Ultra-Processed People Why Do We All Eat Stuff That Isn’t Food ... and Why Can’t We Stop?

The BBC is unique in having no commercial funding and a brave team of in-house commissioners and lawyers who have boldly supported me broadcasting about commercial determinants of health for many years. We're all lucky it exists.

We are ultra-processed people not just because of the food we eat. Many of the other products we buy are engineered to drive excess consumption; our phones and apps, our clothes, our social media, our games and television. Sometimes these can feel like they take much more than they give. The requirement for growth and the harm it does to our bodies and our planet is so much part of the fabric of our world that it's nearly invisible. You may find that abstinence from some of these other products is helpful too.

I sincerely don't have a moral opinion about eating UPF. None of my friends believe this, but it's true.I don't care how you feed yourself or your child. The goal should be that you live in a world where you have real choices and the freedom to make them.

Nestlé rehabilitated their reputation to the extent that George Clooney felt he could risk his by advertising Nespresso. But dangerous marketing of the type that the Jelliffes described in the early 1970s is still going on.

There's an illusion of food supply, but it's primarily a flow of money, driving ever-increasing complexity of processing.

Tearfund looked at a sample of six countries (China, India, the Philippines, Brazil, Mexico and Nigeria) and determined that Coke creates 200, 000 tonnes of plastic waste - or about 8 billion bottles - which is burned or dumped each year in those countries alone - enough to cover thirty-three football pitches every day. Each year, globally, Coca-Cola produces 3 million tonnes of plastic waste, and we know that almost none of this is recycled. A staggering 91 per cent of all the plastic waste ever produced has not been recycled and has either been burned, put into landfill or is simply in the environment.

There is no 'biosecure' way of rearing animals that keeps the resistant bacteria from their faeces away from us. In the southern USA, intensive pork farms drain faecal waste into hog lagoons'. These are frequently aerosolised by tornadoes or overflow into water supply following storms. Flies carry microbes in and out of farms, and the microbes are found on our meat.

If you're a company making a chicken sandwich, you'd be nuts to spend more than the bare minimum on the chicken. Chicken is chicken. Almost no one thinks about the meat in their UPF, how it is treated or how it affects the planet.

Chicken is the most popular meat. Around 1 billion chickens are farmed each year in the UK (fifteen for every adult and child- double the global average), and 95 per cent of them are fast-growing breeds that are intensively reared indoors. Almost none are wandering around farmyards. And with bird flu meaning that flocks have to be kept indoors, free range' may be a thing of the past.

The best way of making money from a chicken is to spend as little time caring for it as possible. If you keep a chicken as a pet, it will live for around six years. Yet birth-to-slaughter time for 95 per cent of the chicken we eat is just six weeks - less than 2 per cent of their natural lifespan.

…animals are now fed fairly nutritious plants which humans could eat.

It is well known that meat is less carbon efficient than plants as a source of food. Producing 100g of protein from beef emits at least 25kg of carbon dioxide, on average. Chicken produces far less, at 4-5kg of carbon dioxide per 100g, but we eat vastly more chicken than beef. Per 100g, tofu produces 1.6kg carbon dioxide, beans 0.65kg and peas 0.36kg. Some nuts are carbon negative even after transport, because tree nuts are replacing crops and taking carbon from the air.

There is an ethical question here as well. We spend around $2 billion on toxicology studies globally each year and kill around 100 million experimental animals. A single two-generation test for reproductive safety might use over 1,000 animals. I don't think that many of us think that food colouring is a good reason to kill this number of animals, but you don't find the number of animals killed to determine the possible safety of the additives written on the pack.

Meals took on a uniformity: everything seemed similar, regardless of whether it was sweet or savoury. I was never hungry, but I was also never satisfied. The food developed an uncanny aspect, like a doll that looks just the wrong degree of realistic and ends up seeming corpselike.

'Some ultra-processed foods mnay activate the brain reward system in a way that is similar to what happens when people use drugs like alcohol, or even nicotine or morphine.’

This neuroscience is persuasive, if still in its early stages. There is a growing body of brain-scan data showing that energy-dense, hyperpalatable food (ultra-processed but probably also something a really good chef might be able to make) can stimulate changes in many of the same brain circuits and structures affected by addictive drugs.

Pontzer's model posits that going for a long walk or run results in simply scaling back on routine non-essential bodily processes, reducing the amount of energy spent on your immune, endocrine, reproductive and stress systems. That may sound bad, but a bit of downtime actually seems to help to restore those systems to a healthier level of function.

If we are active, our bodies compensate by using less energy on other things, so that our overall energy expenditure stays the same.

Almost 90 per cent of hospital tooth extractions among children younger than five are due to preventable tooth decay, and tooth extraction is the most common hospital procedure in children aged six to ten.' The most common operation we do in children - ahead of fixing bones broken on trampolines, hernia repairs and appendix removals - is for rotten teeth. The statistics in the USA are even worse.

The model emphasises that powerful signals inside and outside the body influence food intake and energy balance far, far below the level of consciousness, involving slippery related ideas like salience, wanting, motivation and reward. We smear a conscious layer over all this, but eating is far less of a choice than it appears.

This is one of the many reasons why simple advice like 'Eat less and move more!' is ineffective for sustained weight loss. It's as crazy as saying 'Drink less water!' to someone who's feeling thirsty.

The author goes on to make the case for the ongoing production of synthetic fat:

‘Heavy workers cannot take in enough calories unless a fair proportion of them is in the form of fat ... This is especially important for those working the long shifts of modern industry without a rest pause for a full meal. The increase of fat consumption in all industrial countries during the last 100 years is, therefore, not a matter of taste only but a necessity of modern life, so I think it a good thing to continue research on synthetic fat.’

Here is the inexorable logic of all industrial food: to reduce the time workers require for a meal. I think about this every time I see a lunch-break meal deal. UPF crisps, UPF fizzy pop, UPF sandwich.

Certainly, the traffic lights, the nutrition data tables, the HFSS designation all seem to represent a delusion about the way people choose and eat food. It's not just that no normal person can understand the information mixed in among the manufacturers' claims. The delusion is the idea that we can eat according to numbers rather than appetite.

It's not food. It's an industrially produced edible substance.

In the past few decades, the replacement of traditional food with UPF has happened at a nearly unimaginable pace in terms of our evolutionary history. This is concerning because, in the hierarchy of biological life's activities, eating (along with reproduction) is right at the very top. Almost everything else we all do is in the service of these projects.