How ultra-processed foods wreak havoc on your body

29:11And you can add a very cheap modified maize starch to give it a creamy feel or a xanthan gum or a guac gum or a locust bean gum, any of these gummy things that give a fatty mouth feel. And then 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 yoghurt's this brilliant idea of repurposing waste and extracting more value but none of it's done with an eye on our health 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 cleverly done by the food companies as well, but also the scientists haven't really applied themselves to looking at this because we've had this rather reductionist view of nutrition, as I'm always going on about, into calories and the macronutrients, which misses the whole point.

30:19So reductionist meaning like, I just think about it as a set of individual components. Yeah, food is simple. If you understand the calories, 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 treat it 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 ticks the right boxes and has health claims on the front is actually killing us and causing us all kinds of problems that isn't related to those macronutrients.

31:00It's all the other chemicals that Chris has been talking about, 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 added to by this clinical trial, which done by Kevin Hall of the NIH, which you can describe in more detail exactly what that, But that was a real game changer. That was about three years ago. And just giving people ultra-processed food and the identical equivalent in calories and macronutrients of properly made food, that had really shocking results, even to the people who did the study.

31:43I 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 Dickin at UCL. And 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.

32:21In other words, it's the processing. It isn't those nutrient contents. And Tim talks about, you know, we think of diet as simple. And that's, I mean, I think you've been the person 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 molecules from red wine or the vitamins and you give them to healthy people, they don't have a health benefit.

33:04So food as 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 genius of the scientists who came up with this definition was to realize that those two foods would be different.

33:43And Chris, because we talked about - I didn't talk about Kevin Hall, sorry. Oh yeah, tell us about Kevin Hall. The 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 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 two weeks. They couldn't escape. They were given these food regimes. And amazingly, they liked both equally. that's such a crucial detail is they didn't prefer the ultra processed food and so that and one lot uh 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 oomph so it wasn't you know obviously unhealthy and the key point i think was that they noticed that the ultra process group kept going back for seconds.

34:41And 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've got all these individual chemicals, but together, this effect on the brain and the appetite system, and it explains why we've 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 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 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.

35:37If 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 kind of, we started making this food in bulk in the fifties and the sixties, the seventies. 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 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 5 % more of box A, that's the one that goes to market.

36:17And 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. You describe it a bit like you might be describing something to a gambler, like 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 don't know about Tim's thinking on this. Food addiction has been very unfashionable scientifically for a long time because the problem with saying something's addictive is the only solution is abstinence.

36:54We 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 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.

37:29And I would say that was true of me. So I have definitely had a relationship with certain ultra processed foods that was pathological, that was addicted. And 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 inoculations. 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.

38:11So it wasn't just a one-off sort of completely madcap thing. I ate an 80 % ultra processed diet, which is a very typical diet for a teenager in this country, very typical diet, one in five adults eats 80 % 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 octoprocess food. And what happened? So I gained a huge amount of weight. In one month, I gained so much weight that if I'd continued for the whole year, I would have doubled my body weight. But there were two other kind of main effects that were surprising.

38:46One was 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 a big meal didn't generate the same hormonal responses it had previously. And the other thing I had was an MRI. And I don't know what Tim would have said 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 stand up at four week intervals with a diet that's completely normal.

39:21And 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's Square. So we weren't, we're not doing this in an amateur way. We're doing this with a big team at Queen's Square of people who do 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 80, 90 % UPF for the first two decades of their life?

40:04Well, that's terrifying. So I would love to talk at the end here about what people can do. So could food manufacturers start making ultra processed food that was healthy? And what can listeners do listening to this and say, okay, that's all very scary. What are the practical things that I could do that would really improve my health? So the first question, can 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 consume calories quicker than essentially your hormone response can keep up and make you feel full.

40:41Now, we've known about soft, energy-dense food 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, all the gums replacing fats. We've been hyper-processing already ultra-processed food now since the early 80s. We've been replacing fats with cornstarch and gums. So I am very pessimistic that they can further modify this food, to be honest.

41:22I 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 you know few i had there was a a good example of a i spoke to a beer manufacturer who added fiber to beer thought it was a great idea that actually you could have a healthy beer and uh well don't laugh you know there are worse things so beer is relatively only mildly processed.

42:19So add a bit of fiber to it. Okay. This would be healthy. It turned out people drank less once they had it. So they had to abandon it. Because it left them feeling full. They had 10 % less than they would have the other beer. So even if they charged a premium, they were going to lose it. So this is exactly what you were talking about. There's a disincentive to help for the companies to actually improve them. So if I'm a consumer then, so then I'm thinking like the manufacturers aren't going to solve this for me is what you're saying. No, government could. They could say we want some minimum standards here, but they won't because the lobbying and the corruption in government is not going to happen anytime soon.

43:02And they want to keep the prices low because they worry about people rebelling and the nanny state, et cetera. so you're not going to change that very easily but 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 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 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.

44:08So I think that's what I would argue the consumer should go for is in the first instance, at least proper labeling, proper health, and not allow them to have all these benefits and part of your five a day and all this sort of nonsense that you see. But the consumer needs to understand these foods and reading 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 our hospitals. We need to just say no to this epidemic of ultra-processed food, which is killing us.

44:49When 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 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-evidenced 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.

45:23We'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 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.

45:56But as usual, the UK is dragging its feet because of the food lobby. But you've already got most of the South American countries. You've got Israel. France. France now. Canada will. Even the states might. But yeah, we're again in the UK lagging so far behind. It's a political issue. I want to ask one final question here, which is because a lot of this I think is about what government might do. And so as an individual, 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 ultra-processed food and give up. But let's say you're just listening to this and you're like, you know what, I would like to cut down, but I'd like some guidance.

46:39Like, where should I be? Where should I start today if I'm listening to this and I'd really like to get to this low level of ultra-processed? What would you advise someone who's listening to this right now for sort of practical advice? Well, start with breakfast because everyone is generally in charge of their breakfast. You may not be when you go to work or you're traveling, whatever. Most people start the day and they've got choices. They can skip breakfast, as some people do, and just have a tea or a coffee, or they can say, I'm not going to have any breakfast cereal, you know which 90 the 95 of which are ultra processed that would be 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 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 normally at home most of us have breakfast at home we can read the ingredients list 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 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've you know they've been around for 20 years.

48:35And I think fastidiously read your ingredients lists. You will start, once you're into the idea, you have to look at the ingredients. You just start seeing all these things there and you start asking why your mono and diacetyl tartaric acid esters of fatty, of mono and diglycerides, the datum, 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 that 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.

49:17The 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 the podcast. And 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-processed food. He was talking enormously about the microbiome and about 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 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 or too much of the bad things it's actually the whole processing is has suddenly become you know the the crucial factor and it's only because of this recent science 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.

50:28It's only now that we're able to see exactly what's happening. It's only now, really, we've had a chance to take action against it and educate people. So it really is a very topical subject. 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 to 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 processed food if you stop eating it? And you said you thought, yes.

51:01What would you be saying? Because there'll be 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. Am I stuck? Is it all too late? It's not too late. I think everyone can improve their health. I'm particularly looking at the from the angle of the gut microbiome, which I think is key to our long term health. And re-educating those guys how to eat real food again. For people who've been on ultra-processed foods diets, they've had abnormal microbes because of the sweeteners, the emulsifiers, the preservatives, all these other chemicals in there, giving off the wrong signal.

51:37So there's still time to re-educate your gut microbes, feed them real plants, get them diversity, get them eating fermented foods, 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 with my son who had his intensive ultra processed food diet. He still hasn't 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.

52:23And hopefully most people will benefit. Will my hair grow back? Absolutely not. Sorry about that. Well, it depends what you put on it. 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 at which to wrap up. I'm going to try and summarize. we've gone in a lot of different 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 I think we start off by saying people are eating a lot more of these ultra processed foods than they've realised.

53:00More 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 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 the properties of 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 the last 50, 70 years, that there's really good evidence that this is impacting our health now.

53:41And that's not just because 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. It sounded like almost everything we don't like from dementia to depression to obesity. 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 this experiment for yourself. It's really that your hunger 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 afterwards.

54:20I 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 we're used to having. and somehow they're replacing it with all these things. Whereas we don't fully understand exactly the ways they're working, whether it's through the microbiome, whether it's through spikes and things, but somehow we have to get out of that. 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 food's ecosystem, but at a minimum, we should be demanding really clear labeling.

54:58We 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, we all worry so much about our children, right? 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 start with breakfast. 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.

55:31So think about swapping that for stuff that isn't ultra processed. So bread with only ingredients you would have in your kitchen, yogurt, these sorts of things, taking food to work. So again, you know that you've got food that you can eat instead of most of us living in environments where it's very difficult not to. And I think the final thing, 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 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.

56:06That's an amazing summary. He's good at this, isn't he? I try and pay attention, but thank you. I wanted to interject, but you hit every point. This is like a communication lesson. My publicist is listening out there. I'll do it. I'll do that, Eddie. Wonderful. I really enjoyed that. Thank you both very, very much. Likewise. That was so interesting. Thanks for having me on. I really, really enjoyed that. It's always good. I learned 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.

56:50Your 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 joinzoe.com slash podcast to get 10 % off your purchase. As always, I'm your host, Jonathan Wolfe. Zoe Science and Nutrition is produced by Yella Hewings Martin, Richard Willen, and Alex Jones here at Zoe.

57:23See you next time.

57:33As you can imagine, hosting this podcast, running Zoe, juggling family life, it all keeps me pretty busy. So I try as best I can to stay energized and show up well in all those parts of my life by fueling my body with the right food, by exercising, and by adding a scoop of Daily 30 to my meals every day. If you haven't heard of Daily 30 yet, it's the gut supplement designed by our gut health scientists here at Zoe. It's made of over 30 high quality hand-picked plants, including seaweed, fungi, and different types of fiber. Better yet, it contains ingredients that support gut health, digestion, and energy, which is ideal for packed calendars and busy lives.

58:17Simply add one scoop a day to any meal for an extra boost of fiber and plant diversity. And because it tastes delicious on just about anything and adds a satisfying crunch, it quite quickly slots into your life, becoming a daily healthy habit you'll always have time for. By the way, whenever we talk about Daily 30 as a good source of fiber, we're required to say that it contains four grams of total fat per serving. Obviously, that's all amazing healthy fats from plants. so order yours today at zoe.com daily 30 thanks for listening and see you next time