Recap: The truth about ultra processed food | Dr. Chris van Tulleken and Tim Spector

0:00Hello, and welcome to Zoe Recap, where each week we find the best bits from one of our podcast episodes to help you improve your health. Today, we're discussing ultra-processed food. Ultra-processed foods are everywhere. Many of us eat them over and over again without really understanding the detrimental impact they're having on our health. But why are these foods so addictive? Here to help us identify the ultra-processed parts of our diet are Professor Tim Spector and Dr. Chris Van Tullican. If it's wrapped in plastic and it contains at least one ingredient that you don't typically find in a domestic kitchen, then it's ultra-processed food.

0:40That's the shorthand way of figuring it out. This was a definition that was developed by a group in Brazil in 2010. And since then, we've had now over a decade of really, really good, increasingly robust research, including a very good clinical trial that has linked ultra-processed food to early death, cancer, weight gain, and a whole host of other problems. I think this is the NOVA classification. Is that right that you're referencing? Could maybe the two of you help step us through a little bit from stuff that I think we all feel pretty comfortable isn't processed because it's like a fruit or something, you know, you're eating it completely off the tree to the other end where I think we all sort of know that if it's got 50 ingredients in it and it's bright yellow and it lives for a hundred years and you can still eat it, that's probably at the ultra process end.

1:30And I think we're all deeply confused about everything, which is like 95 % of what we eat right, which is somewhere in between. Could you maybe just help us to step through? I think they have a few classifications, don't they, to help us understand a bit more how that works? I would say that the boundary between ultra processed food and just processed food, which we think is fine, is quite a blurry one. And particularly in the UK, we have a huge number of products where you can buy a lasagna lots of places and it's wrapped in plastic, but the ingredients, while it's a long list, there will be nothing you wouldn't have in a normal kitchen there.

2:05And there are these questions about, well, is that ultra processed or not? And I think this is the discussion that a lot of people who've read my book come to me with is going, what about this product? Is this okay? And those products in a sense, the most interesting because the classification system wasn't invented to decide about one particular sausage roll or another, but there is the shorthand of the ingredient is a pretty useful one. If it has an additive that you don't typically find in your kitchen, then I think it's useful to say it's ultra processed. I find that for me, what I'm interested in, and I think there will be some of your listeners who are living with significant obesity or living with a diet related disease, and they may want to take an approach of abstinence.

2:52And so for those people, having a definition that allows them to exclude this entire category from their diet would be useful. And I I think it is possible to do that. And my rule of thumb is if I'm in doubt, it is ultra processed. If you're wondering about this biscuit or this lasagna or this bread, it probably is. But one of the arguments that the food industry is starting to mount, and there's a huge opposition to my book and to a lot of my work by the food industry, is that humans have been processing food for millions of years. This is absolutely true. Since we first cut a chunk of meat off a mammoth and we started cooking probably over a million years ago, that is food processing.

3:32And we've been pounding and grinding and extracting and salting and smoking. And all this has been happening for hundreds of thousands of years. And it seems to be fine. But ultra processing is a very different thing. Ultra processing is about taking broadly taking traditional foods and designing them with the cheapest possible ingredients to be very hard to stop eating and doing that for profit. That's the very important part of the definition is ultra processing is about profit. It's not about nourishment. And giving some examples here is useful. So, cheese is a processed food. Okay. So, we're not talking about those as being problematic because virtually all our food is to some extent processed, but this has been done naturally.

4:17And we discussed some of those on previous podcasts, right? Things are ground and milled and baked and all these sorts of - But it's when you're replacing the natural ingredients with the extracts of other foods and extracts of chemicals to mimic the original foods using what we call edible, industrially produced food-like substance. And I think it's that substitution. I was just laughing because I feel like food-like substance already. I don't really want to eat food-like substance, do I? I'd rather eat food. And, you know, it's exactly right. So it's you have these ingredients you wouldn't recognize in your kitchen.

4:57They're all there to make that food seem like the original as much as possible, but using the cheapest possible group of ingredients that allow you to manipulate it, give it a massively long shelf life and make you overeat it. And so that's that's really where we are. And the food industry doesn't want a definition of it. because that would make it very easy for them to be criticized. So they're always countering these discussions with saying, aha, we've got some examples of something that isn't, and you're saying it is. But it's quite easy to define, I would say, 98 % of foods in this way. There are maybe a couple of percent that we can argue over.

5:44So I think what you're saying is that there's this sort of clear scientific definition, though relatively recent, and I know from our own work, there's probably still more work to make that better, but it's quite complex. And so this is a sort of simple rule of thumb, if you like, as a way to say, I'm navigating the grocery store, the shop, or my fridge, to understand what is ultra-processed. Tim gave the example of cheese as a brilliant an example of a processed food that for a long time we've thought was a bit unhealthy. Butter also works as an example because butter is something we made probably 8 ,000 years ago, 6 ,000, 7 ,000, 8 ,000 years ago.

6:24Margarine was the first probably mass-produced ultra-processed food. There was solid fat shortening and it was a way of turning waste oils, cottonseed oil, into an edible product that you could put in the human food chain and generate enormous value from. And so fake butters, margarines essentially, were the first set of these synthetic foods where almost all the molecules in the food product are synthesized. And we've never encountered molecules quite like this before. And is that a very important part of the story that these are, you know, new chemicals, if you like, that our body hasn't been exposed to for thousands of years that our microbes haven't exposed?

7:07Is that a very important part of the story? or this is not clear or well i think it's an emerging part of it i don't think we've studied it well enough and until recently we just assumed that these chemicals were inert so the the food industry tells us that oh like saccharin completely inert zero calories just passes through your body straight out of the toilet you don't have to worry about it absolutely perfect and that's been the general theme of these industrial produced chemicals. And most of the artificial sweeteners, for example, come from the petrol industry. So they're not made anything you'd eat.

7:46They're made in laboratories. And I don't think we know the answer to many of these things, but I think it's quite likely that these do have long-term consequences. We just haven't studied them properly. But it's just one part of the story. It's not just those substances, it's other things which we're still beginning to understand. So we can unpack more in a second then. I think just before moving on, we did a little survey of the Zoe community on social media to ask how much ultra-processed food they believe they ate. And interestingly, 84 % said they eat little or no ultra-processed food. and my question is is that typical and is it possible they might be eating more ultra processed food than they realize are your community lying to you i think we trust the zoe community they will be telling you what they think is their the right answer healthier than the average i think this is uk population people listen to this podcast more health conscious so you might expect which The official figures of 57 % of the calories eaten in the UK are ultra processed is the latest.

8:57And in the US is? It's over 60%. And for children, it's higher. So we think 10 % more in children. So the average person is going to have more than half their calories that way. So it's a slightly different question. How many of your calories are that way? Oh, I never have them. But I think that is an underestimate. I don't think they're that healthy. I think it's very difficult to avoid ultra-processed foods if you know what all of them are. And it may be that these people don't realize that in the morning when they drink their orange juice and they have their muesli and they have other breakfast cereals, for example, or their instant porridge, they're eating ultra-processed foods.

9:43That's amazing. So breakfast cereal is an ultra-processed food? I would say almost all commercially available breakfast cereals are ultra processed. Almost all supermarket bread is ultra processed. Almost all flavoured yogurts are. The areas they might be not noticing their consumption would be the very typical lunches that we go and have in the UK. Lunch is a packet of crunchy things, might be some popcorn, a sandwich and a drink. and particularly if you get it from the fancy shops and we can all know the names of them they're widely available up and down the country that's still all ultra processed it all contains maltodextrin dextrose the bread is full of emulsifiers there are flavorings so even the sandwich that you might think is like it's just bread and like this plain it might be a vegan falafel organic whole grain but the bread will contain emulsifiers and the the condiments particularly will contain thickeners or maltodextrin even if it looks brown because it's been dyed brown It looks like a granary, healthy, seedy loaf.

10:45Generally, it's been made to look exactly that, but underneath it, it's full of these chemicals. So yes, I think many people don't realise the extent to which they're surrounded by stuff, even with healthy veneers. Anything that says it's healthy on the packet is nearly by definition unhealthy. It's a great rule of thumb that, isn't it? If there's a health claim on the packet, it is almost certainly ultra-processed. Chris, I read that in your book. I loved it because I thought for a minute and I was like, that's actually so true. Every time these things say - I haven't found an exception. High protein or the one that actually my personal experience, because I've been looking at this a lot more over the last year as you guys have been talking about this more is sugar free and no added sugar, which I think like most consumers, that sounds really good.

11:31I'm buying this for my little girl who's three, for example, that sounds like the right thing. it's sugar free or no added sugar, and now started to learn to turn over and look at the ingredients. And instead of seeing sort of three ingredients, you suddenly find 15 and it's stuffed full of sweeteners and they haven't had to put on the top. We put in lots of sweeteners instead of sugar, they've just said no added sugar or sugar free. So, my favorite example, because it's been the one that's been most shocking to me, is actually just looking even at plain yogurt. and plain yogurt should basically have milk in it, right?

12:07And what's amazing, I've now realized, is that most of the plain yogurt you go and look at when you turn over, it's got like half a dozen or sometimes even 10 ingredients in it. And it's right next to the one that only has milk in it. And it's impossible to tell. There's nothing on the, you know, until you actually go and look into the ingredients, they look the same. So there's a sense, I think, in which it's... fat you're more likely to have fake yogurt than if it's full fat. But there's something really hidden, I guess is what I'm saying about these ultra-processed foods, that it seems to have happened without it being very visible to us, is that?

12:43That's completely right. And if you consider one of the things like the illusions of our food supply system is that it exists to supply food to us. And that isn't the way it works, it exists to extract money from us. And so low-fat yogurt, the genius of low-fat yogurt, is you can sell your yogurt at a premium price because it doesn't have fat in it. And you can add a very cheap modified maize starch to give it a creamy feel or a xanthan gum or a guai gum or a locust bean gum, any of these gummy things that give a fatty mouthfeel. 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.

13:27And you can extract some of the protein and put it into whey protein. you can put it into muscle drinks. So you're adding much more value to your commodity milk by putting different aspects of it 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.

13:51That's it for this week's recap. If you're listening to this, you're already on your way to living healthier through better nutrition. And at Zoe, we're doing everything we can to help you on your way. So we've developed Daily 30, a delicious dietary supplement to add to your meals. Because with Zoe, we ran a clinical trial testing Daily 30. The results were staggering. It's selling out in the UK and we're working hard to bring it to the US as soon as possible. Sign up to the wait list at zoe.com slash daily 30.

14:25Thank you.