What is "Ultra Processed" Food, and Why Does It Lead to Weight Gain?

if you are going to make money and generate particularly growth as a food company you have to sell more and more and more food you have to make food that people cannot stop eating we started making this food in in bulk in the 50s and the 60s the 70s and since then this food has been iterated through marketing development back to the lab tasting trials focus groups it's not being done in in an evil way or a cynical way it's just if you're a breakfast cereal company and you've got box a and box B and your tasting group is five percent more of box a that's the one that goes to Market and then you do the same the next year and the next year and so over 50 years you find that whether it's lasagna your breakfast cereal your cake your buns It all becomes impossible to stop eating [Music] nutrition where World leading scientists explain how their research can improve your health [Music] Chris and Tim thank you very much for joining me today and lots of fun to be able to do this in person great to be here it is nice to be here physically I haven't seen Tim and I were trying to work out when we first met and we think it was more than 15 years ago he actually doesn't which is my hairline has changed and Tim says not well he was he was school boys your first your presenting role when you're on twins yeah it's his amazing microbiome that's what it is Chris so we have a tradition here that we always start with a quick fire round of questions um and we have some very simple rules you can say yes or no or maybe and a one sentence answer if you absolutely have to are you ready to give it a go all right I'm going to start with three questions for Chris and then three for Tim so Chris does ultra processed food cause obesity yes it's responsible for pandemic obesity so it causes it is the primary cause of obesity at a population level you notice I notice already you're good like a professor at like quite a long one sentence answer okay we'll give you that for the first one it was not too long you know it's uh academically it's the academic Arts it's good I wanted to say so much more the proximate causes of obesity really yeah this is always hard for scientists all right um Can Ultra processed food rewire your brain yes how much of our food is now Ultra processed in the US and UK so I get my one sentence yeah that was just a tricky one at the end for you in the UK on average you can use yeah in the UK and the US on average more than half of our calories on average come from Ultra processed food which is obviously enormous brilliant Tim do scientists understand how Ultra processed foods damage our health we're beginning to can you undo the damage from Ultra processed food if you stop eating it yes and finally can Ultra processed food ever be healthy unlikely but I'm not saying it could never be Chris you got one on that one I think unlikely is a really good answer I I mean I I'll tell you what just just for difference I'll say no fantastic and we're going to come back to all of those things I hope that's teed up like it's pretty interesting right people talk about this food as literally causing obesity um causing you know rewiring of the brain I think this is all stuff I had to know about idea about a few years ago um and I'd love to unpick it a bit through this but before we do that I'd actually love to let me go back to sort of the beginning of this story and why you're interested in nutrition because I think it really uh ties in with the first story that Tim told me when I first met him because of course Tim has been doing this twin study for 30 years and looking at differences between identical twins and so I'd love maybe if you could talk a little bit about the story about um you know your own experience as being an identical twin um and how that's so I guess started to Intrigue you with nutrition and how because I think it just and maybe uh Tim can tie that in a little bit to his own Journey from I guess genetics as Destiny to this idea that actually um there's a lot more than just our genes that shape our health in your first dexa scan you had remember in the in the department and your brother I mean Tim you know really weighed carefully you know measured me and my brother and I think that was that was at the beginning of quite a long interest in nutrition and how long ago was when was this so we think that was about 2007 or eight so so more than 15 years ago and as a result of that program I found out that I have really all the major genetic risk factors for obesity and bearing witness to that and Tim remembers this very well is that my identical twin who is my genetic clone when lived in the states for a year in fact he lived there for a decade and he had a quite a stressful um time there and he put on around 30 kilos 30 kilos huge amount of weight and um and I was protected by several things the UK food environment but I think I should just mention for those of you on audio like Chris doesn't look like he has put on 30 kilos at any point in his life I am currently I think at the low end of overweight so I am I hide it well because if you if you're a bloke people don't look at you in the same way and you can wear a baggy jumper but I'm at the low end of overweight at the moment but no I Zan became very heavy and um but also I'm I'm an infectious diseases doctor and I did a lot of work in public health and Global Health where nutrition is what underpins early death for particularly children all around the world and they get severe infections and so this having this brother who was really living with significant obesity and seeing my patients being very affected in particularly in low-income countries by by poor nutrition it gave me a real interest in in how we should feed ourselves better yeah and I remember um having an interest then in in discordant twins as well and discordant meaning why one twin uh they differ in whether it's height or weight or diseases so there's a lack of concordance I was I was intrigued at the time about what the reasons for that would be because it seems strange because they were genetically generally people think of identical twins as everything's identical about them you know they smile the same way they pick up their beer the same way they giggle the same way everything looks the same but when you actually get to diseases you know they die at different times they get different cancers actually you know longevity is is rather different than the aging process is different and we've never really explained why that was and so examples like Chris and Zan were sort of fascinating you know was it just that one went to the US and the other one didn't or without you know are there emotional reasons or there's some physiological thing or something earlier in their life you know so to me you know twins have always been this amazing model where you can sort of the separate all the differences so you know these are two clones who lived virtually you know the first 18 years doing exactly the same things and if they they're different what was it about them so I think it was it is a fascinating natural experiment that we were seeing in real life and you know and and then again both the Twins were interested in their own Destinies if you like and what happened to them is it fair to him at the time I think you said because you you were running the the largest twin study in the UK one of the largest in the world that we had the the greatest discordant discordance in our weight of any twin pair that you'd ever encountered in the scientific literature there was there was a bigger difference between us I think it was 26 kilos at the time certainly that was true for males of your age I think we have seen other ones bigger than that but certainly in in the young males it was it was pretty extreme yes and uh that was sort of quite shocking really and was this part of what was triggering your realization it couldn't just be genes that were driving our health Team which I know you know when I met you much later you certainly I realized it couldn't just be genes in the in the in the sense that they both had identical genes in every cell or their body uh at the time um I thought it could be something called epigenetics we probably might have discussed that at the time where little chemicals and things might just tweak your genes so this chemicals get stuck onto your your genes and that that makes them produce different proteins and I was sort of going down that route but in 2008 um no one was discussing microbes and the gut microbiome and that as a potential root and a difference and and also people you know we're only talking about abortion sizes and um oh in America you just get bigger amount of fries than you do in the UK so that must be the reason so it was quite primitive in terms of the ideas we had and it might just be oh well uh you know zand had been having extra calories that's why he'd got bigger we didn't really relate it to anything much more scientific than that we didn't think there was a different type of food available in the states in Greater quantities and it turned out was eating you know a diet approaching you know 80 90 of ultra processed food for a really long time so it is amazing I remember one thing because you know I'm not an identical twin or any sort of twin and I remember when Tim was explaining to me this first of all it is amazing because identical twins are sort of like these experiments right where you've got two individuals with the same genes and the same upbringing and then different things happen to them in their life particularly you know after they're 18 and you see the difference and you know Tim was uh obviously talking about much broader set than than just you and zand but the way that you could see these like really big differences and and then in his experiments get to the point where you know in laboratory conditions feed identical twins exactly the same food and see these really different responses in their blood and this was the thing that really triggered this idea of Zoe really and about being able to turn that into large scale and personalization and so I you know I think it's fascinating to then you know um to be talking about this as an example because for me it was it was a big part of what created this podcast so it's fun to have you on the podcast because I think that you know that that meeting with Tim and the 12 000 other twins is sort of what made this podcast ever happen it's quite cool to be I hadn't I don't think I'd quite understood that I was I'm a tiny part of the of the Genesis story of this yeah not just the tiny part no quite a big part because it was those exceptions to the rule that for me was my aha moment in you know in my in the career of thinking well hey it's not you can't say it's all genetics and then B seeing these really the great examples like you and your brothers trying to say well I've got to find out why you know because it's not genes and I discovered it probably wasn't just epigenetics and so there must be something else and that really led me to the the gut microbes and gut health and everything else sort of followed because once you've got that then you start thinking about food in another different way to the old-fashioned way and we start getting back to you know thing that's now interested you food quality and and all this and it's yeah it's it's these amazing except natural experiments that you and your brother and if if you could do an experiment a great thing to do would be to take some identical twins and leave one genetic half of them in the UK and move the others to uh Boston that would that would be a nice experiment so it's on tonight unwittingly did this for Tim oh that's lovely I didn't I didn't kind of know that but it's nice nice to understand my place in the in the Specter now thanks very much and Chris I'm assuming that part of the reason that this really Struck it wasn't just oh my twin is overweight you were worried about the consequences that came with that weight gain is that right I mean he he got covered um during the pandemic we were making uh I was working in the hospital at uclh we were making a documentary where he was out doing Public Health stuff and I was with the infectious diseases team and he came in because his heart was in a strange Rhythm and we had to my team had to stop his heart um and restart it because the covet had given him this this this heart problem it was very terrifying that it happened again and again and again and eventually he needed an operation but that was almost I mean as far as we can know and Tim would Tim would have a very good view on this but probably because he was so much bigger than me so there was a there was a thing where you know he's we're terribly close you know he's my he's my best friend and I would I would um there's a moment where you're watching his heart being restarted I feel actually I'm welling up a bit but um uh it was yeah it became a real emergency that he'd been he'd been the funny one and he he didn't look bad and it wasn't affecting his career because because it doesn't um but yeah it became a a problem in the family so so there was there was just a very acute reason but I'd been this was the focus of an argument for for a decade I'd be nagging him and Tim I remembered him saying when we made this documentary you know expressing some surprise there was this very big difference between us and I I tried to use that as leverage I think I said something horrible like you're a disgrace to your Genius it was which is very unsympathetic at the time we were in a different we were in a different um we were in a different National conversation about weight and stigma and actually the quote you're a disgrace to your genes became the centerpiece of the trailer of the promotional material because it was such a powerful idea that someone was had these clearly with the same genes I wasn't gaining weight so what was it that Psalm was doing and I think that's not something you would say today right Tim no absolutely not because that tells you something about the journey and I actually think it's a brilliant transition to talking about you know the topic in in your book and the topic that Tim talks about all the time right which is ultra processed food and more broadly how the food is having this direct um effect could we maybe just start at the beginning so you know I think many people have no idea and we did a little poll actually like nobody really understands what Ultra processed food is versus processed food versus food Chris you know could you maybe start by just helping us to understand very simply like what is ultra processed food so there's this long formal scientific definition because it's a category of food that that was developed to do research with to study diet and its effects on health but it boils down to if it's wrapped in plastic and it contains at least one ingredient that you don't typically find in a domestic kitchen then it's Ultra processed food so that's the that's the shorthand way of figuring it out and we this was a definition that was developed by a group in Brazil in 2010 and since then we've had now over a decade of really really good increasingly robust research including a very good clinical trial that um has linked Ultra processed food to early death cancer weight gain and a whole host of other other problems I think this is the Nova classification is that right that you're referencing could maybe the two of you help to sort of step us through a little bit from stuff that I think we all feel pretty comfortable isn't processed because it's like a fruit or something you know you're eating it completely off uh you know as it were of it as it came off the tree um to the other end where I think we all sort of know that if it's got 50 ingredients in it and it's bright yellow and it lives for a hundred years you can still eat it that's probably at the ultra process end and I think we're all deeply confused about everything which is like 95 of what we eat right which is somewhere in between could you could you maybe just help us to step through so I think they have a few classifications don't they to help us understand a bit more um how that works so I would say that the boundary between Ultra processed food and just processed food which we think is fine it's quite a blurry one and particularly in the UK we have a huge number of products where you can buy a lasagna lots of places and it's it's wrapped in plastic but the ingredients while it's a long list there will be nothing you wouldn't have in it in a normal kitchen there and there are these questions about well is that Ultra processed or not and I think this is the discussion that a lot of people have read my book come to me with this game what about this product is this okay and those products in a sense the most interesting because the classification system wasn't invented to decide about one particular sausage roll or another um but there is the shorthand of the ingredient is is a pretty useful one if it has an additive that you don't typically find in your kitchen then I think it's useful to say it's Ultra processed I I find that for me what I'm interested in and I think there will be some of your listeners who are living with significant obesity or living with a diet related disease and they may want to take an approach of abstinence so for those people having a a definition that allows them to exclude this entire category from their diet um would be useful and I think it is possible to do that and my rule of thumb is if I'm in doubt it is ultra processed if you're wondering about this biscuit or this lasagna or this bread it probably is but the the one of the arguments that the the food industry is starting to mount and there's a huge opposition to my book and to a lot of my work by the food industry is that well humans have been processing food for millions of years and this is absolutely true since we first cut a chunk of meat off a mammoth and we started cooking probably over a million years ago that is food processing and we've been pounding and grinding and extracting and salting and smoking and all this has been happening for hundreds of thousands of years and it seems to be fine and fun but Ultra processing is a very different thing Ultra processing is about taking broadly taking traditional foods and designing them with the cheapest possible ingredients to be very hard to stop eating and doing that for profit and that's that's the very important part of the definition is ultra processing is about profit it's not about nourishment and I think give me some examples here is useful so cheese is a processed food okay so um we're not talking about those as being problematic because virtually all our food is to some extent processed but these have been done naturally and we've discussed some of those on previous podcasts right things are ground and milled and baked and all these these sorts of it's it's when you're replacing the natural ingredients with uh the extracts of other foods and extracts of chemicals to mimic the original Foods using what they call you know edible industrially produced food-like substance and I think it's that substitution I was just laughing because I feel like food-like substance already you're like I don't really want to eat food like substance do I well I'd rather eat food and you know it's exactly right so it's it is you have these ingredients you wouldn't recognize in your your kitchen they're all there to make that food would seemed like the original as much as possible but using the cheapest possible group of ingredients that allow you to manipulate it give it a massively long shelf life and make you overeat it and so that's that's really where we are and the food industry doesn't want a definition of it because that would make it very easy for them to you know be criticized so they're always countering these discussions with saying aha you know as we've got some examples of something that isn't and you're you're saying it is but it's quite easy to Define I would say 98 percent of or Foods in this way there are maybe a couple of percent that we can argue over so I I think what you're saying is that um there's this sort of clear scientific definition though relatively recent and I know from our own work there's probably still more work to make that better um but it's quite complex and so this is a sort of simple sort of rule of thumb if you like as a way to say I'm navigating um the grocery store you know the shop as a way to under or in my fridge to understand what um what is ultra processed and and Tim Tim gave the example of cheese as a brilliant example of a processed food that for a long time we've thought was a bit unhealthy butter also works as an example because butter is something we made probably eight eight thousand years ago six seven eight thousand years ago margarine was the first probably mass-produced Ultra processed food you know there was short a solid fat shortening and it was a way of turning waste oils cottonseed oil into an edible product that you could put in the human food chain and generate enormous value from and so fake Butters margarines essentially were the first set of these synthetic Foods where almost all the molecules in the food product are synthesized and we've never counted molecules quite like this before and is that a very important part of the story that these are you know new chemicals if you like that our body hasn't been exposed to for thousands of of years that our microbes haven't exploded is that is that a very important part of this story or this is not clear or I think it's an emerging part of it I don't think we've studied it well enough and until recently we just assumed that these chemicals were inert so that the food industry tells us that oh like saccharin it's completely inert zero calories just passes through your body straight out of the toilet you don't have to worry about it absolutely perfect and that's been the general theme of these industrial produced chemicals and most of the artificial sweeteners for example come from the petrol industry so they're not made anything you'd eat uh you know they're made in Laboratories and I don't think we know the answer to many of these things but I think it's it's quite likely that these do have long-term consequences we just haven't studied them properly but it's it's just I one part of the stuff the story it's not just those substances it's uh it's other things which we're still beginning to understand so we can unpack more in in a second then I think just before moving on we did uh we did a little survey of uh of the Zoe Community um on social media to ask how much Ultra processed food they believe they ate and interestingly 84 said they eat little or no Ultra processed food and my question is is that typical and is it possible they might be eating more Ultra processed food than they realize are your community lying to you I think they will be telling you what they think is their the right healthier than the average I think this is UK population people who listen to this podcast more health conscious so you might expect the uh which the official figures of you know 57 of the calories eaten in the UK are Ultra processed is the the latest and in the US is it's over 60 over 60 percent and for children it's higher so we think 10 more in children so the average person is going to have more than half their calories that way so ah um it's a slightly different question um you know how many of your calories are that way or I never have them um but it I think that is an underestimate and I think people I don't think they're that healthy I think it's very difficult to avoid Ultra processed foods if you know all what all them are and it may be that these people don't realize that in the morning when they drink their orange juice and they have their muesli and they they have other breakfast cereals for example or or they're instant porridge they're eating Ultra processed foods that's amazing so breakfast cereal is an ultra processed food I would say most almost all commercially available breakfast cereals are Ultra processed almost all Supermarket bread is ultra processed almost all flavored yogurts are and the the areas they might be not noticing their consumption would be you know the very typical lunches that we go and have in the UK lunches a packet of crunchy things might be some popcorn a sandwich and a drink and particularly if you get it from the fancy shops and we can all know the names of them they're widely available up and down the country that's still all Ultra processed it all contains maltodextrin dextrose the bread is full of emulsifiers there are flavorings so even the sandwich that you might think is like it's just bread and like this plain it might be a vegan falafel organic whole grain but the bread will contain emulsifiers and the the condiments particularly will contain thickness or malted even if it looks Brown because it's been dyed Brown it makes it looks like a granary healthy seedy loaf generally it's been made to look exactly there but underneath it's full of these chemicals so yes I think many people don't realize the extent to which they're surrounded by stuff even with healthy veneers and I think that's the other anything that says it's healthy on the packet is nearly by definition unhealthy it's a great rule of thumb that isn't it if there's a health claim on the packet it is almost certainly Ultra processed Chris I read that in your book I loved it because I thought for a minute and I was like that's actually so true every time these things say I haven't found an except high protein or the one that actually my personal experience because I've been looking at this a lot more over the last year as as as you guys been talking about this more is sort of sugar-free and no added sugar which I think like most consumers that sounds really good I'm buying this for my my little girl who's three for example you know that sounds like the right thing it's sugar-free or no added sugar and now started to learn to turn over and look at the ingredients and instead of seeing sort of uh you know three ingredients you suddenly find 15 and it's stuffed full of sweeteners and they haven't had to put on the top like we put in lots of sweeteners instead of sugar they've just said you know no added sugar or sugar-free so um you know my favorite example of because it's been the one that's been most shocking to me is actually just looking even at plain yogurt and plain yogurt should basically have milk in it right and what's amazing that I've now realized is that most of the plain yogurt you go and look at when you turn over it's got like half a dozen or sometimes even 10 ingredients in it and it's right next to the one that only has milk in it and it's it's impossible to tell there's is nothing on the you know until you actually go and look into the ingredients they look the same so there is a there's a sense I think in which it's it's as low fat you're more likely to have fake yogurt than if it's full fat but there's something really hidden I guess is what I'm saying about these Ultra processed foods that it seems to have happened without it being very visible to us is that that's completely right and and if you consider one of the things like the illusions of of our sort of food supply system is that it exists to supply food to us and that isn't the way it works it exists to extract money from us and so low-fat yogurt The Genius of low-fat yogurt is you can sell your yogurt at a premium price because it doesn't have fat in it and you can add a very cheap modified Maize starch to give it a creamy feel or a xanthan gum or a guar gum or a locust bean gum any of these gummy things that give a fatty mouth feel and then some some other stuff as well meanwhile you've still got the fat and you can then use the dairy fat which is the highest price commodity fat you can have to do all kinds of other things with and you can extract some of the protein and put it into whey protein you can put it into muscle drinks so you've you're adding much more value to your commodity milk by putting different aspects of it in the in the food chain So yogurt's This brilliant idea of repurposing waste and extracting more value but none of it's done with an eye on our health and most people still assume it's just because it's got high fat therefore if I pick the low-fat one that's going to be fine and this is this huge misunderstanding uh cleverly done by the food companies as well but also the scientists haven't really applied themselves to looking at this because they haven't we've had this rather reductionist view of nutrition as I'm always going on about you know into calories and the macronutrients which misses the whole point so reductions meaning like I just think about it as a set of individuals food is simple yeah you only if you understand the calories you know the fat content the sugar content you don't really have to worry about anything else and that's what's got into this huge mess where we're so ignorant about food that we treated all the same and therefore we can slip into this the majority of our food being this poor quality Ultra processed industrially made edible stuff that has ticks the right boxes and has Health claims on the front there's actually uh killing us and causing us all kinds of problems that isn't related to those macronutrients it's all the other chemicals that um Chris has been talking about you know these other extra bits that have been added and the effects they have on our body and that epidemiology which by itself is never quite enough has been um added to by this uh clinical trial which uh done by Kevin Hall of the NIH which I mean you can describe you know in more detail exactly with that but that was a real game changer that was about three years ago and you know just giving people process Ultra processed food and The Identical equivalent in calories and macronutrients of properly made food and Chris you want to tell us about what and that had a that had some really shocking results even to the people who did the study I mean the question you're asking is so important is ultra processed food just fatty salty sugary food is it just what we usually think of as junk and in fact one of the papers Tim's I think referencing is produced by my PhD student a guy called Sam Dicken at UCL and he he did an analysis where you can do these statistical controls when you look at all the data and go yeah but what if we account for fat and salt and sugar and fiber and dietary pattern and in every single case whether they were looking at early death or cancer or Strokes or heart attacks or dementia in every case when you make that adjustment the effect Remains the Same in other words it's the processing it isn't those nutrient contents and Tim talks about you know we think of is simple and that's I mean he I think you've been the person who's who's sort of influenced our national thinking about this more than anyone else there's this incredible statistic that we've never been able to extract any molecule from any whole food and find that it has a benefit in healthy people so we know that walnuts are good for us whole grains are good for us Mediterranean diets are good for us vegetables are good for us fruits are good for us but if you extract the lycopene or the you know the molecules from red wine or the the vitamins and you give them to healthy people they don't have a health benefit so food is a complex substance is really Health giving and life-giving for all the reasons that your listeners will know but the individual nutrients are not what make it healthy or it turns out what make it unhealthy so when you make a lasagna at home you can make a salty fatty even sugary lasagna and it will not have the same effect on your physiology or your health or your brain or your risk of heart disease as if you go and buy a very similar sounding and ingredient lasagna from your local supermarket wrapped in plastic and that's the The Genius of the scientists who came up with this definition was to realize that those those two Foods would be different and Chris because we talked about I didn't talk about Kevin Hull sorry oh yeah tell us about Kevin Hall Kevin Hall study I think was this real game-changing study because he didn't believe the results would show anything I think that was the really yeah cool bit he was actually not a believer in this until he did the study and he had these two groups of people who were basically locked in a hospital for for two weeks they couldn't escape they were given these these food regimes and amazingly they liked both equally they couldn't that's such a crucial detail is they didn't prefer the ultra processed food and so that and one lot so they're eating these ones identical calories identical macronutrients you know reasonable they added fiber to the ultra process to to sort of give it a bit more umph so it wasn't you know obviously unhealthy and the key point I think was that they noticed that the the ultra process group kept going back for seconds and over the course of a day on average they were eating an extra 500 kilocalories a day and I think this to my mind is you know as you've got all the these individual chemicals but together this effect on the brain and the appetite system and it explains why you know we've all we've got much uh we've got all gained weight we're putting on fat all the time getting more diabetes and we can't explain that with really the amount of calories we're eating overall uh you know that and that just shows you these foods are designed to make people overeat to overcome our natural appetite fullness signals in the brain for the book I spoke to loads of people within the food industry and when I kind of tried to see it from their perspective and they all said the same thing which is in the UK for a very long time we've had enough food if you are going to make money and generate particularly growth as a food company you have to sell more and more and more food you have to make food that people cannot stop eating and through through kind of we started making this food in in bulk in the 50s and the 60s the 70s and since then this food has been iterated through marketing development back to the lab tasting trials focus groups and every year this happens and so the food it's not being done in in an evil way or a cynical way it's just if you're a breakfast cereal company and you've got box a and box B and your tasting group eats five percent more of box a that's the one that goes to Market and then you do the same the next year and the next year and so over 50 is you find that whether it's lasagna your breakfast cereal your cake your buns It all becomes impossible to stop eating you describe a bit like you might be describing like uh something to a gambler like you know the the slots machine that's getting more and more addictive with more bells and whistles and higher prizes step by step is that actually how you're thinking about it I I don't know about Tim Tim's thinking on this food addiction has been very unfashionable scientifically for a long time because the the problem with saying something's addictive is the only solution is abstinence we know that moderation doesn't work for any addiction and you can't be abstinent from food one of the really nice things about the ultra processed foods definition is that aside from the fact that it's the only food many people can afford it's the only available food for many people at least in theory you can quit it and the research I think is very persuasive and I I went into writing the book feeling a little bit skeptical about the addiction side of things I was very persuaded by a lot of the research that shows that for people who experience food addiction the ultra processed foods they're addicted to are as addictive as cigarettes drugs of abuse or alcohol and I would say that was true of me so I I have definitely had a relationship with certain Ultra processed foods that was pathological that was addicted and I I want to sort of I don't want to leave this without asking about your mad scientist experiment of one because it made me think about those things when you discover people like discovering smallpox inoculation so Chris you decided to do an experiment on yourself for 30 days of I think eating 80 at least of your food as Ultra processed that's right and I did it it was an experiment of one but we did it quite formally so I did it with a group that I now work with at UCL and we did it to generate pilot data for a very big experiment a clinical trial that we're now running so it wasn't just one that one off sort of completely mad cap thing it's an 80 Ultra processed art which is a very typical diet for a teenager in this country very typical diet one in one in five adults eats eighty percent of their calories so I had a washout period for six weeks and then I just ate what I wanted but with 80 of my calories coming from Ultra process and what happened so I gained a huge amount of weight in one month I gained so much weight that if I continue if I'd continued for the whole year I would have doubled my body weight but there were there were two other kind of main effects that were surprising one was the the satiety hormone effects so we saw that in just a month my response to eating a large meal completely changed that I could say that I didn't feel hungry and obviously that would be great to write in a book but you can't fake your blood hormone levels so um a big meal didn't generate the same hormonal responses it had previously the other thing I had was an MRI and I don't know what Tim would have said um if I'd asked him a couple of years ago but I thought we're not going to see any MRI changes on a brain scan's done about four week intervals with a diet that's completely normal and we saw very very significant changes in the connectivity between the reward addiction bits of my brain and the Habit bits of my brain wow in four weeks your brain literally was rewiring and we did it the neuroscientists at Queen Square so we weren't we're not doing this in an amateur way we're doing this as a big team at Queen's square of people who do find functional MRI imaging and we did it six weeks later because they were so surprised and that the changes had stayed the same so if this is happening to a man in their early 40s doing this for one month and I previously ate about 30 UPF what is this doing to children who possibly from birth are eating 180 90 tpf for the first two decades of their life well that's terrifying so I would love to talk you know uh at the end here about what people can do so um you know what can could food manufacturers start making Ultra processed food that was healthy and can what can listeners do who are listening to this and say okay that's all very scary what are the practical things that I could do that um would really improve my health so the first question can food mattress food manufacturers sort of hyper process the food to make it more healthy one of the things we know about UPF is it's soft and it's energy dense and we know that those two qualities of the food mean that you you consume calories quicker than essentially your hormone response can keep up and make you feel full now we've known about soft energy dense foods since the 1990s if the food industry could make the food chewier less energy dense and it would still sell as well they would have done it by now because they could make an incredible Health game the reason the food is soft and energy dense it's not an accident of the processing it's because that's the food that sells incredibly well similarly artificial sweetness similarly to all the gums replacing fats we've been hyper processing already Ultra processed food now for you know since the early 80s we've been replacing fats with with cornstarch and gums so I am very pessimistic that they can they can further modify this food to be honest I don't think reformulation is going to work and to some extent why should we do that we know the food we have very robust data that the food that is associated with weight loss and with health benefits across the Spectrum it exists you don't need to go and invent it it's out there it's just terribly expensive and inaccessible for people so instead of focusing our energies on reformulation we should be thinking what is wrong with our world that people with low incomes are unable to afford real food yeah I agree with all that and let me know a few I had there was a a good example of uh I spoke to a beer manufacturer who added fiber to beer I thought this was a great idea that actually you could have a healthy beer and uh well don't laugh you know there are worse things um so beer is relatively only mildly processed so add a bit of fiber to it okay this would be be healthy turned out people drank less once they had it so they had to abandon it so because it left them feeling full they had 10 less than they would of the other beer so even though they charged a premium they were going to lose it so this is this is exactly what um uh you were talking about there's a disincentive to health for the companies to actually improve them so so you'd have a consumer then so then I'm thinking like the manufacturers aren't going to solve this for me is what you're saying government could they could say we want some minimum standards here uh but they weren't because the lobbying and you know the corruption in government is not going to happen anytime soon and they want to keep the prices low because they worry about people rebelling in the nanny State Etc so you're not going to change that basically but I I think for the consumer the consumer should demand at least there is proper food labeling and there are warnings we know these Foods now are unhealthy so ra but let's not allow them to have um health benefit stickers on there saying you know source of fiber and source of protein and source of vitamin C when we know that's nonsense they shouldn't be allowed that they should have health warning stickers so you know this food contains ingredients that are not healthy for you and will make you overeat nothing wrong with that and that's why in a way I'm happier for people to drink Coca-Cola than orange juice because at least when you're drinking Coca-Cola you know it's not you know what you're getting you know what you're getting orange juice it comes with various things about fiber and vitamin C that are very misleading and it's just giving a massive sugar Spike so I think that's what I would argue that consumers should go for is in the first instance at least proper labeling proper health and not allow them to have all these benefits and party or five a day and all this sort of nonsense that you see but the consumer you know needs to understand these foods and you know really books like Chris's make people understand what we are eating and what real food looks like and doing more cooking and having more things available and we need to start in our institutions in our schools in at hospitals we need to just you know say no to this epidemic of ultra processed food which is killing us when I was when I was on my diet I had this incredibly powerful experience where I spoke to some scientists in Brazil and they just kept underlining all the things the food was doing to me and I sat down that evening to eat some some fried chicken wings and I could not eat them and so my invitation to people in the book is eat along with me it's a bit I mean it's very it's unashamedly like the quit smoking book where you smoke while you read which is a very well evidence book there's loads of research on it and it's a World Health Organization endorsed book so my invitation is do the experiment you're already being experimented on we've all the food companies are doing the experiment to us eat along and most people find as they eat the food they start realizing the lies the food is telling them and it becomes disgusting that's an individual solution the solutions for government exactly as Tim is saying we know we need to think about labeling I would say the number one thing to do is to put it in the National nutrition guidance is to say Ultra processed food is associated with health harms once it's in our guidance we can all point to it and legislation can follow and everyone will know and six countries have done that already but as usual the UK is dragging its feet because of the food lobby but you know you've already got most of the South American countries you've got Israel France um France now and Canada will even the states might but uh yeah we're again in the UK lagging so far behind it's it's a political issue and when I was one final question here which is because a lot of this I think is about what um you know government might do and so as an individual there's there's a limit about what you can influence let's say you're listening to this one option is obviously read the book and overdose on uh on uh alternative food and give up but let's say you were just listening to like you know what I would like to cut down but I'd like some guidance like where should I be where should I start today if I'm listening to this and I'd really like to get to this like low level of ultra process what would you advise someone who's listening to this right right now for sort of practical advice well start with breakfast because everyone is in generally in charge of their breakfast you may not be in when you go to work or you're traveling whatever most people start the day and you know they've got choices they can skip breakfast as some people do and just have a a tea or a coffee um or they can say I'm not gonna have any breakfast cereal you know which 90 the 95 of which are Ultra processed that would be a a reasonable start don't have Supermarket bread because that's also Ultra processed don't have yogurt with anything added to it that isn't totally pure and just by those that would probably reduce your uh level of ultra processing by about a third I love that idea that lunch when you if I'm in the hospital it is and I want to eat a meal for lunch it is impossible to not have an ultra processed meal I can go to the fast food restaurants I can go to the hospital canteen it's all Ultra processed but breakfast you're right I run normally at home most of us have breakfast at home we can read the ingredients this we know what we're buying I love that yeah so it's a good start but you know and the rest and take your own food into work I think that's the other thing and you see you know having worked in other countries it's much more common for people to take last night's meal in a little container and that's their lunch for the next day they know exactly what they're eating they're not relying on some third party to feed them in a healthy way which we know we're going to be tricked uh in this country so I think it's just changing some habits and you know not buying these snacks and these these other things that we've become so dependent on just because we think you know they look natural and tasty or they're you know they've been around for 20 years and I think fastidiously read your ingredients lists you will start once you once you're into the idea you have to look at the ingredients you just start seeing all these things there and you you start asking why your mono and diacetyl tartaric acid esters of fatty uh of mono and diglycerides that the dating why the emulsifiers are in there why are the preservatives in there what is oligofructose and just asking those questions starts to make the food a bit weirder and less palatable why is there mango kernel fat in my biscuit not the mango kernel fat is per se necessarily harmful but it should force you to ask a question about what the purpose of that biscuit is and the purpose is not to nourish you the purpose is to extract money from you and to commodify your ill health I think that this is one of the most shocking areas that we've been discussing in in the podcast and um partly that's also because I know when I first met Tim which was about six years ago he didn't talk very much about Ultra process food he was talking enormously about the microbiome and about like real food but what I've noticed is that it's something that Tim you are talking a lot more about and so I think that shows you sort of the the way in which the science is moving fast and the focus on the ultra processing rather than just like not having fiber is that am I exactly it's it's not just the absence of things uh or too much of the bad things it's actually that the whole processing is has suddenly become uh you know the The crucial factor and it's only because of this recent science uh that's overcome all the pressure of the food industry which is designed to make us not look in that direction and steer us away from that with all their labels and added vitamins and stuff like this or this smoke screen it's only now that we've we're able to see exactly what's happening it's only now really we can we've had a chance to take action against it and and educate people so it really is a very topical subject you know we've been dancing around the edges thinking there's something not quite right here about all this stuff but we haven't really been a put a finger on it now we absolutely can and we can do something about it and can I ask one final question because Tim you said right back in the quick fire questions can you undo the damage from Ultra Ultra processed food if you stop eating it and you you said you thought yes what would you be saying because a lot of people listening to this who are a bit scared now they'll feel like well that's basically what I've been eating for a long time um is there any you know am I stuck is it all too late um it's not too late I think everyone can improve their health I'm particularly looking at the from the angle of the the gut microbiome which I think is key to our long-term health and re-educating them those guys how to eat real food again for people who've been on Ultra processed foods diets you know they've had abnormal microbes because of the the sweeteners the emulsifiers the preservatives all these other chemicals in there giving off the wrong signals so there's still time to re-educate your gut microbes feed them real plants get them diversity get them eating fermented foods um you know eat the rainbow and stop snacking all these things will improve your gut microbes which will improve your health and counteract those years of ultra processed foods we don't yet know how much you can regain but we do know it can improve and I know some examples you know with my my son who had is is intensive Ultra processed food diet um you know he still hasn't uh recovered but he's still better than where he was and so I think we should be optimistic and say get our gut microbes back on track feed them the right things and our health will follow and hopefully most people will benefit will my hair grow back absolutely not oh sorry about that well it depends what you put on you were meant to say you've got a full head of hair Chris that was the correct answer I think that is a beautiful point of which to to wrap up I'm going to try and summarize we've gone in a lot of different um directions and I also think it's clearly a topic we're going to come back to I think on a number of occasions because you can see how much this is brand new science when you're both talking about these papers that are just in the last couple of years but um I think we start off by saying people are eating a lot more of these Ultra processed foods than than they realize you know more than half of all the calories in the US and the UK but people are often thinking they're eating a lot less because often these Ultra processed foods are sort of hidden you know you can see it in the ingredients but you just wouldn't be able to tell that there's some very complicated scientific definitions of ultra processed food but fundamentally does it contain things you wouldn't have in your kitchen that are therefore somehow like chemically produced in order to achieve something for um the properties of the the food so it's not processing itself that's bad we've been doing that for as long as we've been had fire but we're doing something very different in in the last sort of um you know 50 70 years that there's really good evidence that this is impacting our health now and that's not just because it's you're eating more calories it's not just because of sugar or fat actually the ultra processed food itself seems to be linked to it sounded like almost everything we don't like from dementia to depression to to obesity um there's been some debate it sounds like about whether it's truly addictive but certainly in terms of the behavior that it's driving and I love Chris your description of your this experiment for yourself like it's really the your hunger um uh hormones are falling so you're just wanting more of this so the net result is driving just much more consumption yet again showing that sort of this calorie counting thing doesn't really make sense because actually you know different calories affecting what you then eat um afterwards uh I think you both basically believe there isn't a food manufacturing solution to this we can't go to even more artificial food to make it healthy we sort of got to reverse out of this because they're just taking away all these elements of the food that aren't we're used to having and somehow they're replacing it with all these things where sometimes we don't fully understand exactly the ways they're working whether it's through the microbiome whether it's through you know spikes and things but somehow we have to get out of that it's not it sounds like it's not easy to get out from where we are right you're saying this is a huge part of our Foods um ecosystem but at a minimum we should be demanding really clear labeling we should be saying that Ultra processed food is bad and that means that you would then start to have government guidelines against it pretty terrifying stuff about children where you were saying maybe 90 or 100 of their food is ultra processed and that's obviously you know we all worry so much about our children right um and I think I love however a little bit of sunshine at the very end this was a slightly depressing podcast I think compared to some which is maybe think about ways you could say well start with breakfast you know think about swapping out if you're eating breakfast cereal actually you might think you're doing something really healthy and you'll look at it and you'll be like wow so think about swapping that for stuff that isn't Ultra processed so you know bread with only ingredients you can uh you would have in your kitchen uh yogurt these sorts of things taking food to work so again you know that you've got food that you can eat instead of um most of us living in environments where it's very difficult um not to and I think the final thing which which for me has been the most shocking is just turn the food around and read the ingredients list and suddenly realize that many of the things you thought were you were doing really well you were maybe actually spending money on these things because you thought they were good for you and realizing that actually they were Ultra processed that's an amazing summary he's good at this isn't he I try and pay attention but thank you what does it interject but you hit everything this is like a communication lesson my publicist is listening out there I'll do it I'll do that Essie wonderful look I really enjoyed that thank you both very very much likewise that was so interesting thanks thanks for having me on I really really enjoy that right it's always good I learned I learn a lot coming on this thank you Chris and Tim for joining me on Zoe's science and nutrition today if based on today's conversation you're interested in understanding exactly which foods in your diet are Ultra processed and find replacements with Foods personalized for you then you may want to become a member of Zoe and get advice to reduce your risk of chronic health conditions your Zoe membership comes with the Zoe app where you can score millions of foods and meals to find out how good they are for you you also get personalized meal and recipe recommendations based on the results of your at-home test and access to our nutrition coaches who provide scientifically backed nutrition advice on how to eat for your best health if you're interested in learning more head to join zoe.com podcast to get 10 off your purchase as always I'm your host Jonathan Wolfe Zoe science and nutrition is produced by yellow hewings Martin Richard Willen and Alex Jones here at Zoe see you next time [Music] thank you

Channel: ZOE

Views: 388,595

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Id: uMv2TZUSPdg

Length: 58min 10sec (3490 seconds)

Published: Tue May 02 2023