Ultra-Processed People: The Science Behind Food that Isn’t Food
by Chris van Tulleken
“It’s not food. It’s an industrially produced edible substance.” – Chris van Tulleken
Ultra-Processed People isn’t the only book about ultra-processed food, but it is the one that is getting the most attention. If you feel like you have been hearing about UPF’s a lot all of the sudden, it is probably due to this book.
Chris van Tulleken is a practicing doctor in the UK and holds degrees in medicine and a PhD in molecular virology. He is a regular broadcaster with the BBC. Both the author himself and the book both seem to be much more well known in the UK than in the United States.
I got the audio book based on a recommendation, and did not expect to learn very much from it. It’s not like junk food being bad for you is much of a surprise. I turned out liking the book much more than I thought I would, and am really glad that I read it. There were so many things about ultra-processed foods that I was not aware of.
Many things in the book that were presented from a perspective that I had not thought of before. It really made me think about the choices that I was making and what systems I was contributing to with my food choices.
I tend to be a bit hesitant about books promoting specific diets or ways of eating. Many of them I find to be gimmicky, cloaked in pseudoscience, or part of get-rich-quick scheme for somebody. Some of them are mean, judgmental, or use the word “clean” in reference to food in a way that makes me uncomfortable.
I was also pretty hesitant about the term ultra-processed foods itself, which I felt was being thrown around in a pretty arbitrary way. After reading this book I feel like I have a much better understanding of the way the term is being used, and the reasoning behind it being such a vague classification.
While there is a lot of ambiguity to the term, it accomplishes the goal in somewhat broad strokes of trying to explain larger concepts and trends among larger population groups. That is one of the distinguishing characteristics about this book, and the concept of ultra-processed foods as a whole.
It is not a book about what diet choices are best for an individual to lose weight or have a specific health outcome. Instead it is a book that looks at food production and consumption from more of a population-wide perspective.
Part of the reason that it seems so hard to define ultra-processed foods is that the problem is not really with any particular food, processing technique, or ingredient. The problem is with the entire concept of a system of using food for profit. The harms are created at every level of food production, distribution, and regulation, and not merely in the factories where the foods are processed.
The author includes a large section where he follows a diet of just ultra-processed foods and then a diet removing the ultra-processed foods. This seems to be a staple feature of people writing about diets and nutrition, evoking the Super Size Me documentary. This might be a bit of an overdone trend, but it created a good narrative flow through the book while he was talking about the science. He uses it to connect how these large scale concepts impact an individual person or household.
He is a good communicator and explains things in a clear way that really makes you think. I felt like he was kind and compassionate to different groups of people, and his empathetic approach helped make the book more relatable. He spends a lot of time looking at the larger scale regulatory frameworks and infrastructure systems that have created the food environment that we currently have.
I recommend listening to the book as an audio book. The audio book is read by the author, and he does a good job of keeping it engaging. There are however interviews included in the audio book that seem to be original recordings and not quite as good of audio quality as the rest of the book.
I highly recommend reading this book. It is probably the best non-fiction book that I will read this year, and I have already found myself rereading passages of it because I wanted to make sure I really understood or remembered correctly what was being said.
It is one of those books that will make an impact on your life, and you will find yourself thinking about things that were discussed in the book later.