49 pages • 1 hour read
Chris van TullekenUltra-Processed People: The Science Behind Food That Isn't Food
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
IntroductionChapter Summaries & Analyses
Introduction Summary
Influenced by a 2014 paper on dormant viruses, van Tulleken argues that “our bodies are much more like societies than mechanical entities” (3). What he means by this is that our bodies are not just a collection of parts with biological inputs and outputs. Rather, like our immune systems in relation to dormant viruses, they are a series of complex ecosystems evolved over millennia to ensure the optimal interaction with our environment. This, he suggests, applies specifically to the way we extract energy from our food. As he says, “Over billions of years our bodies have superbly adapted to using a wide range of food” (4). From the balance of microbes in our stomachs and the way we store energy to hormones regulating hunger, our bodies have evolved a complex, harmonious relationship to the food sources around us and the nutrients they contain.
However, in the past 150 years, this relationship has been altered. As van Tulleken says, “We’ve started eating substances constructed from novel molecules and using processes never previously encountered in our evolutionary history” (4). These include modified starches, synthetic emulsifiers, stabilizing gums, dyes, and flavor compounds. They are created by processes like refining, bleaching, and hydrogenation. Synthetic and “ultra-processed food,” or UPF, risk upsetting the complex balance between food and our bodies that has evolved to ensure our health. These new ways of obtaining energy risk subverting our bodies’ well-adapted digestive ecosystems, with unknown health consequences.
That is not all, argues van Tulleken. Driven by profit and the desire to make increasingly cheaper and more appealing food synthetically, UPF has come to supplant traditional diets. For example, UPF now constitutes around 60% of the average diet in the UK and the US. What was once the exception has become the norm, with UPF consumption growing in every area of the world. This is why van Tulleken links UPF to many contemporary health problems. As well as the huge rise in obesity, he says that UPF is responsible for an increase in “rates of cancer, metabolic disease and mental illness” and “increased risks of dementia and inflammatory disease” (6,7). At the same time, he suggests that UPF causes broader social problems. The industrial food industry necessary to the production of UPF undermines biodiversity and is “the second largest contributor” to greenhouse emissions (6). The energy required to create and transport UPF, an elaborate, multinational process, powers global warming while also promoting overconsumption through quasi-addictive products.
Ultra-Processed People has another purpose. While the book is an effort to analyze UPF and its effects on our bodies and the world, it also forms part of an “experiment” (10). Following his own self-experiment, van Tulleken invites the reader to consume an 80% UPF diet for a month while they complete the book. His hope is that by doing so, along with gaining a deeper understanding of UPF by reading, they will start to see UPF in a new way. By eating UPF while reading, they will start to not just understand how UPF is damaging but also feel that damage in themselves and become disgusted by it. In this way, Ultra-Processed People does not just aim to promote awareness about UPF and its effects. Rather, the book also aims to help individuals overcome their dependence on UPF and make healthier choices.
Introduction Analysis
Van Tulleken argues that in the US and UK, food exclusively created by industrial processes and chemicals “is our food culture” (5). Comprising up to 60% of our average diet, such UPF has supplanted “traditional” and “whole” foods to the extent that whole food now seems exotic. In contrast, UPF feels normal and familiar. Van Tulleken stresses that the familiarity of things like UPF bread, cereal, yogurt, and pizza does not mean that UPF is benign. Despite health claims that often accompany these products, such foods pose a risk to our well-being. By introducing “novel molecules and […] processes never encountered in our evolutionary history” to the complex ecosystems of our bodies, we risk unknown effects (4).
The relationship between UPF and negative health effects has been backed up by “a vast body of data” (6). Since 2010, when UPF was formally identified and defined, research has linked UPF foods to obesity, mental illness, dementia, and cancer, “driving inequality, poverty and early death” (6). Van Tulleken points to The Correlation Between UPF, Poverty, and Inequality and to other research that has shown that UPF hurts society and the environment. The industrial character of UPF, and the profit motive that drives it, subverts traditional food cultures, damages biodiversity, and makes UPF a significant and growing contributor to global warming.
Given all this, van Tulleken’s policy recommendations are mild. As he says, he has “no proposals to tax things or ban them—only a demand to improve information about UPF, and access to real food” (9). Van Tulleken hopes that by drawing attention to the risks of UPF and defamiliarizing UPF as acceptable “food,” governments can alter people’s behavior. Van Tulleken’s goal is to expose the true costs and nature of UPF, which are hidden behind its reassuring packaging. He aims to dispel the sense of UPF as real food and to promote a return to healthy, non-ultra-processed food.
Van Tulleken’s objective dovetails with the “experiment” that he proposes for the reader. By reading the book while eating a mostly UPF diet, the reader, van Tulleken hopes, will become disillusioned by UPF. In learning about the true processes and substances that create these foods, they will realize what they are putting in their body and want to stop. Their awareness will cause a shift—instead of seeing UPF foods as alluring treats, they will view them as empty vectors for a commercial and economic machine.
While proper information and disillusionment may be necessary to curtail UPF consumption, it may not be sufficient. As van Tulleken says, “What we eat is determined by the food around us, its price and how it is marketed” (9-10). Knowing that certain foods are bad for us is of little help if other foods are unfamiliar, expensive, or hard to find. Likewise, knowledge of harmful effects and a wish to stop eating are insufficient if, in some respect, we are addicted. Van Tulleken suggests that UPF may have addictive properties, designed to “hook” consumers and make them crave more; therefore, understanding alone cannot cure UPF dependence.
This is even assuming that UPF companies can be made to accept the dangers of UPF and adjust their marketing. These firms are powerful multinationals who engage in, as van Tulleken says, “secret lobbying” and “fraudulent research” (6). The UPF industry may also be a symptom of a wider political and economic problem. The power of UPF companies, and their link to a wider system, raises the question of whether an equally wider intervention is required to limit the harms of UPF.
