are so fine that partly you can consume it Without Really chewing so you don't get the hormonal release that you you get from the chewing and partly it seems to be absorbed in a part of your gut that doesn't release a fullness signal it never gets to your the bit of your small bowel where the hormones come from that say it's time to stop eating now and so this is one of the reasons we think why so many people listening and have this experience of you're sort of continuing to eat food and you know you should be full and you kind of are almost full and yet you can't seem to stop eating it's that that disconnect between you know your evolutionary expectation of when you should feel full and and when you actually do so this is but this is how the food is designed it's not it's not surprising when one of the things you're measuring in these design trials is how quickly do people eat it and how much do they eat you famously did this 30-day trial where you would mostly eat ultrapress 80 80% of my food 80% of my calories came from ultrapress food for 30 days maybe talk us through the thinking behind doing that and then if you can Chris paint us a picture like a really Vivid picture of what that was like and because I'm interested and I'll we'll pick this up shortly that the fact that you are now abstinent I'd love to know what does abstinence mean UPF are everywhere so how can you be abstinent uh well re we live in a weird food AP partide in this country where if you have money time and resources you can buy better more varied food than in any other time in human history you know I can go and get an avocado or a mango from the end of the road and it'll be pretty delicious and you know it's incredible and yet most people that food is is absolutely unaffordable it is more more expensive per gram than than steak so it's quite easy if you don't mind preparing your own lunch so I brought brought my lunch today uh brought some some peanuts salted peanuts some tomatoes and a whole bunch of fruit now the bill and I got it from the supermarket at Houston Station so you can buy it at some stations the bill for all that was about 16 quid and I didn't get very many calories for that but it it was fine um so you can do it it takes a little bit more time or you have to tolerate a fairly simple lunch I don't I don't mind have you been in a scenario where oh yeah so I when did I last have Ultra PR food yesterday I was at a a friend of my parents so I had to sort of turn up and it was a Christmas party had to be you know these people you've known for like your whole life so you have to be polite and they were bringing around a little tra of oven baked like little um cheese twisty volon kind of you know the sort of varied snacks little spring rolls and it just looked rude to not have some so I I ate some and it was it was fine but that didn't result did you enjoy it really no so one of the things that I I really focused on trying to write the book is there was this experience Midway through this diet that I went on as as as a this 30-day trial the 30-day trial was done not as a stunt for the Bur for tell you it was done to generate data for a big trial that I'm now running at University College in London so we did it really properly and it wasn't some heroic experiment this is a normal diet for 20% of the UK population it's a normal diet for a UK teenager so this is this was this was normal it wasn't extreme and I didn't expect much to happen can can I just pause you there Chris a minute are you saying the average British teenager is consuming a typical one so on average they probably just over 60% we reckon but it would be many teenagers eat 80 or 90% of their calories from UPF I want to just remind us all of something that you said right at the start which was that UPF consumption in high volumes is linked with early death cancer inflammatory bow disease heart attack Strokes metabolic poor health like type two diabetes mental health and dementia right so let's just and eating disorders I think he the only one you missed off that was a very good list yeah so let's keep that at the top of my mind right that's what GFS are causing and a typical British teenager is maybe having 80% of their diets that would be quite normal as a parent that is it's it's sort of terrifying this is the tight RPP that I'm walking I think you walk this as well is going do I terrify everyone and sound a bit hysterical or do we sort of try and find a balance there and I think I think it's very hard what I work at is going we need to s matize the corporations and we need to regulate them we mustn't stigmatize or shame the food itself or or the people who are who are forced to eat it so there's probably no way of perfectly getting that balance right but um and and of sort of underlining like it's not any one product it's not that it's poison it's that when this is your dietary pattern if you if we could switch down to 40% or 30% or 15% like they do in France you know the benefits are kind of enormous but you have to be able to have real food to do it we'll be back to the conversation in just a moment now many of us struggle to find time to eat all of these incredible Whole Foods that's why I'm a big fan of good quality Whole Food supplements like this one that's been in my own life for over three years now it contains over 75 Whole Food Source ingredients vitamins minerals pre and probiotics and can help us support our energy Focus digestion and our immune system ag1 again giving my audience a fantastic offer oneyear supply of vitamin D and five free travel packs with your first order you can see all details at drink a1.com more or just click on the link below and now back to the conversation so the so the sorry the but the the so the diet was a normal diet and Midway through it I was talking to a collaborator in Brazil called Fernanda rber and she kept saying to me you know this isn't food Chris it's it's I we it was almost like an argument I was going well it is food foran she no no no it's an industrially produced edible substance you mustn't think of it as food the purpose of food is nourishment this is not produced for nourishment it's produced for profit and she kept kind of underlining this it was a bit irritating and I sat down that night to eat in the book I say it's a turkey Twizzler actually it's the one thing that isn't true in the book I'd already used a fried chicken and I couldn't eat it and I was reading the ingredients list and she'd made it disgusting for me and we know this happen happens to addicts of all kinds and you know you've you've spoken bit a bit about this you may have experienced it you can feel very attracted to something or someone and suddenly a switch is flicked and they're they're repulsive or or the substance is repulsive and it happens with smokers and we have some evidence about how this happens so that that kind of cheesy Health self-help book The Alan car easy way to quit smoking has three randomized control trials showing it works pretty well as well as any other intervention is recommended by the World Health Organization so I at the second it happened to me I was like oh she's done a kind of Alan car thing where the food wasn't forbidden to me so I was eating it very mindfully and I was learning about it and that was what enabled the F switch to be flick so at the beginning of my book I say please eat this food while you read and only by not forbidding it do we think that you may be kind of released from its spell and that's proved really powerful for so and that isn't me saying I've got some solution or no weight loss program but but it does seem to work for people if if you inspect this food it doesn't stand up so you were for 30 days you were eating this diet of 80% Ultra processed foods and during that so you're you're consuming these foods but you're also talking to these expert scientists who are educating you on just how problematic they can be for various parts of your health and you're saying learning about that whilst eating helped what create some sort of dis disgust or some sort of disgust and addiction are quite love and disgust are quite closely linked in our brains it's the same set of emotional systems I don't think we quite understand all the neurology we do know that liking things and wanting things being addicted to them are very very different and we can like things we don't want and we can want things we don't like and that was established doing lots of different experiments in the 80s and the 90s and often people who smoke will say I don't like cigarettes I don't like anything about them but I do want them and when I'm smoking them I don't even like them and when you ask people who live with addiction to this food they often don't really like the food and especially if you ask them after a few bites they're like no I'm satisfying a craving so a lot of it is what what you said about people hate being told what to do when you take the breakes off and you stop forbidding yourself the food that seems to be quite crucial to unlocking this this disgust thing where you then you then stop wanting it yeah it's interesting that one of these research has said to you it's not food I looked up this morning some of the definitions of food so the Cambridge Dictionary say food is something that people and animals eat or plants absorb to keep them alive Collins English dictionary said any substance containing nutrients such as carbs protein and fats that can be ingested by a living organism and metabolize into energy and body tissue now according to those definitions archers are getting at we we it might be more helpful for us to not consider them Foods I think Michael pollen called them food like substances yeah and Michael pollen had a huge influence over Carlos Montero who came up with the definition yeah they they know each other and their friends so there are several instances in this story of journalists pointing out problems with science the scientists then going and fixing things Mark Shater wrote an amazing book called The Dorito effect which then influenced a lot of the research that was then done at Yale on flavoring and artificial sweetness so yeah it I would say we have a cultural understanding of food that everyone kind of gets that food is about nourishment food has uh is the substance that binds us together it binds us to our heritage our ancestors it binds us to our family and our community It's Not Mere nourishment and there are things missing from those definitions of food food can't be toxic it can't induce disease or it shouldn't I feel like that should be that is baked into all our common understanding of what food is is that it won't make me ill yeah it's it's interesting that because upf's according to that definition you just said that it mustn't cause disease or be harmful well you know It's tricky because they clearly are when consumed in the amounts that we're consuming them I think that's key if if it was only 5% of your diet you're probably going to be okay it's the volume and you know we can say well trans fats a trans fats food well you can get calories from them and we all ate masses of them for ages but now they're banned because they call disease so yeah there's there's there's no legal definition of food but but I think it's helpful for people to not think of a UPF as food I think it's it's a it's a bit of artifice there this 30-day trial you did at the end of it you said your weight went up by six kilos your levels of leptin the ctiy hormone went up five times your levels of CRP the mark of inflammation doubled those were quite remarkable findings in just 30 days those are the kind of um objective measurements that that you could do pre- and post but it was also interesting to hear those more subjective things how how you felt what happened when you woke up at night how did your brain function you're also very open in the book about what it did to your bows um and you know how quickly that returned or it returned back to normal when you return back to a whole food diet so maybe that was really cool was the the lesson the intellectual lesson was underlined by kind of overdosing on on the problem and then suddenly going cold turkey because I didn't want it anymore and it was like the clouds parted so as a as a physician I think we live often very different lives to our patients we're generally more privileged uh in in just in puure finest but we also generally make more money because doctors are paid and so we eat different food we have different levels of Education about food and so what happened in the space of that month was I kind of aged 10 years and I developed all these problems that I hadn't had before uh the the the sleeplessness where you wake up in the middle of the night and you go to the fridge that was that was kind of new and the piles and the general aching and misery all of which at the time I didn't it was weird I didn't associate it with the food until I quit the food and it all went away when we you've talked about this I think you understand this better than me when we feel anxious or unhappy we really point at the thing in front of us and go that's that's the problem it's my work it's my children it's my marriage and it was when I stopped the food I went oh my wife didn't suddenly become absolute pain in the neck for a month in fact the opposite was true it was me that had become unbearable and it was it was driven by the food so I was very inflamed and and the sleeplessness was you know you get into it's that vicious cycle I mean you talk this it was your pillars it was like I I destroyed those pillars one by one starting with the food and that interrupted everything else I mean Chris hearing that is really powerful because I almost do the opposite with my patient so you went onto a specific diet which then gave you a whole host of non non-specific and specific symptoms right General malays moodiness low energy low Vitality stopped exercising stopped exercising work was hard all these kind of things but you also had you know constipation anal Fisher all these things that you write about and I'm going to draw this into another part that you think that we shouldn't be looking to the industry for the solution the solution has to come from government and doctors I want to talk about that in just a moment from a medical perspective I qualified in 2001 for medmer medical school I like many doctors when they finished Medical School thought that they had been taught all the tools that they need to get their patients well and then I started practicing and I thought well what I've learned is fantastic for maybe 20% of my patients but there's a whole 80% of people with chronic symptoms sometimes vague non-specific symptoms that I can't quite put a label on that I don't really have many tools to help and you know listeners to my show will know I went on a journey from 2010 or so I've been going around the world going to conferences to try and learn about nutrition and movement and sleep and stress and the gut microbiome and how did these things affect us and I would say around 23 I made quite a significant change in the way I practiced which is with a lot of patients who came in who had chronic symptoms whether it was you know whatever it might be sometimes autoimmune conditions sometimes fatigue energy Iris bow syndrome even vague things I didn't know what it was I would try and suggest to them that they go on a whole food diet for 2 to three weeks if they could and I remember on a scrap bit of paper paper from the printer I'd write down I said look if you can what I'd recommend for the next few weeks is just see what happens if you're only consuming Whole Foods now I recognize it can be hard I recognize there a poverty issue I recognize all of that but I started to get truly mesmerized when people would come back a few weeks later go oh my mood's better oh oh I don't have that anymore oh that that sort of vague pain that I don't have that anymore I've got more energy I'm sleeping better I'm not talking about weights blood sugar measurements blood I'm not talking about weight my high potential my high blood pressure is gone and I thought wait a minute how many of the problems that we're seeing that we're taught to diagnose give a label to and then give a treatment to how many of these are Downstream consequences of the way that we're eating and I tell you what this is again Chris I don't this is wellknown enough you mentioned the link between Ultra processed food and inflammatory bowel disease things like Crohn's disease and Ultra colitis we can talk about this through the lens of autoimmune disease I remember so clearly one of the first times this had happened I've seen this many times since then but years ago a lady came to see me with hypothyroidism so she had an underactive thyroid she was on 75 micrograms of Leo thyroxine a day which is very standard treatment but she didn't feel good in herself and you know so her blood tests were exceptional you know everything was in the correct range so as doct says we feel pretty good with oursel right because you know we've treated her condition she treated her blood test she still feels rubbish now so when I saw her for the first time I said listen um your blood test look great but I understand that you're not feeling good in the first instance would you be open to maybe changing what you're eting and she said to me you know do you think this will make a difference to I said listen I don't know honestly but I know what you are currently eating and I know that food impacts your gut microbiome which has an impact on your immune system and this is an autoimmune issue so there's definitely no harm here so why don't we try this this completely changed her life she went on a I think she got this Paleo cookbook actually which she followed within six months she was down to 25 micrograms on L thyroxine today so we could reduce her dose of thyroid hormone and she felt amazing and that just continued but I don't think I still don't think across medicine across the population we understand that the food we're eating and I get it's hard right I'm not saying this is easy it can impact all kinds of different things right it's not just your weight it's so much more I mean we we if if if we break down the evidence because because we're sure that Ultra is food that a non-hole food diet is causing these problems and if you go well what are the plausible mechanisms you're like well synthetic emulsifiers we've got really good data now that they scrub out your gut they thin the mucus lining they disrupt the microbi now do we understand all the KnockOn impacts of that no but do we know that it generates terrible inflammation and metabolic disease in rats yes you know are rats people no but if if it does it to rats do we have reason to be concerned about the number of synthetic ml far routing yeah absolutely do we have early human data that's troubling absolutely and could this also explain if we scrub out the gut we inflame it and we start leaking fecal bacteria into our bloodstream that drains to our liver do we think this cycle of inflammation that that's going to drive might be explaining the increases in in GI cancers in gastrointestinal cancers including liver cancer in young people yeah it could be it's pretty plausible and the emulsifiers and then we can go through that with carboxymethyl cellulose with multidex with non-nutritive sweetness so with the additives alone we can start doing that then we could look at all the synthetic fats and on and on and on so the idea that this food might be driving all these problems isn't isn't isn't exactly a you know wildly improbable it's extremely likely and well evidenced and where I feel comfortable as a doctor making these recommendations is if you think about what's the risk of harm here well there's pretty much zero risk of harm when you improve your diet like with that lady I thought well if nothing changes yeah okay fine then but at least know and she knows that diet is not playing a role because when you do that with patients it's just like your experience of 30 days of doing it and then within 48 Hours your sleep your bows everything starts to return back I think that's a very powerful experience for a patient go wait a minute I had no idea that this was impacting me that much because it's sort of like the it's it's the water you're you're living in the air you breathe you sort of can't you can't understand all our lives have a lot of causal density and so we of course work is stressful and family life is stressful we don't understand that it was the food we ate last night and the problems and the food we've actually been eating for 5 10 years that that's been that's the proximate cause of why we ended up screaming at our kids let's just talk about how in adverted commas real foods become ultr processed right and two examples I want to I want to talk about our bread M and pizza MH now I think I've got it you have you got some bread I don't have any pizza but I've got breads right so again I just looked in the local news agents I just thought what is looking healthy yeah right medium slice whole meal no added sugar right so perhaps okay me what's in there this let's have a quick look at the ingredients and check it is so um it's got uh um it's got vegetable oils including sustainable Palm there's no such thing as sustainable Palm let's be clear about this and palm fat that's in this is not uh it's not the the red spicy liquid that you squeeze out of palm nuts for West African cooking this is refined bleach deodorized hydrogenated and Inter aerified Palm fat so that is makes it then this weak gluten and then this emulsify z471 e481 e472 e so that is dietle tartaric acid estas of mono and diglycerides of fatty acids so this is this is ultrapress bread meets all my you know other foods with lots of ingredients yes tick foods with Health claims no added sugar real bread so I would say it may be useful for many people to not think of this or any bread like this as real bread real bread has three ingredients it has water uh wheat and salt that's how you make bread you can use naturally occurring yeasts um this has you know no added sugar sugar should not be in any bread I mean Sugar's what you put in cake it doesn't go in bread and again we've got the the great traffic lights they're all greens apart so these are all good signs that something is ultra processed yes and do you know can I just say Chris one one of the ways that you outlined in your book I thought was brilliant which was if you're wondering whether that food is ultra processed it probably it probably is if you're reading an ingredients list you're probably eating an industrially produced food if you go and buy broccoli there is no ingredients this time there's also no Health claim on broccoli or cabbage or tomatoes or onions one ingredient Foods it's like one ingredient food you know the one thing we're sure is that if you cook at home unless you are cooking those kind of Internet cakes where you make them all out of candy yeah you know if you're cooking at home you no almost no matter what ingredients you're using you're you're going to be doing yourself a service so so that bread so the the difference between that bread and what I would call real bread is um there are several things about that are harmful it's incredibly soft so that is one of the products that you will spread with an ultr process spread of some kind some margarine maybe some lowfat mayonnaise or some chocolate spread and you will consume calories that erate your body cannot keep up with the flour is very very fine particles and the protein has been back added to the flour bread flour should be very high protein they've back added the weak gluten into that for absolute control and then it's emulsified and the emulsifiers do all kinds of things broadly that bread is a a kind of whipped foam of these commodity carbs uh proteins and and fats uh and then it's sort of baked into this very light soft spongy substance that is a vehicle for ultr processed spreads so the main thing about the difference between that and real bread is you'll consume it very quickly but it has got those emulsifiers which we have some evidence will will drive some harms we as a family went to um kfu a couple years ago for you know a holiday and I remember going to this really old uh Greek Bakery like it's been there for years it had a great feel in it and I think we missed I think we we were driving past it on the way back to where we were staying it was around lunchtime and we thought we'd go and get something and all the bread had run out and you they said you can't have an in now till tomorrow morning because it was all made in that kind of you can't just turn it around in an hour like you can now at the supermarkets it's actually no there's a process to make this and it and it all when it's gone it's gone and the next day we picked up what she said was a a very ancient bread called I think it was called Z bread and you know I don't eat much bread right so it was a real treat and it tasted completely different it wasn't soft or chewy right it was it was a bit harder um it took longer to eat you couldn't just wolf it down and I think the point I'm trying to make here is that and and you can also make it with pizza if you want that bread is not bread right bread is just the word how is that bread made what is the ingredients what is the list within it there should be I mean we have this with cheese we have this with Cornish pasties bread should have a standard where you can't just call any old stuff bread at the moment there isn't really a definition of bread you can call anything you want bread you can call a lot of bread is more much more like cake it's got huge amounts of sugar in it and you say in the book that actually most Supermarket bought bread these days is ultra processed yes now there are Supermarket breads you can buy that will not have very many ingredients won't have any weird ingredients some perhaps only one of them is really truly non UPF bread there is this loophole in ingredients list whereas if you if you use additives that don't have a function in the final product so they are merely processing agents the oil you put on the rollers for example or something some way of treating the flour those never have to go on an ingredients list so there are these sort of sourds that um seem like they are real sourdough and they're this sour Foe and they'll have lots of treatment agents in them the reason I'm bringing up pizza is because so was a very powerful section when you you roast my pizza being it starts off as a real food but it's yeah Pizza is a traditional healthy food it's a piece of sourdough or a piece of piece of dough cooked at high temperature with tomatoes and a bit of cheese you know it's a really healthy meal pizza and it but when you Ultra process it and you turn it into something with emulsifiers and you intensify the acids and the sugars um and you add more flavorings it you can turn traditional healthy food into an addictive substance they kind of a appalling things that pizza is synonymous with junk food the same with fried chicken you know Fried Chicken is a traditional food in it's incredibly healthy uh good for you it's got a massively Rich culinary history it was mainly developed by enslaved peoples and it's now been commodified by gigantic companies and it's now being sold back to uh to particularly low income settings and it Fried Chicken can be a perfectly healthy bit of a part of a of of a healthy diet um so kind of this is the genius of the food companies in a ways to to take these traditional foods and and make them feel like uh they are traditional but they they're really not they have nothing to do with their Origins I'd love to talk about um artificial sweetness Chris because I think there's been a lot of confusion and controversy around them for a number of years now you're very clear I think on your your views with don't know your view can I can you give me your potted summary on I'm not a fan of artificial sweeteners I haven't I didn't think you would be but I I I haven't being at all um in fact you know how long have you worried about them I'm going to say 2015 2016 something like that because it was when I saw early data suggesting that they may have a detrimental impact on the microbiome now I know that's not I I can't remember what that study was at the time but it may not be like a human trial that has shown conclusively but I thought well there's enough it it was a paper in nature in 2014 a really good paper it was R dat it was by a group um it was by a group that iyed in fact I think that paper is in there a very good study was rat data but yeah I I always try and take that precautionary principle go listen this stuff hasn't been around long I to my knowledge I'm not sure here and I also think we sometimes do our patients a disservice right because it's easy to go oh you know it's much easier you know at least there's no calories in this and I know you'll kind of explain what the issue is with that so it's let's say we're talking about Coke right oh Diet Coke is better I'm like well I'm not sure because if my patient is really struggling I think I'm better off trying to lay it on the line with them be honest and see when they're making the transition can they make that transition to water and honestly some people can right so I don't think we need to I think there's I think we should be concerned I think we should be acknowledge that poverty plays a role acknowledge that some people find it harder than others but I think we also have to be careful we don't disempower people and go some patients even if they're on the povery would rather know from me is this helping me should I have and and I so I've always taken the approach of trying to be honest with my patients even though some may find it hard to implement be honest and I think more and more data now is is supporting that very thing there's a difference between giving people uncomfortable information they find it hard to act on which I think is really important I think we're obliged to do that and giving people dogmatic advice yeah you know and you and you never do that I mean I I think of these diet diet drinks particularly as a way of ultr processing water so you can't make much money from water you you can make a remarkable amount if you put it in a fancy pack but it's it's you know people will only drink water to thirst really if you put phosphoric acid flavoring caffeine and sweeteners in that water and you carbonate it and then you sell it in an ad with with a sports star or a model then you Ultra process water you've added no n nutrients it's a it's a it's got four you know all the diet drinks have four green traffic lights they've got Zero nutrition but it's a way of getting people to drink more liquid for you know I mean the cost of these ingredients is virtually nil especially if you can get rid of the sugar you said something you said people will only drink water to thirst that's a problem if you're a food company isn't it that's a huge problem people only eat when they're hungry and only drink water to thirst so if you can find a way of getting people to drink more liquid than they feel thirsty for and eat more food than they feel hungry for that's the purpose of ultra processing I do have one of these um diet drinks here just talk us through the ingredients there so this is my if you can if you can understand why this is not a healthy product and and this is not for the audio list let's explain what it is this is this is diet this is a diet cola you know it happens to be Diet Coke but this this will this will differ any of them it's got four Dre green traffic lights this is the healthiest thing you can buy on any shelf in any Supermarket okay this is incredibly healthy go go go now the ingredients and it's all this silver you know writing and it's beautiful refreshing taste no calories no sugar okay so let's look at the it's a sparkling low calorie soft drink with plant extracts with sweetness I mean arguably plant extract sounds sounds wonderful AR caffeine is a plant extract and so is citric acid although in neither case I suspect they come from plants so let's look at the ingredients carbonated water fine color caramel e150d now caramel e150d has nothing to do with caramel on a crem boule right it's it's a um it's an industrially manufactured coloring agent used by by modifying carbs um so why are they calling it that well they call it caramel 150 I think it it should just be called e150d um what does a caramel do do you think when they put that on it makes it sound like it's it's got to do with maybe something traditional traditional confectionary creme brulee caram Food it sounds like food yeah then we've got aspartame and Asis alame K now aspartame has been uh I I mean the who has said this does cause cancer I'm not enormously worried about that evidence I think there are lots of things that are carcinogenic if we cook food um but the evidence is good it's just not a very strong effect what's a much more concerning effect is that aspartame and asell Fame K to non-nutritive sweeteners seem to cause a lot of metabolic confusion so we've had data building for you know since 2014 huge paper this summer in the journal cell which if you're a molecular biologist like me is is the the journal you want to publish stuff in and it showed you know previously here was the the theory and I think you've probably been saying this for ages and I was if you put sweet taste on the tongue you get this pre-absorptive insulin release so you release a little bit of insulin that drops your blood sugar and then you go looking for more sugar and you eat more french fries so your body's trying to help you this was the old this is the old way of thinking about the sweeteners is the reason they seem to be causing harm is they drive you to get sugar in other places because they've we've been sure for quite a long time they don't seem to lead to weight loss which is weird so the old theory was by lowering your blood sugar they made you go and eat more french fries that was the old Theory what it seems now is that most of them put your blood sugar up and this no one's entirely sure why this happens but it seems like the reason we have a sweet a taste detector in our mouth to detect sweetness it's not just for fun it's to prepare our body to receive sugar when that Sugar doesn't arrive it causes a kind of physiological stress it's a confusion because it's a mismatch between expectation and what actually arrives if you just put phosphoric acid into the gut and it seems like this stress may be leading to a stress response which elevates blood sugar no one's entirely sure what what we are increasingly sure about is that these in the long term do not seem Superior to Sugar very much they don't seem to be much worse but they don't seem to be any better than sugar when it comes to weight gain or metabolic Health like your risk of type 2 diabetes they seem to elevate that over if you just drink water so we've got these troubling non-nutritive sweeteners then we've got natural flavorings caffeine flavoring and then we've got phosphoric acid and citric acid both will dissolve your teeth the phosphoric acid also leeches the minerals out of your bones and you pee out your own skeleton less of a problem for you and I but if you're if you're a woman and you're approaching menopause you are at risk of osteoporosis and so you are increasing that risk so this is quite you know I mean I could I could probably do another half hour just on this product there is nothing in this that has any benefit um so I it it's symbolic of how we misunderstand healthy foods how we think that we can just Strip calories out how we misunderstand human appetite and how we we don't have any way of as a public you know in of public talking about these acids these that difference between expectation and reality for the body is really really interesting I was thinking about that this morning Chris that you mentioned that through the lens of artificial sweetness but if I take a step back from that and I think about what's in your book I think about the fact that we seems we seem to have separated out the reward from the effort in so many things in our life these days so it you know let's say food right instead of now having to acquire hunt gather the food prepare it spend time cooking it and then we get the rewards we can now literally on the way home from work on our smartphone just order something that will be there and hot when we when we we arrive home if we want to so we're getting the reward without the effort you can make the same case for social media and our online low-grade addictions whereby we're now getting or highgrade addictions or highgrade addictions we're getting dopamine for not doing very much right and and I I kind of see there's a well literally in my I mean I want I mean you've this is a good moment to say you gave me a piece of advice we were having a drink we we met at on BBC thing like it was a decade ago and you gave me this piece of advice you didn't frame it as advice you just mentioned um and I'm going to misquote you here but you just mentioned you charge your you don't charge your phone in your bedroom and um I took that very seriously for some reason something about the way you framed it I just like internalized it's like a core religious belief and that night I charged my phone in my kitchen that has got me every night another half hour sleep because it is the only way I can be abstinent from my phone addiction yeah if the if the phone is next to the bed I will no I'm just up I'm just up till till one just and not not like meaningfully engaging with my my followers not sending out useful information about ultrapress food or food policy or I just like Doom scrolling you know cat videos and car crashes I it's just terrible but it's it's kind of well first of all I'm delighted at I me like I quote you on this and say I always attribute it to you it was the best bit of advice anyone has ever given you didn't give it as advice you know what it does when it's not in your room there's it's it's also when you wake up in the middle of the night there's no temptation that's exactly because your kids kids get you you know I'm up twice a night with the with the girls they want to pee or they want just a cuddle or whatever and if the phone was there you know you know you it's a Strong Addiction you talk about a mild addiction for me it is is a huge problem and I cannot be abstinent from my phone for all kinds of practical reasons you know just getting here today I need my phone so I these things weigh on me a lot yeah we've evolved over Millennia to acquire things in a certain way to eat things in a certain way and of course humans are always trying to make it easier you know we we always have done but it's just now we're in a state where ease and convenience is now killing us quite literally it's killing us and it's whenever we try and hack human biology it's seems that it leads to negative consequences yeah we're not quite as clever as Evolution just taking a quick break to give a shout out to Vivo barefoot shoes now I've been a huge fan of Vivo Barefoot for over 10 years now well before they started supporting my podcast they are the only shoes that I wear and they really have had a huge impact on my own life and the lives of many of my patients you see when people start wearing Minimalist Shoes like Vios you can see improvements in things like back pain hip pain knee pain foot pain even things like plop fasciitis can often get better and scientific research shows us that just wearing Vios for about four months or so improves the strength in your feet by over 60% which is absolutely incredible one thing people don't realize about these shoes is just how flexible they are which allows your feet to do what your feet naturally want to do rather than the shoe dictating your foot's movement Vivo Barefoot are giving my audience a 15% off onetime code when you make your first order and they make it really easy for you to give them a try they give a 100 day trial for new customers so if you don't like them you just send them back for a full refund I'm a huge fan I really hope you take advantage of this offer to get your 15% off codes all you need to do is go to Vivo barfoot.co.nz FL live more or click on the link in the description box below yeah we think we are we think you know what soft drinks with sugar are a problem all right let's give you that sweet taste but without the sugar that'll sort it little by little we're now learning well maybe it's not going to solve it and maybe there may be some adverse consequences of that because we're hacking the tongue is part of the digestive system you know when when things come in enzymes all kinds of physiological processes change based upon what goes on your tongue if if that then doesn't come in to your belly and stretch and whatever it might be your body will get confused I mean this food it seems true smell you know you walk into a kitchen someone's frying some onions and cooking a piece of meat you know that your physiology is changing your your mouth starts to water your tummy starts to rumble you know there's a million other changes happening that we we've barely unpicked so when you put these molecules that lie to us on the tongue it's a problem because it's not just the non-nutritive sweetness they're the ones we've studied the flavor enhancers glutamate inosinate guate they signal that protein is on its way readily digested protein you know fermented protein they should be in a in the context of a rich Ramen broth when they arrive on a on a on a potato starch chip you know they're really that's why when you pop you can't stop and the gums similarly that's so interesting so you're having a Ramen there's Umami in it yeah so that is that protein is on its way it's matched the amami in the ramen is matched to the ingredients of the ramen it's it's like the sweet taste of sugar is matched to what's physiologic what's nutritionally in the sugar but when it's hacked and the potato crisp with the yumami flavor you've now got a mismatch in that system yeah and we we we what's amazing and the same is true with the gums so you look at um xantham gum Locus bean gum Gua gum caragen and all these gums that are in loads of things they create a smooth fatty sliminess that means you can add them to yogurt and take out Dairy fats very expensive if you can put in a bit of modified cornstarch it's very cheap so you just save money but your tongue is going oh Fat's on the way when the fat doesn't arrive in the gut again we don't really know because all of the studies of taste and flavor happen in this whole bit of literature scientific literature that's a million miles away from health no one's ever studied how tastes and flavor Drive appetite so in this Lancet series for example we're publishing a big series big medical journal all about Ultra prous Food We have basically nothing to say about how tastes and flavor Drive appetite because no one's ever studied it and yet you and I know if I just mix you up a bowl of fat and sugar you're not going to eat it it's going to be disgusting if I flavor it and I texture it now we're talking now I can turn it into something you'll eat to excess so there's there's so many things about our food that the food companies understand in great detail and that the academic Community really don't have any idea what does emotional eating come in here Chris because of course today so many people struggle with making the choices that they want to make we we've already mentioned how environment hugely influences our Behavior but a lot of people will eat more for example when they're stressed I think there was a stress in America report from a few years ago which suggested that maybe 80% or so people changed their eating behavior in response to stress it was something like 45% eat more 35% of us eat less and we're living in highly stressful times where you know increasing rates of burnouts people are struggling with their mental well-being how does our stress and the way that we eat in response to that stress relate to ultra processed foods so I would say I think about it in the same way that poverty drives a lot of uh negative Health behaviors so we know that people who live in stress and and poverty is the main driver of of stress um people who live in poverty smoke a lot more now that doesn't mean that stress and poverty cause lung cancer it's that uh they drive a set of behaviors that we know cause health problems so ultr pred is like one of the ways that stress manifests its harm gambling apps Alcohol Tobacco drugs of abuse ultrapress food these are all ways in which people who live with stress will experience they will they will will uh manifest those those Health harms that's how they will come to be so a lot of people say look my problem isn't Ultra precious food my problem is stress or emotions but when we look at the data and I work with the raw College of psychiatrists on this the only foods that those people binge on are ultr processed so people never when they're stressed turn to the the broccoli and the kimchi and the you know the salads we turn to the ultr processed products we don't even turn to the fatty salty foods that we make ourselves so one finding seems to be that you generally don't binge on your own chocolate brownies on homemade ice cream on homemade cakes you part of the part of the binging and the the way that the excess consumption is they have to be wrapped up branded and made in this special way that hacks your appetite so stress is a huge part of the problem I mean if the headline on all of this right on everything you and I are talking about is if we stopped sweating about Ultra processed food and we just dealt with poverty we know that would get rid of 50 to 60% of the problems we're talking about and that's a sort of whole separate thing but that that is that's the umbrella thing is is you know the the tragedy is people being forced to eat this poverty is a massive issue to change that would require political will it would require societal change that can take time right so um an infinite amount of time I suspect well let's say the will was there right let's just be Optimist for a minute and say the the will is there it is going to take time you're very careful in the book to say you don't want to give people advice right you don't want to tell people what to do this is a societal issue but you know where this is going for that person who is struggling with their health and saying look Chris I get what you're saying I had no idea ultrapress Foods were this toxic for me in the volumes that I'm consuming them I cannot wait for society to change I cannot wait until my school serves my kids healthy foods and not Ultra processed foods do you have any advice for what they can do right now uh no but I'll tell people what I do um and they can which is what you did for me all those years ago so I'll I'll tell you what I do which is um uh my life is much more expensive now so I I have to budget for buying real food and you're going to spend more of your money on real food and maybe that will be disposable income but you may have to if you want to then I just sacrifice money elsewhere what do how much do we spend on average on on on food at the moment in the UK uh on average we spend about 6 to 8% of our inome of of our income 6 to 8% of our and and if we just look compared to you know northern Europe you're spending 12 14 15% uh compared to low income settings people spend 50 60% of their income on food and if we look at it through a different lens 50,000 years ago we probably spent our entire day trying to acquire food animals spend if you think of animals have a have a budget of of resources it's almost all spent on food and then a little bit on reproduction once in a while but most of what animals do is is acquiring food so this isn't a choice in the UK we have massive inequality if you it cost I mean the train ticket to get here was like hundreds of pounds it is bizarre our transport our rent our energy we live in an incred incredibly expensive in equitus country so it's not a choice it's people don't have money to spend on food um if you can spend a bit more great it will be hard that loaf that we just looked at was I'm going to guess about a pound if you go and buy a loaf of freshly baked sourdough from your local it'll it'll be probably 10 times as could be up to 10 times as expensive um so what I do is I I try and regard preparing food as not a hassle it's easy to oh it's a pain and try and remember you know there is it should connect you to like this is this is like a like I think you this is the point you're making it's a core human activity and we should regard it as like part of the essential functions of Our Lives preparing food can be meditative it can be a cultural experience you can learn things teach it to your kids it almost needs to be again for those who can it almost needs to be factored into your schedule right it's almost like you know there's all these productivity hacks about in this and if it ain't in the diary it ain't happening like and there's pros and cons of all those things but but broadly if you don't put your trainers out the night before you won't go for a run I mean you know these sort of obvious things that it's really true you do have to build in a bit of time you're not going to decide you know this morning to make a sandwich for your kids school lunch you know you're going to have to you you need a bit of planning my little tip is well again it's not a tip what I do to turn that into an enjoyable part of my day is I put on music when I'm in the kitchen like I know it sounds I don't know it sounds almost a bit cliched but I've said this before I'm old school I still listen to CDs I bought a new Noah Gunderson CD this weekend I because I've got a CD player in my kitchen and it keeps me off my phone like one of the problems with a phone having all your music on and I get it and I do have music on my phone as well but I'm going to go and buy a CD player mate honestly they're really cheap now they so so I've got it there can you still buy them you still can Well mine's I don't no actually I'm not looked for a while but mine you probably can the point is is that I've found what works for me which is I like many people also feel quite busy a lot of the time married young kids busy job etc etc like many people and so I realized if I just put on one of my favorite albums in those 30 minutes or whatever it might be that I'm in the kitchen preparing it completely changes my experience of it do you know what I mean which if you're doing it kind of you know fing through what so so yeah you get frustrated I've got that email to get back to I need to get back to that WhatsApp and I'm like no put the phone away but You' got to shop in advance as well like if you go to your shop at the end of the road that's all the food you will be able to buy so you also have to prep and go to a bigger Supermarket or you have to prep unfortunately and then my my other invitation to people is simply to say you are part of an experiment you did not volunteer for right we do not know that emulsifiers non-nutritive sweeteners multiex and modified stues we don't know they're safe they might be safe the date the emerging data might be wrong I think it almost certainly isn't um but none of us signed up for this this stuff is just added without our consent to all our food so you have to feel a bit angry you can be a victim if you want but I think you got to move from I moved from sort of victimhood to sort of activism quite quickly and you have to think of shopping I guess as a as an activist project that's how I I think I just don't want to give my money my financial support to uh companies that don't just harm us that they you know they are harming the global ecosystem they're harming children all around the world I mean they they're incredibly predatory they're very extractive from the global South to the global north um you don't really want to give most of these companies your money um and then I invite people to just eat along for a month like if you I mean you don't have to buy my book lots of people can't afford the book there's loads of there's a great piece in the guardian you can get for free by B Wilson um who's a a mentor of mine really she's an incredible writer and you can read B Wilson's piece in the guardian for free eat the food for a few days like for for 2 three days go on an 80% UPF buy it but buy all your old childhood favorites tuck in you're already most people most of us are eating this stuff anyway read your ingredients lists and the one thing I did is I pour it out on a plate like if if you get a takeaway serve it on China with a knife and fork and you will realize that's when the LIE is exposed you know you get your burger and fries and you're like this is a sad this isn't the picture in in the app um and you you know hopefully you can make that Journey from from addiction to disgust some people are going to find it really easy just I'm just G to cut down you the same people you've had loads of patients they're drinking a half a bottle of wine a night and they can quickly turn that to like a glass of wine you know every few nights and that's fine some people are going to struggle and those people have my love and my my support and I would just say you know it's incredibly hard and and if if you do struggle I I there are going to be some people who find this impossible and I you know I don't know what to say to them I don't I think you know that that's where someone like you you sort of pick up at a moment where I'm I'm uncomfortable and I think I think a lot of what you say will be really helpful to people that's why it's kind of nice to come on here look it's always hard how do you communicate this information I I passionately agree with you that our environment in huge part determines our Behavior but I guess you know I guess where a doctor or a healthcare professional would come in is that you're generally seeing a patient one-on-one so if it is a political solution if it is a cultural solution a societal Solution that's required it kind of doesn't help you in that oneon-one because that patient's coming they're looking at you they're struggling one of the things I learned in AUM with families who were struggling and time to diabetes was rampant in that practice was for patients who felt that they couldn't afford much I'd really spend a lot of time going okay look what are you eating okay and I remember at the time there was a Tesco nearby a big Tesco in that area and 12 eggs I can't remember how much it was but it was pretty cheap but for those individual patients I found that just telling them about eggs and how nutritious an egg can be in instead of let's say um let's say a breakfast cereal that was full of sugar and full of flavoring you can get a dozen eggs for for less than the bo yeah yeah the point I'm trying to make is that I've my whole point of doing this show is to try and Empower individuals because it's individuals who listen yes there are a lot of policy makers who listen as well and I hope that your book and this sort of conversation helps them realize and politicians realize we have to change things because it's unfair to put this on individuals but I also want to without making people feel bad I want to lead them with hope where they go I can at least make some changes but this is this is a very important distinction between us is people need to do the same thing now because I am literally speaking to policy makers I go into the Department of Health and I speak to I speak to companies I never ever take their money um because I write policy articles and I work with Charities to influence policy and I advised who I I refuse to have a discussion with anyone publicly about the affordability of food that's I'm being a bit Arch here and so there's so here's a sort of public confession is it is I think for many people affordable to actually switch to whole food diet I never ever say that because who am I to say that like I just I have such privilege and and a history of privilege that I can't it just isn't for me to to say that out loud I think there are so many food camp cign is I think you have a different voice to me I think you have a slightly different audience you're not in there with you know you're also not involved in a battle against industry in the way that if I open my mouth in that way and I start going look at the price of porridge look at the price of lentils industry will paint me in a heartbeat as you know privileged middle class snobby um you know generating food stigma so I'm a bit Arch about it and I'm kind of almost to the point of perversity I refuse to give advice because because all my my my laser focus is regulate industry stop the food industry paying the policy makers and put a warning label on the and we need we need people in all camps I would argue like we need people like you who are putting pressure on these policy makers to make changes that ultimately make it easy for people to make the choices that actually they do want to make and you did you not no never once in that book do I celebrate real food I mean there is a moment where I talk about the evidence that W nuts and olive oil are good for you but basically I don't mention real food in that book as as being sort of healthy I don't celebrate it at all because there are so many voices from disadvantaged backgrounds and and and diverse voices who can speak to that cause yeah and if I get involved in that you know it just kind of pollutes what they're doing and it muddies what I'm doing I really does that make sense makes sense and I think this is really important because the solution is going to be multifaceted you you by coming on here the the opportunity is in the I mean this is going to be the work of my entire lifetime right like it took us 60 years from the evidence that tobacco products cause lung disease the incontrovertible evidence to any meaningful regulation for 60 years now I think this will take 30 years with with food it'll happen quicker because we will use the tobacco control template to regulate the food industry and we we sort of know how to do it it's still going to take ages so in the intervening three decades what you going to do someone has to say to people and and I work with lots of people and and and you know including you who who can then promote individual Solutions and and and Solutions in the meantime yeah I think it's so important and and I think I mentioned this earlier on in our conversation but I gave a keynote in September at the British Society of Lifestyle medicine uh annual conference and just before me was Sir Michael mmt who of course has done incredible work yeah in terms of the relationship between poverty and health and I love his research I think it's fantastic what it has showcased what it has proven at the same time I think I don't mean this with somich M at all I mean just in general I think within our profession what I found sometimes is that even online on social media so well this is a societal issue and it is a societal issue but we can take that to an extreme where I think we disempower individuals and I think we can sometimes look down on people in poor families I go oh you know they can't do anything because you know what can they do until we make a big change for them and maybe it's my background that makes me quite sensitive to that but I think both things are true it's really interesting no one's ever yeah quite framed it like that to me I'm not directing you think but do you think I'm making a a mistake with sometimes I think and everyone does say to me look just give us the give us the quick guide give us the what to do and I I kind of refuse to do it but you're making me think like maybe there is a maybe I should lean in a little bit more to it because basically what I am doing you're you're completely right that a little bit of me is going um people from dis Advantage don't have any power to do this I think I I think what I really feel is they don't need to hear it from me I really appreciate your honesty I think you you know I think it's I honestly think it's really incredible what you're doing how you do your advocating the progress you're making I think it's incredible and as I say we need different voices one thing I did want to um talk about Chris just before we finish off we both know a lot of the science on ultr processed foods and what it's doing to human health it seems from what I can tell that we have taken a slightly different approach with our children now you and I have taken a different I think so okay which I think it's worth boring because what I one thing I always say before talking about any parenting thing is I am just sharing my experience right I never want to tell anyone how to parents go for it no no I'm certainly not telling and I think you have the same opinion which you don't want to tell anyone else how to parent we're trying to figure out I have no idea what I'm doing like on a day-to-day basis you know I'm you know I do not I'm not the the powerful I'm not either right I I think all parents genuinely are trying to do the best that they can based upon what they know so how do you how do you kind of feed or like what what do you say your what do your kids eat so they were largely until I would say the last year or two when my son has been in secondary school where things start to change they're they're they're 13 and 11 okay so I've got 13y old and 11 year olds and again I want to be very clear my son was very unwell when he was six months old was he didn't right which is a huge part of why I do what I do today so that's hugely influenced how I see the world and how I see the health of my kids you know we could have he could have died when he was six months old in a foreign Hospital okay it was a very very scary time I've spoken about about that before on the podcast so therefore having nearly had a son who was no longer around I then see the world a particular way which is I want to do everything I can for my kids not that anyone doesn't to be clear to promote really really good health so we've always had largely a whole food based diet at home and even when they were at primary school they mostly would so if they went to um I remember when the kids would go on school trips at their first school you know we would make them fruit I say we my wife let me be really clear on this not um she would make these really nice fruit kebabs where they would take with them and actually I do remember one of the teachers once saying wow that's such an awesome idea we normally give the kids sweets but from next year we're going to actually now you know make these fruit kebabs because they're really easy to do which that's a side note we generally will try and eat mostly whole food at home um yes of course now that my son's a bit older he goes out with his friends you know they'll go to pizzza express whatever it might be and I struggle what I struggle with is knowing this exess is okay yeah I don't know but I think but the point is the point I guess in a Long window way I'm trying to get to is you can know the science and you've written a wonderful book on this right and then you're like okay knowing that what on Earth do we do because everywhere around us they're being offered this food at every party they go to they're being offered this food often at schools they being offered this food and then so how do you bring them up how do and not be a social outcast th this to me is the most important thing is I am treading this kind of Highwire of going I don't want my kids to be weird I mean we you know anyone who's been a kid knows the most important thing when you were a kid is to be normal it's just fit in sure we love our kids to be the kind of quirky Outsider who is absolutely confident but most of our kids AR like that so my view is I don't tell them not to eat stuff at parties when they go to a party it is Open Season my my I've got a six and a three year-old right so dialogue with a three-year-old is somewhat limited but Lyra knows Lyra can read you chapter and verse on Ultra process food and she understands that some food is nourishing and some food isn't when she goes to a party she eats quite a lot of rubbish um you know grandparents bring it into the house they get party bags so we have a blue Bowl in the kitchen that's up on a shelf and it's full of it's just full of absolute rubbish and they get it I would say if I'm really honest most days they will Pro probably most days they not every day they get after dinner they will get some little treat or sweet from the Blue Bowl but it is not the foundation of their diet but some but yeah so and I look do that sound no I really appreciate how do you but how do you do it with yours at at parties or when Grand grandparents or relatives or friends BR the grandparents know what we're keen on what we're not right but but you control your grandparents well let let me the thing is it's very easy to look at the downstream situation now without looking at the Upstream drivers many many years ago so because of what happened with my son that then changed everything for us and how we look at this right so had that never happened I'm not sure how I would parent right I I I honestly can't can't say and I think it's easier when you do it from a super young age now here's the situation Chris I like everyone else is trying to do the best that I can I don't know if in 5 to 10 years time when they're no longer under well even sooner I don't know if they'll go off the rails and go find that this was restrictive I don't know like I've definitely loosened up over the last few years because I think actually you know what wrong with chill out a little bit he needs to fit in with his friends so I've had to like look at my own baggage around that and deal with that and I think sometimes I watch them now and they go I think they made some pretty good choices and I wonder we also have all always spoken about um food from a very young age sounds like you're doing that with your kids they understand they know all the stuff that I write about and have been writing about for you know seven eight years now we discuss all these ideas I remember when they were sort of six and three or six and four talking about you know I mean people might go this is bit over the top right but you know what fyon nutrients are and you know this you know tomato we talk about some some foods are good for your bones they'll make you stronger but my experience of kid you know so I do a kid show on children's BBC Operation Ouch and so I meet lots and lots of kids and from a very young age kids want to be good at sport smart uh to be healthy to be strong to all these things kids are quite motivated and we've got data from Chile where they properly label bad food they put big black hexagons on it when you put big black hexagons on packets of sugary cereal kids tell their parents to stop buying it just like you and I I remember telling my dad to stop smoking because you know I knew smoking was harmful so kids care more than we think and I suspect you do this I try and give my kids some agency so just as patience hated advice and the public hate advice my kids don't love advice but if I present them with uh raw fruit and veg when they're watching telly before dinner and they're bored they will eat it and if I can stop them eating too much rubbish before dinner they will eat a real dinner of sort of fish or meat and vegetables and then for putting you know they yeah but not forbidding I was I wasn't forbidden I I was my mom did an incredible job of creating a food culture in our household there was food I didn't get as much as I wanted and then I went nuts on it when I was a teenager I don't know it's hard I don't think there's some I don't think there's a you know I think ultimately we all have to do what we feel is right maybe we'll uh revisit this conversation 15 years and we can compare like which approach you know and of course as you mentioned before our genetics and how susceptible we are to certain things and S you know and peer pressure and certain foods and temptations are all going to play in I definitely know that I feel I've softened a lot over the last few years but I still think how I've soften is probably to most people an extremist yeah but then to to to sort of maybe defend myself for a minute let's look at the state of society and how sick Society is and I'm not putting blame on individuals and what you know you are a sane person in an insane world one in five kids leaves primary school with obesity and at the age of five this is how much shorter 5ye olds are in the UK than they are in Eastern Europe how much is that 9 cmet at the age of five right if you took a classroom of British 5-year-olds and you moved them to Bulgaria or Lithuania or Lavia or Sweden you could tell the British class because they would all be shorter than than the Eastern or northern European class so because of the food it's all because of food and people say no no no it's because of migration of of shorter populations it isn't it isn't it's nothing to do that it's because oured all our diet it's ultr processed food obesity and stunting go hand in hand not just in the same Village in the same body so there's a certain irony there where we are over we have excess calories and we're ending up shorter it's the same in America and it's the same it's kind of under nutrition yes it is malnutrition obesity and climate change are these synergistic pandemics So when you say hold on let me defend myself look at look at at the state of the world it's like you're completely right but but you know sane people appear insane when they when they start talking sense when everyone else around the I guess look I'll I'll I'll I'll be honest here and explain my discomfort in what I've just said right which is I feel I have to soften what I do with my kids to make it appealing yes right that's the truth if we're being really honest I feel so that they're not weird or yeah no or even so I'm not I don't come across as being weird to people I'm not I'm not judging anyone but I really feel strongly that based upon what I know and based upon my own life experience I of course I'm trying to parent in the best way that I know how and yeah that's it I kind of feel that as I say the worry for me is you know H what happens as they get older you know they have to fit in but I think they've got a good group of mates and they're fitting in so I'm like I don't know the only one thing certain is that whatever goes wrong in their life they will look back and blame whatever we did on that problem so well Chris listen I I've I've I've so enjoyed this conversation we've gone into so many different areas um I'm going to push you at the end you know what giving advice I got it I understand your reasons for not giving advice but you've talked me a bit into it go on ask ask could you for that listening who the one tip yeah who wants to make a change well yeah the one tip or you know and and maybe just prefix that with are you optimistic about the future I flip around on optimism we controlled the tobacco industry slightly fewer people now smoke in the UK we've seen the rise of Vapes owned by the same companies the companies have never lost any money so I'm a sort of optimistic pessimist it's like we we did did control smoking and we've got a we've got a map so I think we'll get there and a people are Furious I mean you see that the reason you your podcast is so successful is because people are are just wild with anger about about the way they're they're being abused by all these different commercial determinants of Health but food is the most important so yeah I am an optimist or else I wouldn't I wouldn't bother doing all this and and the World Health Organization UNICEF certain parts of the government different politicians people are passionate about this and they get this so yeah I think we'll get there um the one if you want like a really discreet piece of advice that my top tip and this was told to me by a um a colleague at UNICEF who's a who's a professor of nutrition and the nutrition team at UNICEF like the best nutritionist in the world and they said the if we only made one single intervention in any country it would be to swap uh whatever children are drinking for milk and water and that is the if that's the only change you make that would have the biggest health impact of any single Health intervention and so the place I would start with anyone listening to this is switch your switch your liquid diet from uh whatever you're drinking whether it's your you know supplement drinks or or or colas or whatever to drink milk and water and if you want a glass on a Friday night then a glass of wine on a Friday night then don't sweat about it but that would that would be the I think that's probably the best evidence changed Chris Ultra processed people why do we all eat stuff that isn't food and why can't we stop wonderful book I've so enjoyed this conversation really it's so nice to see you again and I can't wait for the next time thank you very much if you enjoyed that I think you are really going to enjoy this conversation on how you can use Foods as the most powerful form of medicine we need to realize whatever we put into our body is either going to take our health down or build our health back up and it all works at the level of the defense systems

Channel: Dr Rangan Chatterjee

Views: 128,312

Keywords: the4pillarplan, thestresssolution, feelbetterin5, wellness, drchatterjee, feelbetterlivemore, ranganchatterjee, 4pillars, drchatterjee podcast, health tips, nutrition tips, health hacks, live longer, age in reverse, self help, self improvement, self development, personal development, motivation, inspiration, health interview

Id: wLBbmhna8qI

Length: 141min 46sec (8506 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 20 2023