49 pages • 1 hour read
Chris van TullekenUltra-Processed People: The Science Behind Food That Isn't Food
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 5: “What the Hell Am I Supposed to Do Then?”
Part 5, Chapter 18 Summary: “UPF Is Designed to Be Overconsumed”
Van Tulleken summarizes the negative effects of UPF on both the human body and society and the reasons why these harms occur. These include the softness and dryness of UPF, which encourages overconsumption and makes the food that is consumed more calorie dense. Relatedly, UPF displaces whole and nutritious food from diets and replaces it with nutrient poor food, which, as van Tulleken says, “may also contribute to excess consumption” as consumers, seeking missing nutrients, eat more food (271). In addition, emulsifiers, preservatives, modified starches, and other additives cause damage to the microbiome and cause diseases of inflammation. On top of this, additives and artificial flavors interfere with our body’s natural satiation signals, leading us to consume more. Finally, the production methods and industry required to make UPF “drive environmental destruction, carbon emissions and plastic pollution” (272).
Van Tulleken asks whether the food industry itself, as some have proposed, could solve some of these problems. His assessment is that it cannot, for two reasons. First, many of the products produced by UPF companies have already been “reformulated” to mitigate perceived negative effects for over 40 years (272). For example, in response to concerns that UPF is high in fat, UPF companies have reformulated low-fat versions of their products. Despite these reformulations, the problems of obesity and other diet-related diseases have gotten worse in the past 40 years. More fundamentally, argues van Tulleken, neither self-regulation nor hyper-processing by UPF companies will work because UPF firms are driven to maximize profits. This means trying to sell more of their products by encouraging existing customers to consume more. At a fundamental level, UPF producers are structurally geared and incentivized to promote excess consumption. If they do not, they will be replaced by firms that do. As such, UPF firms can never be relied upon to solve the problems they create.
Part 5, Chapter 19 Summary: “What We Could Ask Governments to Do”
Van Tulleken examines what policy proposals might have an effect on reducing our consumption of UPF. He looks at the notorious case of Nestle’s marketing and sale of baby formula in the 1970s and the eventual policy response to that. Nestle, a UPF producer, had aggressively marketed their baby formula as superior to, and as a replacement for, breast milk in low-income countries. This included sales representatives without nursing qualifications dressing up as nurses and advising mothers on the benefits of formula over breast milk, often in maternity wards. Having given formula to mothers for a low price or for free, the price was then hiked when the mothers stopped lactating.
The adoption of formula led to thousands of infant deaths for four reasons. First, even formula made with clean water is likely to damage the microbiome and cause preventable deaths. Second, Nestle marketed the formula in areas where there was little chance of making the formula with clean water and no way of sterilizing the bottle used for it. This led to infants drinking formula contaminated with bacteria and many subsequent deaths. Third, increasing formula prices once the mothers had become dependent on the formula increased poverty and malnutrition among already impoverished families. Fourth, related to the previous point, mothers often diluted the formula to save money, making “almost homeopathic quantities of milk,” leading to “starvation and death” (289).
In response to this campaign by Nestle and the resulting scandal, a policy document known as “the code” was drawn up. This was created by activists and the World Health Assembly and outlined rules and regulations about the marketing of formula. Van Tulleken takes two lessons from “the code” and the response to Nestle. First, the people who make policy should not be funded directly or indirectly by the food industry. Second, the control and regulation of marketing practices and better information for consumers is more effective than outright bans or taxation.
Part 5, Chapter 20 Summary: “What to Do if You Want to Stop Eating UPF”
In the book’s final chapter, van Tulleken looks at what people should do on an individual level if they want to quit UPF. First, he says, they could try the 80% UPF diet that van Tulleken and his brother were on “for a few days” (303). If they find that they have an addictive relationship to UPF, they should try abstaining from UPF and exploring possible underlying causes for addictive behaviors. For quitting UPF long term to work, he says that individuals must learn to cook affordable and appetizing food from non-UPF ingredients. As such, he recommends two authors, Allegra McEvedy and Jack Monroe, who can help with this project.
Part 5 Analysis
Given the problems with UPF, it may be tempting to think that the UPF industry is capable of correcting itself. After all, if consumers demand healthier food, it seems to follow that UPF producers can be pressured to change the nature of their products and to address many of the concerns raised by van Tulleken. As van Tulleken says, “They do this already” (272). For example, UPF producers say, “[I]f emulsifiers damage the microbiome, let’s add some probiotics. If the food’s too soft, add more gum. If it’s too dense in energy, add artificial sweeteners” (272). Likewise, low- or zero-sugar UPF has been created to counter concerns about sugar, just as vitamins have been added to UPF in response to concerns about poor nutrient content. This is what is known as “hyper-processing” or “reformulation.” It appears to solve at least some of the problems with UPF, and potentially all of them, through the very technological ingenuity that created UPF in the first place.
However, hyper-processing has several drawbacks. Despite its convenience for industry, it can never be a substitute for actual policy and regulation of UPF. Hyper-processing creates new and unknown health risks, just as it is purporting to resolve existing ones. A clear example of this is the use of artificial sweeteners and saccharin, which was developed in response to concerns about excess sugar in UPF. Saccharin in fact contributes to “the mismatch between taste signals from the mouth and the nutrition content” (271), which drives obesity. By tricking the body into expecting a calorific reward that never comes, saccharin may both stimulate insulin and exacerbate the confusion of satiation hormones, a core problem of UPF.
Saccharin may also affect the body “in ways that we are only beginning to understand” (271). New synthetic chemicals introduced to the body may cause long-term side effects about which we simply cannot yet know. For example, gums used to create texture and probiotics used to mitigate gut damage may cause future health problems. This issue is worsened by the absence of regulation for new UPF chemicals and products and by the fact that reformulated UPF is often eaten in addition to “traditional” UPF. For example, Diet Coke and low-fat desserts, perhaps because they encourage further craving, are often eaten alongside, rather than instead of, other UPF meals and snacks. As such, consumers may get a double hit of calorie-dense, addictive food and unknown chemicals from newly reformulated UPF.
Before any explicit policies can be designed, Van Tulleken argues that “those who seek to limit the harm of these companies must have an adversarial relationship with them” (294). This might seem like an obvious point, given that UPF companies’ drive for profit creates the nature and problems of UPF. However, in the UK and the US, the idea that policy should be designed only with the collaboration of the UPF industry it is trying to regulate largely goes unchallenged.
Aside from the fact that research into the effects of UPF is often compromised by industry funding, groups claiming to be charities also receive substantial funding from UPF companies. For example, the British Nutrition Foundation, which has “held contracts with numerous government departments” and helped shape UK health policy, is “funded by almost every food company you can think of” including Coca-Cola and Nestle (295). As van Tulleken notes, “In the UK the lines between food activism and the UPF industry are also very blurred” (296). As shown by the collaboration between obesity activism charity Biteback 2030 and UPF firms, those claiming to be activists are often compromised by the support and largesse of the UPF industry. This makes it difficult for them to genuinely challenge or change industry behavior when it conflicts with industry interests.
Beyond “getting industry out of the room,” van Tulleken suggests specific policies that might help tackle the problems of UPF (299). Using the example of Chile in 2016, he cites policies such as “marketing restrictions and mandatory black octagonal labels” on certain unhealthy, UPF-related food (299). He also notes how many of these products were banned in schools and taxed to reflect social costs. In addition, marketing directed at children, like cartoon animals on UPF cereal, has been restricted.
The main issue with van Tulleken’s proposals is the political one of getting Western governments to accept their necessity. Given industry power and the culture of collaboration with industry that has dominated policy making in so many areas, this will, as van Tulleken admits, “require a cultural shift before any shift in legislation” (299). Van Tulleken gives little indication of how this will come about. It will perhaps require a deepening of the crises of diet-related disease and climate change caused by UPF before this imperative is recognized.
