The Junk Food Doctor: "This Food Is Worse Than Smoking!" & "This Diet Prevents 60% Of Disease!" - Chris Van Tulleken (Ultra-Processed People Author)

27:33Your body has a way of linking all that information with nutritional information that you get from your gut subconsciously. When you muddle it all up in a product like this, it's very confusing. The phosphoric acid will dissolve the minerals out of your bones as well as dissolving your teeth. So what we have here is a solution of flavorings and addictive drug, an acid that will leach stuff out of your bones and sweeteners that seem to be metabolically confusing and certainly aren't better than sugar. Yet we think of this as a health product. That for me is the archetypal, confused way of thinking about food.

28:07What we also know is that when it comes to kids the age of my youngest, so the age three, they are drinking on average one can of artificially sweetened drinks every single day. We've taxed sugar. Sugar has come out of our diet. We've seen no weight loss, no indication that it's helping health. And what we are doing is consuming huge numbers now of these artificial sweeteners, which we also know affect our microbiome. What is a better alternative that's popular on the market than, because it appears to me that all of the drinks in the bloody supermarket have artificial sweeteners and flavorings.

28:43They do because of the sugar tax. So it's almost impossible now to buy fizzy tax without sweeteners.

28:51I try and not give any advice to anyone ever, but my kids eat a lot of UPF, but they don't have fizzy drinks. I think fizzy drinks are really quite harmful across the board. So kids should just drink milk and water, milk if they can have it, and grown ups can do pretty well on milk and water if you drink milk. What about breakfast cereals and Cheerios and things like that? So breakfast cereals are really convenient. I mean, let me see the Cheerios. So I think these probably do meet the deaf, yeah, these do meet the definition. Oh, they are. So we've got things like palm oil, caramelized sugar syrup, colors, and thatto norbix in, and antioxidant.

29:43And so this is ultra processed. It'll have some fiber. You'll have it with whole milk. I don't want to demonize breakfast cereals. My kids eat breakfast cereals for breakfast, but it's not like eating porridge, which is just whole grains or real bread. This is, and what you will find is if you give this to a kid compared to porridge, is they will be able to eat much, much more of this. And there is that there's a lot of marketing that this is a really, really healthy product. And I would say the evidence says that this falls into a category of foods that we actually know are associated with negative health outcomes.

30:23It says on the side there, doesn't it, a list of all the health benefits? A really good way of telling if a food is ultra processed is if there is any health claim on the packet, it's almost certainly ultra processed. And part of that is to do with this intellectual property thing that the only food you can make lots of money out of is a branded product. So there's no money in broccoli, milk, steak, eggs, soup markets quite often make losses on all those things. There's no health claim on broccoli or on plums or on milk. There's no health claim on steak. It's only the ultra processed things that you get marketed to you in this way because there's enough money to do it.

31:02The act of mail is interesting as well. The immune support. Well, it says immune support and it says vitamin D and B6. So that rich and vitamin D, immune support, that is definitely healthy. I mean, this is this is a, this is where we need, we should have done the maths and shown how much sugar there was in each part. These are very high calorie shots of sugary liquid that will harm teeth. And I don't know why you'd have this if you could just have real yogurt and or milk. And the reason they back at the vitamins is to be able to make health claims. So generally foods with added vitamins, real food doesn't need added vitamins.

31:47And we're again, we're pretty sure that. And I'm conscious I'm talking to you here. I've got a, I'm, I'm, I probably have to try to be careful. Supplementing vitamins into food doesn't seem to have many health benefits for healthy people. So we've got quite a lot of very big data on this. And there are lots of studies that show benefits that are funded by people who make vitamins, but broadly, the independent evidence shows that when you get vitamins and minerals in the context of food, they're really good for you. And when you take them in pill or supplement form, they don't seem to have many benefits if you are healthy.

32:31And this food here, this bottle of cocoa, I've got a can of pringles and cocoa pops Kellogg cereal. This is the stuff that I typically think of is like bad processed ultra processed stay away from. You would, but give me the cocoa pops. So the cocoa pops. We look at these traffic lights. Okay. Green, green, orange, orange. Pretty healthy. I mean, there is a, there is a monkey on the pack selling it to my, to my kids. Yeah, it says high in vitamin. Fibers vitamin D. Iron, yeah, iron supporting your family's health. Right? Sad. A goodness. I mean, everything about this tells you that this is a product not just a safer kids, but intended for kids.

33:14And we'll know you like you can't sell things if they're not healthy. There must be some regulator dealing with that. And this is the thing that my six year old will eat five adult portions off. So when you eat five adult portions, the, the traffic lights only apply to a 30 gram serving for you. Now a 30 gram serving is, is a handful like that. It's, it's one big spoonful. Okay. So this is the product that I, I recognize addictive behavior in my kids. And frankly, myself, I mean, I could eat, you know, 300 grams of it. And the other thing that I went and got from the supermarket because I think about what I typically think as ultra processed and good for me, I went and got this frozen pizza here.

34:00Mm hmm. And then I went and got a test goes finest. So this is high end, you know, much more expensive, not frozen pizza. And I thought, surely this pizza here is better for, a lot better for me than this one here. So again, that there's a complexity talking about is one better than the other because we've, we've never done a trial testing them against each other. They're both ultra processed. I know because I looked at the ingredients. They're both containing ingredients that you don't have in a domestic kitchen, like palm fat or dextrose. And they're both made really in a sense by the same company.

34:41So both of, they're both made by PLCs who will be owned by institutional investors with requirements for growth. So they come from the same food system with the same incentives. About production and my bet is that you or I would be able to eat the entire pizza at a single sitting and we'd be still licking the pack of both of them. So this is food that in a sense is, is engineered to be consumed to excess. You did an experiment, didn't you? Quite a famous experiment now where you put yourself on an ultra processed food diet. Can you tell me about that experiment and the symptoms that you saw when you did lived off ultra processed food pretty much exclusively?

35:27So I ate a diet that's very normal for a British teenager. I ate 80 % of my calories from ultra processed food. So for a teenager in, you know, my kid's school, for example, this would be a completely normal thing to do. One in five people in this country get 80 % of their calories from EPA. So I wasn't really putting my body on the line. I was switching from 20 % to 80%. Kind of two really big things happened. There was some health effects. So in terms of the physical effects on my body, I gained so much weight and I wasn't, it wasn't supersized me. I wasn't forcing it in. This was done as part of a scientific experiment for a big study that I'm now running at a university college London where I work as an academic.

36:11I gained so much weight that in, if I continued for a year, I would have doubled my body weight. We scanned my brain before and after I work with colleagues at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neuroscience. So, Neurology and Neurosurgery. So these scans done very expertly. And while I'm only one patient, you can, you can subtract the noise. You can be very sure that what you see is real. We saw enormous increases in connectivity between the automatic behavior habit bits, the back of the brain and those reward addiction bits right in the middle of the brain. So we can't exactly say what's happening, but certainly behavior and rewards are getting much, much more connected.

36:52Most significantly, I think we saw change in my hormonal response to him. So when you eat real food, whilst you're eating your chewing, all kinds of hormonal and neurological changes happen in your body, that will come to a point they'll say, look, you've had enough. Even you're fine. You can stop eating now. And that's called satiety and we've evolved this mechanism since living things first started eating food, hundreds of millions of years ago. And all animals have it and humans have it too. What we saw is that at the end of a standard meal, at the end of this month, my hunger hormones remain sky high.

37:25So this is food that is interfering with our bodies, evolved mechanisms to say, I am done. It's time to stop eating. But there was this other thing that happened kind of the most important thing, and it's the core of the book, is that midway through this diet, which I was quite enjoying. If you're a middle -aged man, the quest is always to lose weight. And I could go back to eating the foods of my childhood, and I was eating hot wings and all this stuff that I hadn't eaten for years. I was really enjoying it. But I was also doing all this research, partly for the book, and I'm a scientist, I study nutrition.

38:00And I was talking to a colleague in Brazil called Fernando Rao, and she just kept saying, this isn't food, Chris. It's an industrially produced edible substance. And I sat down that evening to meet Eta, a meal of takeaway for our chicken, and I could hardly finish it. And she had flicked this switch in my brain, where all of this ultra -process food had become disgusting. But I then had to keep eating it for another fortnight. And so it was a bit like the very famous book, The Easy Way to Quit Smoking, where you smoke all the way through reading the book, while you learn about smoking. And by the end of the diet, I mean, I now don't want to eat any ultra -process products.

38:39So the gift I'm trying to give the reader is if you're living with addiction, my invitation at the beginning is eat along, eat while you read. Don't forbid this stuff to yourself. Let yourself wallow in it, immerse it, taste it. And you'll start to read the ingredients lists while you eat. And you'll realize that all the food is, it has the same flavor profile. It's all equally salty and sugary and sweet. It's all acidic. And you will gradually become disgusted. And that's not a promise. That seems to be what's happening to a lot of people. And that is a very well -evidence technique when it comes to living with addiction.

39:16So the World Health Organization, who I work with, recommends the easy way to quit smoking for quitting smoking as being as useful as patches or any other technique. So for the individual, treating it as an addictive substance may be really useful for some people. What was the impact on your mental health and how you felt from a psychology perspective? Because we've seen this huge rise in mental health diagnoses across the board, especially in younger people. But it seems to be pretty consistent throughout different ages and demographics. And I wondered if there's a link between ultra -process foods and mental health crises that we're living through.

39:59We've got really good epidemiological data. So we now have hundreds of prospective studies, which are the best, the kind of studies we use to link smoking to cancer. That it is not just associated with physical ill health, metabolic disease, inflammatory disease, cardiovascular disease, cancers, early death. It's also associated with anxiety depression and also dementia. And my experience of being on the diet was that there was a thing that I think the research does capture, which is because it's salty. I was getting up to pee more at night. And I was getting really constipated and uncomfortable, because it's quite low in fiber.

40:40And so I got in this vicious cycle of sleeplessness, and I'd often find myself where at the fridge, in the kind of small hours at the morning, and the food felt like the solution to the problem. So I got in this spiral of sleeplessness, anxiety, overeating. And we know that stress and elevated cortisol also generally increases your desire for low quality food and makes people overeat. So in a way that kind of middle -aged stress, anxiety, there's sort of mild mental health symptoms that so many people live with, often it is just driven by the food. I read this stat in your book that, according to the World Obesity Federation, 51 % of the world, or more than 4 billion people, will be obese or overweight within the next 12 years.

41:27So I like to say they will live with obesity, rather than that, rather than use a beast as an adjective, because I think the biggest problem for people who live with a beast is stigma. It's that being a beast is your identity. And what we actually know is that the World Obesity Federation are doing some really good work, identifying this as the major public health problem. The ticklishness talking about this, is it's really hard to say that obesity is a problem without also saying that people who live with it are the problem. And if you're not careful, the war in obesity becomes a war on people who live with it.

42:03And I think the evidence is very clear, it's just about the food environment. So yes, you can make these very powerful economic arguments that we simply cannot afford to have a food system that's driving this rate of disease. I think the moral arguments are much more powerful that this is stuff that causes human suffering. So I would not actually tax ultra -process food and I certainly wouldn't ban it. I think all my arguments are about increasing freedom, increasing choice, increasing opportunity. And that's quite conscious. So I mean, you know this as a skillful communication. You talk about kind of doing exactly this in your book, where I'm trying to make an argument that will appeal to the political right that are much more on the side of a free market, low regulation.

42:59And in fact, we can have regulations completely compatible with huge economic growth. And what I'm asking for is a food system where people with low incomes have access to healthy, affordable food. Because a lot of people would say, this is sort of part to your book that, okay, so the solution here is really just for people to make better choices when they're in their fridges or when they're walking through a super market, why don't we just all make better choices? I mean, you may have a much more profound... I think you're asking this question in a provocative way. I think you will understand it much better than me.

43:34I've always had choice. And so when I choose to buy things, they're unhealthy. It is with a degree of choice. I do it. My patients, I run a clinic at the hospital for tropical disease where I work. And most of my patients have no addresses. They're very disadvantaged. They're migrants, asylum seekers. They come from very low income families because those are the people who get infections. Now, when I say to them, go and eat some healthy food, they all know what healthy food is. They've often got very diverse communities. They've often got very rich traditions of healthy food from the communities of the cultures they've come from.

44:11They are completely unable to buy it. In the case of the asylum seekers, there are eight pounds a day and they can't work. You can't say to someone, spend your eight pounds a day on apples and broccoli. And they haven't got knives to cut it with. Now, we know a million households in this country don't have fridges, freezes, stovetop cookers. So there are a huge number of families that only have a microwave to cook. And fresh food, while there is always a politician willing to advance this argument, like, but you can buy a bag of lentils. If you go to the cash and carry, you can buy rice or lentils, but you know, a couple are quid for 10 kilos.

44:45It costs money to heat it. It costs time. Time is the most expensive thing for people with low incomes. Then he pots, pans, cutting boards, knives, tap -aware. If you're going to batch cook, which is the only way to make home cooking economical, you've got a deep freeze to store it in. So saying to people with low incomes, you know, make healthier choices, it is nonsense. It's just, it's, and so I feel very strongly, the world does not need another person like me saying that. And in fact, no one. We all have people hate being told what to do. There was a study done on toddlers in 1920 that you write about, which is quite illuminating, where they got to choose their own food from a selection of unprocessed foods.

45:29And the children instinctively chose their own diet, which met their nutritional needs and calorie intake. What was that experiment? And what does that indicate to us about the nature of this argument? What, as it relates to just being able to control what we and choose what we want? If we look at the animal kingdom, even if you look at something you might think has quite a simple diet, like a, like a big herb before living in, you know, any of the big herb balls living on any of the big plains of the world. And you think, well, they're just eat grass. They don't. We've done loads of experiments.

45:57Well, you put, it sounds a bit unkind, but you put a hole in the neck of the animal, and you put a bag on the hole and you collect the plants, they're eating. And you can do this in a way that's relatively humane. And what we discover is if we study goats or cows, they're eating 50 or 60 different plants a day. Calories are abundant. And what those animals are doing is balancing all their nutritional needs from all those different plants and selecting them and learning about the flavour profile and the mineral content. They're moving to avoid predators in the rains, to different soils. So animals are incredibly sophisticated at perfectly balancing their nutritional needs from their environment.

46:34An obesity is non -existent in the wild animal kingdom. In urban animals, actually, if it starts to scavenge from humans, there is some evidence of obesity. But in wild animals, there is no obesity. Humans, it turns out, obviously, have the same ability. And so a scientist called Clara Davis, who's an amazing woman. She was a gay woman, one of the first medical graduates in North America. And she did this experiment where she was taking abandoned kids in the sentubes, functioning almost like an orphanage. And each child got access to 34 different whole foods every single day. And it was things like there was raw bone marrow and cooked rice and yogurt and milk, and they had a little bowl of salt they could have as much or as little salt as they wanted.

47:19And her question was, could the kids balance their nutritional needs? And the best example was a kid called Earl, who she took in a few months old, and he came in with a record. So he had very bad vitamin D deficiency, he had bendy bones. And they did some x -rays and you could see the records on the x -rays. And every single day he would gllug an entire cup of cod liver oil, which at the time was one of the only really the only source of vitamin D. And he'd drink this every single day, enthusiastically. He always wanted his cod liver oil. And on the day his records were healed, and you couldn't see them anymore on the x -rays, he stopped drinking the cod liver oil, never asked for it again.

47:58And none of the kids without vitamin D deficiency would touch the cod liver oil. So something in Earl's body was saying, I will, when I need this stuff, I'll have it. And once I don't need it anymore, I won't have any more of it. And all the kids that she studied over many, many years with access to a full range of foods perfectly matched all their nutritional needs. They all grew really well. They were intellectually well developed. They're extremely healthy. And they didn't have any of the sort of food refusal problems that parents have nowadays. So, and she knew very well that the point was the kids only had access to good food.

48:35She wasn't giving them access to industrially processed junk foods, which were still slightly available in the 20s. It was a really cool experiment. For me, I take away from that that our bodies can kind of self -regulate what we need if they're in an environment where the options are good. So if I'm a parent, and I'm sure I'll be a parent in the next couple of years, I hope so, if I just make sure in my house all the food options are good for my kids, whole foods, all the good stuff you've described, presumably then I can just unlock the cupboards and let them run free. I love talking to people who might become parents.

49:15We're so worried. I mean, I mean, I'm like, wow, I mean, yeah, good luck to you. Let's, can we have this conversation again in about six years? Can you tell me why I'm walking back? Well, you're not wrong. You're completely right. It will be impossible for you to limit the influx of ultra -process food into your house. So clearly, I've written the book on this. I study this. We'd love to do that. I want my kids to be normal. Being normal is really important as a kid. And food isn't just stuff we put in to build our bodies. Food binds us to the people around us. Food is part of our community and our culture.

49:48In the UK, our food culture is ultra -processed food. If you don't eat and drink ultra -processed food, you become a slightly odd person. And so I still eat it when I go to friends' houses. Because otherwise, I look like some, you know, fanatical food snop. And it's the same with my kids. So grandparents, friends, relatives, all bring it around. You don't control what they eat at school. My youngest one's a really nice nursery, but it's still ultra -processed food from the minute she gets there to when she leaves. So very good luck to you. But this is why I argue, I nod to, if an individual wants to read my book, I think they will come away with technical knowledge that they will be able to use.

50:35And I wish them well with that. The big argument of the book is about this. This is about social justice. You know, it is really appalling that even for people with a lot of means, real food is incredibly affordable and unavailable. Q1 is often when businesses start implementing new systems and processes in hopes of creating efficiencies for the year ahead. And over the course of my career, I've learnt just how crucial having the right systems in places, one which has helped me across many of my investments is NetSuite. They're also a sponsor of this podcast. NetSuite is the number one cloud financial system through their streamlined platform.

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51:44That's netsuite .com slash Bartlett. What about the people that say this is just about calories and calorie out? The fitness community, a lot of the weight loss community, just say what you've got to do. I've actually got a friend that said this to me quite passionately. He says what I do is I just measure the amount of calories I'm taking in, measure the calories that are coming out. And I make sure that there's a calorie deficit. And if you have a calorie deficit, he actually says me one day, he goes you can eat whatever you want and you'll be fine. So mathematically he's not entirely wrong.

52:19There are some very, very, there are two very, very big problems with that. The first is that while some people can just eat to instructions, many of us have genes that lead us to engage with food in a more interesting way. I care about food, I love food, I'm driven to it. So your friend should come around my house in the morning with a box of cocoa pops and try and get my daughter to eat one adult portion and good luck to him. I mean, they'll be screaming and crying and she'll be grabbing the box. So the food, it's a bit like saying to smokers, all you have to do is just smoke one cigarette. Don't smoke the whole pack, just have like one to be social, or people who live with addiction to alcohol.

53:00Just have one drink and that won't do you any harm. The food really is addicted for many people. But there is this other bit of the equation, which is really fascinating, which is that when we do more activity of the kind that most of us do, it doesn't seem to have an enormous impact on the calories that we burn. And this is very good robust science, going back to the, going back to the 90s. The most, if I tell this as a story, which I think is the way you do it, there was a scientist called Herman Ponser and he wanted to know how many more calories he'd burn if he went and lived as a hunter gatherer with the Hadsatribe in Tanzania.

53:36So he went and studied there and he put, he used the thing called double labelled water, where you can measure very accurately a calorie expenditure and he put them in metabolic hoods and he studied them for months and months. And he came back and he looked at his data and he thought he got it all wrong because the data showed that for, essentially if you or I went and lived in Tanzania and we walked 15 kilometers a day hunting antelope and digging tubers out of the ground, we wouldn't burn any more calories per day. And he just could not make sense of this. So then he went back and looked all the data available in the literature.

54:08We've studied animals, we've studied different human populations, there are, we've studied subsistence farmers compared to secretarial workers in the states, we've looked at miners. The same thing is true in all the studies. When you do sustain that activity over a long period, it doesn't massively impact your calories. Now some exceptions, if you do polar exploration, if you cycle in the Tour de France, if you go to the gym for an hour and a half every day, six days a week, you probably do burn a few more calories. But activity of the kind we all do doesn't seem to. And that explains why exercise is good for us.

54:40Because if you don't do exercise, I burn 3000 calories a day, let's say we're slightly different body compositions, but roughly you and I burn 3000 calories a day. If you do your hour and a half of exercise every day, you're stealing energy from your other budgets. So you're taking it away from inflammation, away from hormones, and away from anxiety. That's why exercise seems to be good for us. Because I'm sitting here and I'm relatively sad and true with my two kids, I don't go to the gym for an hour a day. So I spend my calories, but they spend on inflammation and anxiety and relatively high hormone levels.

55:18And is this what we call the fixed energy model? I read that in your book that term. Yeah, so that's the model. And there are lots of exceptions. But what that model tells us along with all the other available data is that when we are talking about populations who live with obesity, increasing activity will be really good for them, but it will not have a significant effect on body weight. So when we're talking about the pandemic of obesity, activity isn't hugely important. And if people are listening and they want to lose weight, many people have the experience that are putting a healthy diet in the context of lots of other healthy things.

55:57It's often really a good way of bringing about behavioral change. You'll feel good in other ways. But the activity and the exercise, if you think that putting in your slog at the gym every, most of us can manage 40 minutes every other day to hops. And I get nowhere near that. It's not going to have an impact on your weekly calories. Even if we accepted that even if we did think that it increased the number of calories you burn, there's other evidence that says you either eat more because your body isn't just the mathematical machine that your friend proposes. But also if you add up the calories and you go to the gym for half an hour, four times a week, it's just not very many calories in terms of your weekly calories.

56:37And even if you're cycling as hard as you can, the whole thing. I can definitely relate. I work out every day because just because I... I do it every day. Seven days a week. I have a PT every single day. And the reason I do that is purely because I am best disciplined when I have a clear routine. So knowing that it's part of my habit and that it's actually today, it's in my calendar. Yesterday it was in my calendar. Even I even have lunch in my calendar now because I'm just trying to make sure that I have some kind of routine with my eating or also just won't eat. I remember on Friday, my first meal was at 6 p .m.

57:12because I was podcasting, had some stuff with the BBC. And I don't want to do... I don't want to eat before I do anything because my... I'll slump. My point here though is with my personal trainer every day, if I don't change my diet, very little happens with my body. I actually end up growing a bit more muscles. I end up getting a bit stronger. But in terms of weight loss, the fact is just sits there. Interestingly though, from a psychology perspective, I've spoken to a lot of scientists and doctors who have said, your body will basically overcompensate for what you've just burned. If you went for a 5 or 10 mile run, your body wants to defend its weight because that's defending its survival chances.

57:46For me, one of the things that happens is if I go and work out in the gym because it was so painful, I'll then come home and look at the flapjack or the cookie or whatever. And I'll think that's two steps backwards. That's interesting. Whereas some people will come and look at the flapjack and go, I've earned that. But to counteract my point, that also happens sometimes. I go, well, I can have it because I just ran or whatever. What I might do is I might avoid the flapjack, the obviously bad thing. But then I might eat more of something that I think isn't bad. Do you have a nutritional bar or something that is sold to you as being part of that kind of access?

58:28Yeah, and I'll eat four of those. But when you speak to nutritionists, and I've spoken to a couple who work with really elite sports teams, those athletes generally eat food. So they have chefs that make, and they might make quite an elaborate flapjack, but it will be a flapjack made with the ingredients you would have in your kitchen. And they will often drink milk while they're cycling or running. And they'll eat pieces of chicken rather than other things. This topic of world power, again, we kind of started with it. I love it because world power comes up a lot in your stuff and it's been so interesting listening to your stuff about it.

59:05Yeah, I have to be honest. I have evolved in my thinking about it because I've listened to both sides of the argument around world power. And it does appear to me that there is probably something else going on. But with all these studies on world power, it's hard to establish causation because there are other factors that are quite clearly could confound the variables in play. So it's something that I've gone back and forward on. You talk about twin studies in the context of world power and what that can teach us. Why did you talk about twin studies in chapter nine? Part of it was done by a colleague called Clarelo Ellen.

59:41And what Clare was looking at was the heritage, it's a bit convoluted. Let me see if I can do this. The heritability of obesity genes. So there's a weird thing. We see this with, with it's a bit easy to understand with IQ, but it's true if IQ genes and obesity genes. That in some places, if your parents have genes for obesity, you will have a 90 % chance of inheriting the obesity. But in other families, it's more like 10%. Same as true with IQ. So what Clarelo Ellen showed was that if you came from a situation of deprivation, if you came from a low income household, your genes for obesity are much more likely to be expressed.

1:00:22So you would inherit those genes and you would develop obesity. Now the the social importance of this was because IQ studies originally showed that intelligence was hereditary. And this caused huge problems because it was done in the states and minority groups were measured as having lower intelligence. And this provided that kind of core argument of saying, well, some people are genetically less intelligent. And there's a woman called Sandra Skarn. She did the first intelligence, it's her first studies and it was twin studies that showed it. With it, whilst intelligence is heritable in some communities, it isn't in others.

1:01:07And basically it works like this. If you come from a well -off household, all your genes, whether they're for a healthy body shape or for intelligence, they're all maxed out. And so you, all the variability is genetic in the population. If you come from a low income household, you might have genes for height that never get expressed. You might have genes for intelligence that because you have been polynourished, you haven't been as educated as well. Those genes for intelligence never get expressed. So you have a really complicated picture where genes can be inherited but not expressed in different communities according to how those populations are treated.

1:01:44And so that's one of the crucial things in psychologies. When we only study white middle -class populations, when we study psychology students, we get very, very different answers to when we go and look at populations who live with disadvantaged or low income. So essentially, one of the big findings from Clare Lowell's work is if you've got rid of poverty, you would get rid of around 60 % of the problem of diet related disease. And you and your brother, because you are twins, are quite a good example of this, I guess, because you referenced how he went and lived in Boston and was having a stressful time in Gamedway.

1:02:20I mean, every time I go to America, we travel out there to record the podcast. It's just absolutely fucking wild. I just feel terrible. I always gain weight. And it's just unavoidable if you're doing work like you're doing the states and you're at hotels and you're on the move and you're traveling, you cannot eat good foods. That mini bar in the bloody hotel, which they just keep topping up. I remember I was saying to the team, I was like, I put the cookies in the fucking bin. And then I came back the next day and they put two bags there. They think you're eating the cookies. Yeah, they thought I enjoyed them.

1:02:55I mean, the marketing, that's a form of marketing. And if you think that you are struggling, I'll come back to Boston. But if you think that someone like you struggles in a hotel room when they put cookies and all this junk there and you have to sort of put it out of sight. For a British teenage, oh, this is true for teenagers and states, Canada, Australia, they are saturated in marketing in a way that you would be completely invisible to you and I. It's, I mean, you may remember this from childhood. It's on your bus tickets. When you buy stationery at the shop, it'll be on your receipt. It's on your music apps because we pay for our music apps, but kids don't.

1:03:29It's on their social media. The companies get their phone numbers directly from the anti -competitions and then they send them meal deals and messages ping, ping, ping, two their phones. So they, it's 360 24 seven immersion in marketing of addictive products. So it's not that confusing why 25 % of British kids live with obesity, not just over. Anyway, so Boston, yeah, my twin, my twin moved to Boston. It was a situation of some stress. He'd had a kid, a son Julian with someone in a way that wasn't planned, I suppose. I was Julian knows this. I mean, Julian's a whole, it's all part of a very dear family now.

1:04:14But it was very stressful. He went there to do a master's degree. He lived above a burger shop and he he kind of ate his problems and he gained 30 kilos. And that, that is an example of we both have a genetic vulnerability, but my life in the UK was very stable. Then I was in a different food environment in the UK. You move my genes, my clone genetically were identical. You move my clone to the states, stress him out a bit, he gained 30 kilos. I mean, it's, it's nothing. And as our will power changed, as our personal responsibility changed, you know, a set of accidents and coincidences and the food environment and what determined his weight.

1:04:56There's nothing to do with will power. Whenever I feel like I'm in a situation where I don't have autonomy and control, I'm like, oh, and when I hear about this sort of food environment we're living in and the big food mafia and the marketing and pinging me left, right and center and all the products that are in some of these ultra -processed foods that are making me feel addicted to them that I just, it's just triggering my brain in a way that I can't seem to control either. I go, I wanted to be able to do something about it on an individual level. I want to be able to take back control without having to wait for bloody downing street or the white house to change things.

1:05:30I love that. And what what I try and propose in the book is that you need to make that journey probably when you start reading the book, you're, you're in this sort of unconscious stage, you don't think of yourself as either a victim or anything, you're just eating your food. And then midway through the big book, I think I do propose to you that you are a victim and that's a hard thing for any of us to listen to. Most of us don't want to be victims. And I think you have to make the journey from victim to activist pretty quickly. And you can be an activist in your own life for yourself and you can, if you have resources and money and skills, you can get rid of ultra -processed food.

1:06:09Lots of people actually can't. I just, I just got to be really blunt here. Like there is, there is an anxiety I had writing this book that for the core audience of readers who can afford books, most of them will be able to buy sourdough from a fancy bakery rather than, you know, the loaf of bread we just looked at. But for the people who are most affected by the problem that it simply won't be a choice. For someone like you, yes, you need to take that kind of emotional reaction and turn it into direct that rage rather than directing it inwards. It's directing it out to a food system that controls you.

1:06:42I mean, one of the, one of the political narratives we hear is that any kind of regulation is nanny status and it's about government overreach. At the moment we live in a nanny state, the nannying is done by transnational food corporations. They don't pay any particular tax in this country. They do employ some people, but these, these are not companies that are part of our sort of culture. And yet they are controlling our food and what we eat. And I think we need to rest a little bit of control back off those, of those companies. But that group of people that maybe weren't the majority of people you were speaking to with your book that don't have the privilege that mean you have to make better choices as it relates to food or to buy the pots and pans and chopping boards or get a chef to cook it for us, whatever.

1:07:29What do you say to them? What do they do? I mean, this is why I don't give advice because there is, there, we are at this moment where we do have to politically treat the companies like the tobacco companies. Now, at the moment for many people trying to quit ultra -process food will be like trying to quit smoking in the 1960s. Is it really addictive? So do you normally do a bet on the evidence prediction? Please, yeah. The definition of a dick, because people, food addiction has been really scientifically complex for a long time because baked into the notion of addiction is that the only strategy that ever works is abstinence.

1:08:04You cannot be a dick abstinent from food and so food can't be addictive. So for a long time we said, well, food is a behavioral addiction where it is the food behavior is not the food itself. The definition of ultra -processed food allows you to describe the category of substances that are addictive. And when we go and speak to people who say, I live with addiction to food and you say, what do you feel addicted to? It's always ultra -process product. It'll be very different. Some people it's going to be the dark colors. Some people it's biscuits, some people it's pizzas, but it's always you. The definition of addiction is continued use of a substance despite knowledge of harms, physical or psychological, and despite repeated attempts to quit.

1:08:46And you and I will both know people in our own lives who continue to eat this food. I was definitely one of these people despite knowing it was harming me and wanting to stop eating it. So that's why I think I have two groups of readers. Some people are just going to want to cut down. You might be someone who's maybe eating a little bit more than you want and you just want to go, I'm going to maximize my health and I'm just going to have it as a treat on a Friday night. And that's fine. It's like it can be like booze or the occasional cigarette. For some people that one cigarette, that one glass of wine, but for many, probably 40 % of people, I don't know about your audience, but across the country, 40 % of people will have a troubled relationship with it.

1:09:28And for those people, abstinence may be an easier strategy. So yeah, I think it's addictive when we look at scans, it's addictive when we do surveys, it's addictive when we look at the profile of genes and the other surrounding factors that lead to addiction, it's caused by the same things. And there's lots of basic science about the speed of consumption and addiction. So addictive things are normally very quickly consumed, shots, crystal meth, tobacco products. If you chew tobacco, if you have slow release, metal fennadate, it's a treatment for ADHD, it's not addictive. If you have a week session beer, it's not addictive like tequila shots are.

1:10:10So the speed of hit seems to be important. And that may be partly to do with the softness of UPF, you get a very quick hit of your nutrition. Is there a link between ultra -process foods and neurodiversity? ADHD, those kinds of things? There's some emerging evidence about ADHD. I'm speaking to there's a working group at the Royal College of Psychiatrists who are really interested in the links between binge eating disorders and other eating disorders and ultra -processed food. I think we are only at the very beginning of discovering the health effects, but remember from very early on in childhood, a huge number of kids in this country are on a diet of almost pure ultra -processed food.

1:10:53But that's often in a situation where there is also other sources of trauma, there'll be other health factors, there'll be poor housing, it will go hand in hand with lots of other things. So it's an adjunct to other problems. I would think there will be a link, but teasing it all out is going to be complicated. A high UPF diet is linked to more deaths globally than tobacco, high blood pressure or any other health risk, 22 % of all deaths. That's the start I got from your book. And also increased consumption of UPF, ultra -processed foods is linked to the following diseases. All -course mortality, cardiovascular disease, cancers, high blood pressures, fatty liver disease, inflammatory bowel disease, depression, worse blood fat profile, irritable breath bowel syndrome, dementia, and I can't even say that other one.

1:11:42Frailty. Frailty. Just pretending. Being weak and old.

1:11:54Part five of your book is what am I supposed to do about it? And I've kind of answered it. I want to make sure I'm really clear in my own life here. I can, because I have the privilege of doing so, I can make better food choices. The first part of it is awareness, knowing what ultra -process foods are. I believe I've got that definition from you. Step two is I really need to do an audit of the things that I'm consuming frequently to make sure that I'm at least intentional about my consumption of ultra -processed foods. And then I can make better choices to bring in more whole foods into my diet, because you're right, there's so many things that I'm consuming that I thought were good for me.

1:12:29I mean, I drank bloody orange juice for sunny day for 20 years, because I just thought it was great for me. Indeed, or something, I can't remember. It's so sunny. Yeah, exactly. It was marketed at me. Awareness is step one, making more informed choices, I guess it's step two for me. And then there's a broader point, which is about trying to change the system for others, which I can do by having these kind of conversations, I guess. I love that those steps are coming from you. I don't have a... I honestly don't care what people eat. I like freedom. I don't like being told what to do. And so I am not prescriptive about what anyone should eat.

1:13:12No, we're in the book diet. Do I say you should? Like as a normative statement, you should eat less UPS. So if you want to, knowing what you know, that's up to you. I don't think anyone has a duty to be healthy, to generate economic growth. I just think no one asked to be born. You're born. You should be able to live your life as you want. What I do think is what I want for for everyone is that they can... they have agency, so that they are not subject to constant predatory marketing and they have true choice. So all the policies that I'm proposing and I'm part of a big group working on this are about making real food affordable and available.

1:13:54So in terms of the hierarchy of what needs to be done for everyone, the number one thing is tackle poverty. Poverty is a political choice. There is enormous wealth in this country and people born into disadvantage should not have a different childhood than people who are born rich. And it feels kind of almost revolutionary to say that, but it's really obvious to me like why... I mean, I can talk about this all day, but health outcomes are so different for people born in poverty, for people who live across the road from from from my kids. So that's the number one thing. The second thing is some very light regulation.

1:14:33I don't want to tax things. I don't want to ban things. We need to appropriately label unhealthy food and at the moment the labels are so confusing as to be unusable. We need to put in our national nutrition guidance that there is good evidence linking ultra -process food as a category to all these poor health outcomes. We should recommend the government should recommend that people do try and consume less. Now there will be a real problem for the government doing that because the government creates a food environment and it's really hard for a government to say, look, and the one had don't eat all this and then go on the other hand, that is all you can afford to eat.

1:15:05So that's going to create a real political problem and that's sort of what we're talking about. The most important policy step is to get industry out of the room when it comes to making policy. So this is so the I just spoke at the World of the Visty Federation in New York. There are UNLINE, WHO aligned group. Outside of the UK there is no discussion about the role of ultra -process food. The pandemic obesity is primarily due to this western industrial diet. Everyone agrees on this. Countries like Argentina, a count of cola has three big black hexagons on it, bigger than the logo of the company that makes the cola.

1:15:46Same with most of the breakfast cereals. There are warnings in the national guidance. So globally people are very, very aware of this. In the UK there is real control of the public health narrative by the food and drink industry. So as an example, all our major charities, the influence policy and a lot of policy comes from charity. They're all paid by companies that make by UPF. So if we look at the British Nutrition Foundation, this is a majority funded by all the major food companies. You can name Coca -Cola, Nestle, Cargill, all of them. Cancer Research UK, diabetes UK, the British Dietetic Association, all of them are funded by companies that make ultra -processed food.

1:16:25So we need to start treating the companies like the tobacco industry. And say, no, no, your money is not good and we won't take it because it influences food policy. That's kind of the most important step. And so part of being an activist in this area for me is not taking food industry money myself. And so that is a very painful weekly process because if you write a book about food, you get offered, you know, I mean, enormous amounts of money to go and to go and work for the food industry. How did your food consumption change from the beginning of this book to the end of this book? What, whether any particular choices that you have unmade or made because of what you learned in the process of writing this book?

1:17:14I think resisting addictions, if you live with addiction, is almost impossible. That's the whole point about addiction. And what you need to do is to make the journey from being addicted to being disgusted. And love and disgust, they're anatomically close in the brain, they're neurologically quite related. And many of us have experienced this falling out of love process where something you're in or something or someone you're infatuated with that is irresistible. You want to spend all your time engaging with, suddenly becomes something you really don't want to do. And smokers will describe it.

1:17:50Some people have this experience in human relationships. It can happen. That switch can be flipped quite quickly. And I think if you're someone who lives with addiction, you need to figure out how to flick that switch. At the moment, if you're addicted to this food and you constantly try to resist it, it will be too much. So I think that that is kind of the priority if you're living with the addiction. It's to try and get to disgust. And that's what happened to me is the food became. You know this thing about the uncanny valley where if there's a thing in animations, where if animations are very cartoony, they're fine.

1:18:29But if they become quite human, they suddenly start looking weird. There are some films where they get it a bit wrong. Where the cartoon characters are too realistic. They become almost zombie or corpse -like. So this uncanny valley that animation goes through where it becomes weird. And then when they're ultrahuman, they're fine again. The food for me was bit like that. It entered this sort of uncanny valley where it's similar to food, but it isn't food. And so now I just don't want any of it. But I will eat it to be polite. This stuff that I brought with me, you know, the pizza's I've got the cocoa and pops.

1:19:07I've got the cocoa cola here. Is this food? I don't think it meets. So food is very poorly defined. We don't have a working definition of food sort of in law. But I think food is substance that you eat for nourishment. And it should be about nourishment culturally, socially, personally, psychologically, as well as physically. And these products are developed to generate financialized growth for institutional investors. They're not made by people who love you, who want to nourish you. And so I don't think it meets what I think is a useful cultural definition of food. I think it's very useful to not think of them as food.

1:19:50And I don't think a mixture of coloring addictive drugs and phosphoric acid could be called food. In any sense, the word, it doesn't have nutrition. It only has things that will we're pretty sure that almost every ingredient does you harm in some way. So I don't see how that could be called food. It's a way of commodifying your ill health for the benefit of a very small number of people. Are you optimistic? Oh, that's such a great question. Like I live with, and I want the real honestly, you could ask me, you get a different answer each morning. So at the moment, here are my sources of optimism.

1:20:31There is another way of doing this. I have a friend who runs a not -for -profit drug company. Works as a normal drug company. That's a huge quantity of revenue. Only one person took a pay cut. That was the CEO. So he doesn't own it. Everyone else is paid. Exactly as if they're in a normal pharmaceutical company. The purpose of it, and he paid back investors. It's a really, it would be cool for you to interview him. Actually, it's one of the smartest people I know. He came from Big Pharma. And because he's not obliged to institutional investors, he developed drugs for low -income settings. He also sells them in middle and high -income settings.

1:21:04And that was really a great job. But the purpose of the company is to reduce healthcare inequalities. Now, there are lots of people who are working on a similar model that will sit within a capitalist structure that will pay back investors. But where food needn't become so beholden to institutional investors. So I think there are financial reasons for optimism. There are economic models. We can propose corporate structures. We can incorporate things in different ways that will serve the community in different ways. So that's one source of optimism. The second source of optimism is we sort of did it with tobacco.

1:21:38And the cool, terrible thing about tobacco is we regulated the tobacco industry and got smoking rates right down and the growth of equity value of the tobacco companies has continued more or less uninterrupted throughout. Now, part of that comes from selling cigarettes in other countries. Some of it comes from the rise of vaping. But nonetheless, we did manage to get control of tobacco. So as a public health activist, I have a template. I know how to do it. I know how to tackle marketing. And we have a road map. And we also know that people are furious. I mean, people are enraged. For 40 years, we've watched particularly our children not just get bigger, but get shorter.

1:22:19So if you have kids, if you have kids in this country, but they age of five, they will be that much shorter than if you had kids in Scandinavia or Bulgaria or the Netherlands. At the age of five, that much. Nine centimeters. That is the difference between a British five year old and a Bulgarian five year old. And he's all diet. So it's not just our kids live with obesity. They are stunted. Now you can't stunt a body by nine centimeters at the age of five and not also stunt them intellectually. So people are furious. We sort of know this is happening. We know we can't stop eating this food. Vistia is all around us.

1:22:53And so I think there is real, real momentum for people to reclaim their foods. And we do have a lot of amazing food cultures in this country that we can draw on for kind of rich, phenomenal diet. Might explain why the US is so poor from an education standpoint to some degree. You know what I mean? Because they always rank at the very bottom of the education tables. It's the same thing. It's about the same in the US. The physical stunting. Really? The physical stunting. Once we get rid of cigarette smoking during pregnancy, which is still far too high, it's really, it's really all due to diet. So there's all those causes of optimism.

1:23:29And yet I also up against the power. Any one of these corporations has revenues equivalent to the GDP of a pretty decent sized country like Venezuela, Croatia. Yeah. So and that's any one of the companies. Do you know this is just such a conspiracy theory that I just popped into my head about my own childhood. I'm the youngest of four, right? And if we just look at the brothers, so there's three of us brothers, I'm the youngest brother. And Kevin, my oldest brother is a monster. He's like six, five or something. Even Jason is like six, three. And then I'm short. And I'm like short in comparison to that.

1:24:07Sure. Six, six, one. But there's so much there's so much taller than me. And I did I was thinking about it as you're speaking. My mother did make home cook food. She was at home during my my older brothers and sisters as they were growing up. So she was cooking in the house the whole time. African food, lots of whole foods and chickens and vegetables and salad. Traditional, like any traditional diet. And then she started businesses and stopped coming home. So I was a scavenger. And I had like free reign to go to the sweet shop and eat not so good things. So I was just thinking about I've always wondered why I'm why I'm shorter than them.

1:24:40And I'm younger. But maybe there's a story. You're starting to physically and intellectually. Maybe. I think you're going to have difficulty selling people. I mean, it isn't in trigger point. We know about youngest people in in Europe. The youngest children are sure about I don't know. I don't know that. There are about five IQ points less smart because this is the family as well. My brothers are absolute. They're like they're like math leaps in the UK. My brother was rewriting the textbook. He was on the front of the plumber of her old because of his bloody the grades that he got. I think it was a plumber of her old.

1:25:13It's one of the newspapers. He was in there. And Kevin was even smarter. He was a suit another super genius. I got kicked out of school. I was it's really interesting. I mean that idea of eating a sort of traditional home cooked whole food diet versus your probably quite high UPF diet. I mean, I was the data. You know, you're one case, but we build evidence out of case studies. You know, I love that idea. I'm not sure I can really accept you as kind of intellectually if there's at least done to sitting across from you. No, but academically they were just so much so they still are so far ahead of me.

1:25:46In fact, Jason now works in my company just to help me with everything because he's so smart. There's a pair of twins I know who separated at birth, adopted in China separated at birth. They're quite well known. I've interviewed them for a podcast and one grew up in Norway, one grew up in the states, genetically identical. And the Norwegian twin is that much taller than the American twin. So we do see these natural experiments. How's your brother getting on? So he maybe the big est of the book is he kind of I stopped a message in the book. And I would say this because people are listening and it listens to selfish.

1:26:18You're like, well, how do I lose the way? How do I quit UPF? Well, I've said that. But the the bigger thing is don't beat your loved ones over the head with this. So many people like, I'm going to buy or poke for my wife or husband or daughter or I'm going to tell my kids. And when we let people go and we stop owning their problems, it gives them agency, it empowers them. And then it's up to them to decide. And they if they have the resources and the opportunities generally they will. And so a big kind of core message to the book is stop nagging your loved ones about their food. Their food is controlled by forces that are far bigger than you.

1:26:54They know what to eat, nagging people about their way, only stresses them out and makes it worse. So when I it was when I let go properly of what's aren't eats and stop really, really stopped caring about him. And and started to kind of not see him as an extension of myself. Because when he he would be big in public, you know, we work together as television presenters and I feel like, God, you're embarrassing me. Like we're trying to talk about health medicine to kids and look at you. And when I let all that go and saw him, it's like, you know, he's such a wonderful person. I love him so much.

1:27:28Who cares about his weight? That enabled him to sort of engage with then lots of other things happened. He's just got married to a public health academic. He's got resources. He got a bit older. I mean, all kinds of things happen. So much of life is is like, we can tell these narratives of how someone got from A to B, but he's very fortunate. And I think celebrating weight loss is just something I'm so anxious about doing. But he yeah, he a big product of the book was an improvement in my relationship with him because I stopped caring what he ate. I find it so interesting why people decide to make changes in their life.

1:28:08And it's so different for everybody. I've I've wandered and pondered whether sometimes we need a little bit more pain. You know, I can't forget a conversation I had with a manager of one of the top music artists in this country that was struggling. And this person was a friend of mine, the person struggling. And I kind of went to him and I was like, listen, how can I help? And he goes, you can't. He goes, I've managed a lot of music artists that I've struggled with addictions of various kinds. And at some point they'll reach rock bottom and they'll decide themselves that they need to make a change.

1:28:44And it's such a hard thing to accept just to kind of let someone, in your view, go into free fall in a narrow of your life. You want to catch them.

1:28:57You want to decision that's when we've all had it, switch suddenly flex, that can never arise as long as someone else is telling it. The clearest example of this is the washing up that my, you know, I've got a family and everyone's and sometimes as I'm about to heroically at the end of a meal get up and do all the washing up, my wife will say to me, could you clear these plates and do the washing up? And I've gone from being an empowered person with agency about to heroically do my bit for the family to being someone doing the bidding of someone else and I it enrages me and we do it to each other.

1:29:31So just allowing other people to grasp their problems and deal with them or not is, that's, it's a really hard journey for a doctor because doctors are all about telling you about yourself and I try and do it less and less. It kind of reminds me a little bit of what I was saying earlier about, I don't like it when it feels like I'm being controlled. And that's kind of what the food environment we live in makes me feel like it makes me feel like I don't have a choice. You don't and I want to have a choice. You don't really have a choice. I mean, if you have enough money and you're really prepared to get up early in the morning, you have some choices but our food choices are severely cutheld and if you're on a motorway, if you're traveling around this country, if you just try and go out on that high street out there and just buy yourself a quick lunch, there aren't a lot of choices.

1:30:21The pain thing's interesting. We need a little bit of pain in our diet. We need foods that are better and real and chewy and crunchy and make us work for them and take time to prepare and one of the big switches is trying to see food preparation not as a chore but as something that connects you to your ancestors. I mean, you know, we've survived because we come from this long chain of people who just spent hours at a grinding and pulver izing and salting and mashing and figuring out how to make food to nourish us and it's the thing we should do with other people and that trying to enjoy food prep is a big change for me.

1:30:59Second ago, I asked you if you're optimistic and you gave me a dodged it. You did a little bit but you gave me the reasons for being optimistic. What are the reasons you're pessimistic? I think because when it came to tobacco control, it took from the certainty that tobacco caused not just lung cancer but strokes, heart attacks and a whole range of other health outcomes including early death. The same list of health outcomes that ultra -processed food causes. From that knowledge to proper regulation took 50, 60 years and because around a significant percentage of women still smoke throughout pregnancy in this country, which is a good benchmark of not succeeding there, they're highly motivated to stop and unable to and we see the rise of vapes.

1:31:48So it's an arms race. You know, I'm a virologist by training. My PhD is in studying how viruses compete with humans and in an arms race you never get ahead very long. It's like business. Business is a great example of an arms race. You understand arms race is better than anyone. You can't just build your company. Well, that's done. Oh my go. Let's watch the money flow. Someone's always always trying to overtake you. And so we're as a community of activists, what we need to build is a sustainable form of activism that is you build regulation, you build on that, you keep generating evidence. And there are some, we have more and more ways of doing it with these sustainable non -profit, not -for -profit food companies, for example, as a way of funding activism.

1:32:32So are you optimistic? I have to be. I mean, nothing worth achieving will be achieved in our lifetime. So this will not be just the work of my lifetime. And I'm inheriting this work, many of us are inheriting this work from a generation of people who've been slaving at this since Nestle were indicted for aggressively marketing infant formative and very, very low -income settings and really harming children in low -income countries. So that was kind of the first engagement with big food where people were angry and we could really point to a problem. Those activists now, they're 20, 30 years older than me and they're sort of handing knowledge to me in a whole bunch of other people, across around the world, people from the global south, people from very diverse communities.

1:33:21And so I'm going to hand this to my kids, but there's a fight and you can be on one side of it, I guess. Chris, we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're going to leave it for. And the question that's been left for you is, what will we also have a little bracket since as you regret in 10 years about how we brought up our children today? I can tell you because I already regret it and it's it's not spending the kind of quality time that I've just given you with them, that to spend time as you today I've prepared, I thought about it, I've read your book, I've been listening to the podcast for ages.

1:34:13As a result, we've had at least what feels to me, I've got a meaningful engagement, it's really nice, I leave kind of enriched. And my kids get these sort of snatches of time. And you talk about diorizing lunch and I know this is this thing you talk about in lots of places, it's not just giving the crumbs to your family, but it's like giving, investing in your family and the way you do your work. And I don't do it because you know, my wife's pregnant, I've got two kids, six and three and it's just a scramble. So that's what I will regret and it's great actually being given the opportunity to articulate that and go, okay, if I'm going to regret it, who do I want to be?

1:34:50And you know, I love that question. I'm going to go away and try and force time with them that I'm present. And often they don't want, they're not interested, but it's just being there, listening to them and investing in them regularly in the way that I do with everything else in my life. Chris, thank you so much because you, I feel like this book, I think it's been in the Sunday Times best seller chart for like 25, 24 weeks or something mental. You knocked me off number one. Oh, listen, I'm just visiting. You live there. So I'll be there for another five seconds. I'm sure you'll be there for many, many, many, many more weeks.

1:35:27And you're starting a really important revolution and conversation around what we eat, a really important one and books come along once in a, once in a while, once every couple of years, once in a generation that really meet culture at the exact moment with the exact language, with the exact appreciation of the reader, the nuance, the inclusivity, not taking provocative stances that are so far on the right or so far on the left that they alienate a certain group, they kind of bring everyone in and they appreciate both sides of that nuance and that perspective. And this is exactly what this book does, perfectly timed, written perfectly to appeal to both sides of the most tricky narratives.

1:36:19And that is why it's such a brilliant book. And that's why everybody needs to read it. Because as you said, I think before we started recording, it's starting a conversation that we really need to start and it's, and it's these books that end up changing, changing the world and changing legislation. So congratulations, first and foremost, but thank you, secondly, for writing such an important book at such an important time. I'm really blushing. I mean, there's very few people I'd rather hear that from the new, it really means a huge amounts of thank you.

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