Ultra Processed People Quotes

It’s not food. It’s an industrially produced edible substance.

At present around 80 per cent of the world’s farmland is used to graze animals or to produce crops to feed to animals. The combined weight of animals bred for food is now ten times the combined weight of all wild mammals and birds put together.27, 28

The food security that many of us enjoy is the product of a system of production that has kept costs low by destroying wild land and not paying for the costs of atmospheric carbon. These approaches will, ironically, create huge food insecurity. This is happening already around the globe, but nowhere more directly than in the areas of the Amazon that have been deforested to grow soy.

We might think of flavour as frivolous, but there’s a school of thought that says artificial flavouring is the problem when it comes to obesity and overconsumption. Since I did my diet, it’s the word ‘flavouring’ that I avoid more than any other in food. Flavourings signal that something is UPF, and the need for flavouring tells us a lot about some of the ways UPF does us harm.

Another existential threat to human life caused by UPF but not mentioned on the packaging is antibiotic resistance.

UPF has a long, formal scientific definition, but it can be boiled down to this: if it’s wrapped in plastic and has at least one ingredient that you wouldn’t usually find in a standard home kitchen, it’s UPF.

The word ‘sustainable’ has no formal meaning with any independent body. Sustainability criteria are largely set by industry and, in general, the designation just means that a farm growing it can’t clear new forest.

Each year, globally, Coca-Cola produces 3 million tonnes of plastic waste, and we know that almost none of this is recycled.60 A staggering 91 per cent of all the plastic waste ever produced has not been recycled and has either been burned, put into landfill or is simply in the environment.61

None of the UPF snacks and discretionary products are necessary for human diet, meaning that many of the environmental impacts could be avoided.

The British Nutrition Foundation is funded by almost every food company you can think of, including Coca-Cola, Nestlé, Mondelēz, PepsiCo, Mars, Danone, Kerry and Cargill.38

sugar (including honey) can harm the body, not because it increases your insulin levels, but because it rots your teeth and makes you eat more food.

The third external cost that I want to touch on is how UPF harms the environment through production and use of plastic.

In pursuit of making this quantity of food, agribusinesses have invested in a handful of high-yield crops and products,¶ typically grown or produced on land that should be tropical forest, using agrochemical inputs – fertilisers, pesticides, herbicides, and lots and lots of fossil fuel of course. Supported by government subsidies, this approach has led to a global glut of commodity crop production, and declining food diversity.

Sugar and salt are the two greatest food additives in terms of driving appetite, which is why they are nearly universal in UPF, whether it’s beans or pizza. So, high sugar content is one of the properties of UPF that drives weight gain.

But the main reason that I don’t think we can reformulate UPF to make it better for us is that it is designed to be purchased and consumed in the largest possible quantities. And a food that is consumed less will never sell as well as a food that’s consumed more.*

For these commodity crops to be profitable, they need to be turned into something, and there are two options (or three, if you count biofuel): ‘You can force the crops through a factory-farmed animal to produce meat, or process them into an aggressively marketed UPF.

And the nature of UPF means that the manufacturing process typically cannot allow for concern for the environment or high standards of animal care. It encourages excess consumption of food and necessarily diminishes our knowledge about its origins. If you buy fresh beef or chicken, it will often say on the pack grass-fed’ or ‘corn-fed’. People often want to know which farm it came from. But very few people ask about what the chicken in their prepacked UPF sandwich was fed on, although this is, it turns out, an important question to ask.

Inland rain requires trees. Rain clouds on their own cannot travel more than 400km from the sea, so rain in the centre of a continent – the very rain that creates the central forest of the Amazon for example – requires continuous forest to the coast. Around half the rain that falls on the Amazon comes from its trees. As every school geography student knows, water evaporates from the sea, then falls as rain on coastal forest. Those trees ‘breathe out’ water vapour, which creates new clouds that travel further inland in so-called ‘flying rivers’. Crucially, this is how water reaches the soy and corn plantations in central and western Brazil. Once you destroy the forest you get less rain. A 2019 study showed that the rainy season in the state of Mato Grosso had become a month shorter in a decade,41, 42 and many of the major soy farms in Brazil are now suffering from the very drought that they have caused.

Removing industry from the table will require a cultural shift before any shift in legislation. It will gradually become shameful for activists to work with the UPF industry as the understanding spreads that the companies are as responsible for diet-related disease as the tobacco industry is for smoking-related disease.

Some people think that UPF is just lousy food in terms of nutrition and that it’s eaten by people who eat generally poor diets. But when you correct for all that, the effects on death and depression and weight and heart attacks remain the same.’ It is the ultra-processing, not the nutritional content, that’s the problem.

On the grey, tinned, ultra-processed diet, people ate an average of 500 calories more per day than those on the unprocessed diet, and they gained weight in line with that. Perhaps even more surprisingly, participants actually lost weight when they were on the unprocessed diet, even though they could eat as much of it as they liked.

Factory farming and UPFs are two sides of the same industrial food coin,’ Percival said. ‘And then, of course, lots (though not all) of that factory farmed meat is subsequently turned into UPF.’ The result of this is that, of the thousands of different strains of plants and breeds of animals that have been cultivated since the birth of agriculture, just twelve plants and five animals now make up 75 per cent of all the food eaten or thrown away on earth.14-17

So dominant is soy as industrial animal feed that the average person in the UK or Europe consumes approximately 61kg of soy per year, largely in the form of animal products such as chicken, pork, salmon, cheese, milk and eggs.36 Only 20–30 per cent of imported soy is ‘certified sustainable’ (and we have already discussed how little that means). So, if you live in the UK, there is a tennis court of land producing soy in the tropics just for you, and most of it comes from places like Brazil and Argentina where ecosystems that affect global climate are being destroyed.**

This is the science behind how UPF affects the human body: • The destruction of the food matrix by physical, chemical and thermal processing means that UPF is, in general, soft. This means you eat it fast, which means you eat far more calories per minute and don’t feel full until long after you’ve finished. It also potentially reduces facial bone size and bone density, leading to dental problems. • UPF typically has a very high calorie density because it’s dry, and high in fat and sugar and low in fibre, so you get more calories per mouthful. • It displaces diverse whole foods from the diet, especially among low-income groups. And UPF itself is often micronutrient-deficient, which may also contribute to excess consumption. • The mismatch between the taste signals from the mouth and the nutrition content in some UPF alters metabolism and appetite in ways that we are only beginning to understand, but that seem to drive excess consumption. • UPF is addictive, meaning that for some people binges are unavoidable. • The emulsifiers, preservatives, modified starches and other additives damage the microbiome, which could allow inflammatory bacteria to flourish and cause the gut to leak. • The convenience, price and marketing of UPF urge us to eat constantly and without thought, which leads to more snacking, less chewing, faster eating, increased consumption and tooth decay. • The additives and physical processing mean that UPF affects our satiety system directly. Other additives may affect brain and endocrine function, and plastics from the packaging might affect fertility. • The production methods used to make UPF require expensive subsidy and drive environmental destruction, carbon emissions and plastic pollution, which harm us all.

These groups were a new kind of vehicle: a hive or colony of close genetic relatives, which functioned as a unit (e.g., in foraging and fighting) and reproduced as a unit. These are the motorboating sisters in my example, taking advantage of technological innovations and mechanical engineering that had never before existed. It was another transition. Another kind of group began to function as though it were a single organism, and the genes that got to ride around in colonies crushed the genes that couldn’t “get it together” and rode around in the bodies of more selfish and solitary insects. The colonial insects represent just 2 percent of all insect species, but in a short period of time they claimed the best feeding and breeding sites for themselves, pushed their competitors to marginal grounds, and changed most of the Earth’s terrestrial ecosystems (for example, by enabling the evolution of flowering plants, which need pollinators).43 Now they’re the majority, by weight, of all insects on Earth. What about human beings? Since ancient times, people have likened human societies to beehives. But is this just a loose analogy? If you map the queen of the hive onto the queen or king of a city-state, then yes, it’s loose. A hive or colony has no ruler, no boss. The queen is just the ovary. But if we simply ask whether humans went through the same evolutionary process as bees—a major transition from selfish individualism to groupish hives that prosper when they find a way to suppress free riding—then the analogy gets much tighter. Many animals are social: they live in groups, flocks, or herds. But only a few animals have crossed the threshold and become ultrasocial, which means that they live in very large groups that have some internal structure, enabling them to reap the benefits of the division of labor.44 Beehives and ant nests, with their separate castes of soldiers, scouts, and nursery attendants, are examples of ultrasociality, and so are human societies. One of the key features that has helped all the nonhuman ultra-socials to cross over appears to be the need to defend a shared nest. The biologists Bert Hölldobler and E. O. Wilson summarize the recent finding that ultrasociality (also called “eusociality”)45 is found among a few species of shrimp, aphids, thrips, and beetles, as well as among wasps, bees, ants, and termites: In all the known [species that] display the earliest stages of eusociality, their behavior protects a persistent, defensible resource from predators, parasites, or competitors. The resource is invariably a nest plus dependable food within foraging range of the nest inhabitants.46 Hölldobler and Wilson give supporting roles to two other factors: the need to feed offspring over an extended period (which gives an advantage to species that can recruit siblings or males to help out Mom) and intergroup conflict. All three of these factors applied to those first early wasps camped out together in defensible naturally occurring nests (such as holes in trees). From that point on, the most cooperative groups got to keep the best nesting sites, which they then modified in increasingly elaborate ways to make themselves even more productive and more protected. Their descendants include the honeybees we know today, whose hives have been described as “a factory inside a fortress.”47

The foods we eat, the air we breathe, the toxins we absorb through our skin, and the stress we manage all factor into our body’s pH. And although there’s a consensus among nutritionists and medical experts well versed in these matters that somewhere in the range of 80 percent of the foods we ingest should be alkaline-forming and 20 percent acidic, the typical American diet—combined with our fast-paced, stress-inducing urban lifestyle—is overwhelmingly acid-forming. Processed foods, sodas, meat and dairy proteins, polluted air, and simple life pressures all contribute to what is called “metabolic acidosis,” or a chronic state of body acidity. Why is this important? When the body is in a protracted or chronic state of even low-grade acidosis, which most people’s bodies these days are, it must marshal copious resources to maintain blood pH somewhere in the optimal 7.35 orbit. Over time, the body pays a significant tax that manifests in a susceptibility to any array of infirmities: fatigue; impaired sleep and immune system functionality; a decrease in cellular energy output, nutrient absorption, bone density, and growth hormone levels, which over time lead to a reduction in muscle mass; an increase in inflammation and weight gain, leading to obesity; the promotion of kidney disorders, tumor cell growth, mood swings, and osteoporosis. And I haven’t included in that list a variety of bacterial and viral maladies that flourish in the acidic environment.

intake of UPF by 10 per cent was associated with a 25 per cent increase in the risk of dementia and a 14 per cent increase in the risk of Alzheimer’s disease.

The impact of the current food system is not sustainable for the next few decades – let alone the next few millennia. The environmental cost is so immense that, even if we stopped all fossil-fuel emissions, emissions from the global food system alone will take us well beyond the fatal 1.5°C rise in temperature by 2100.12 And, while there will always be an environmental impact from farming and processing food for 8 billion people, UPF is a particular driver of carbon emissions and environmental destruction.

Factory farming and UPFs are two sides of the same industrial food coin,’ Percival said. ‘And then, of course, lots (though not all) of that factory farmed meat is subsequently turned into UPF.

Inland rain requires trees. Rain clouds on their own cannot travel more than 400km from the sea, so rain in the centre of a continent – the very rain that creates the central forest of the Amazon for example – requires continuous forest to the coast. Around half the rain that falls on the Amazon comes from its trees. As every school geography student knows, water evaporates from the sea, then falls as rain on coastal forest. Those trees ‘breathe out’ water vapour, which creates new clouds that travel further inland in so-called ‘flying rivers’. Crucially, this is how water reaches the soy and corn plantations in central and western Brazil. Once you destroy the forest you get less rain. A 2019 study showed that the rainy season in the state of Mato Grosso had become a month shorter in a decade,41, 42 and many of the major soy farms in Brazil are now suffering from the very drought that they have caused. Diverting rivers is not going to be possible, because the river water comes from rain.43 Hotter temperatures and droughts mean the southeastern Amazon has become a source of carbon dioxide rather than a carbon sink, and by some estimates the Amazon now produces more carbon than it stores.44, 45 So, the single greatest threat to Brazilian agribusiness is ... Brazilian agribusiness.

Plowman thinks that it’s very hard for companies to tackle the public health issue on their own. ‘It would be very difficult for one company to say: “We’re going to take this on,”’ he explained. ‘No one company is that big. It would cost them too much and won’t ultimately make a difference. The rules of the road have to be set by governments. And in the end, business is really good at reacting to that. Remember the sugar tax that was introduced in the UK in 2018 on the soft drinks industry – that has resulted in a massive reduction in sugar consumed in soft drinks.

A similar situation exists in the USA, where the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, which trains dietitians and helps to shape national food policy, was found to have extensive relationships with the food industry.

A report in the peer-reviewed journal Public Health Nutrition showed that the organisation accepted more than $4 million from food companies and industry associations, including Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Nestlé, Hershey, Kellogg’s and Conagra.39 And this was just between 2011 and 2017. In addition, they had significant equity in UPF companies including more than a million dollars of stocks in PepsiCo, Nestlé and J.M. Smucker.40 Meanwhile, back across the Atlantic, Diabetes UK lists Boots, Tesco and Abbott as corporate partners.41 Cancer Research UK is funded by Compass, Roadchef, Slimming World, Tesco and Warburtons.42 The British Heart Foundation takes money from Tesco.43 The British Dietetic Association has Abbott, Danone and Quorn as its current strategic partners, with other food companies as supporters.44 The

It is so, so normal to work with and take funding from industry, that many of these groups may not be fully aware of how working with companies that make and sell UPF allows for ‘healthwashing’ of the brand. It’s a great opportunity for the company to get publicity for weak promises and delaying tactics as they fight for ‘voluntary’ measures to challenge what they do.

In 2016, Chile implemented a set of policies that put marketing restrictions and mandatory black octagonal labels on foods and drinks high in energy, sugar, sodium and saturated fat. These foods were also banned in schools and heavily taxed.46 These policies banned treats from Kinder Surprise eggs and removed cartoon animals, including Tony the Tiger and Cheetos’ Chester Cheetah, from packaging. PepsiCo, the maker of Cheetos, and Kellogg’s, producer of Frosted Flakes (known in the UK as Frosties), have gone to court, arguing that the regulations infringe on their intellectual property, but at the time of writing Tony and Chester are not on the packs.‡

It was a masterclass in the technical side of policy making, developed in consultation with the public and then tested and trialled. All the participants in lay group meetings wanted clear labelling. The

labelling has had a huge impact, with decreases in food purchases and, perhaps most significantly, research showing that the regulation made children ask their parents not to buy the products.48

There are ways of farming beef and chicken that may even help to sequester carbon, and many agroecological systems that farm without chemical inputs and in which grazing and browsing animals help to build soil health and natural capital in a way that supports the local and global ecosystem. But it’s doubtful that these methods can produce enough meat to match our current and growing appetite.# If we keep eating more meat, it will require the destruction of more tropical forest, which in turn will drive pandemic disease and climate change.

On the present course, global meat production is set to almost double in the next 30 years, and we’re going to need an area the size of Europe to produce the soy and maize to feed the animals on.

Many UPF products contain ingredients from four or five continents. Your lasagne or ice cream may have palm oil from Asia, cocoa from Africa, soy from South America, wheat from the USA, flavouring from Europe and so on. Many of these ingredients will be shipped more than once – from a farm in South America to a processing plant in Europe, then to a secondary processing and packaging plant in another part of Europe, then to consumers, who might be back in South America right next to the farm.

We could at least imagine a system arranged around agroecological farming and the consumption of a diverse range of fresh and minimally processed whole foods.47 Such a system would promote biodiversity and has the capacity to produce enough healthy food for a growing population on a lower land footprint than today with massive climate benefits. We would need to eat significantly less meat, but the modelling is clear that it is possible.48-53

We could at least imagine a system arranged around agroecological farming and the consumption of a diverse range of fresh and minimally processed whole foods.47 Such a system would promote biodiversity and has the capacity to produce enough healthy food for a growing population on a lower land footprint than today with massive climate benefits. We would need to eat significantly less meat, but the modelling is clear that it is possible.48-53 With this new, organic farming system, fresh and minimally processed whole foods would be more abundant and possibly cheaper. But such a system wouldn’t favour the monocultures required for UPF that do so much damage. By fixing the agricultural system so that it becomes sustainable, the production costs of whole foods should fall (without the requirement for fossil-fuel-based agrochemical inputs) – and those of UPF would rise.

With agroecological approaches, we could increase food quality and diversity while reducing all those external costs of ill health and climate change. It may be a fantasy to assume it would fix all problems, and it would almost certainly present new challenges, but they would be nothing compared with the consequences of not changing the food system.

antibiotics have become a routine part of animal care, and the microbes in the animals’ guts become resistant to them. We have been worrying about family doctors ‘overprescribing’, or giving antibiotics for viral infections (when they’re needed only for bacterial infections) for a long time. But this accounts for a trivially small amount of antibiotic use.

I worry that these arguments are unlikely to bring about real change, because the response from industry is to do yet more processing.

They do this already: if 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. Their solution to ultraprocessing is hyper-processing, also known as reformulation.

reformulation won’t work for two reasons. First, many of the ultra-processed products that are currently causing diet-related disease globally have already been reformulated.

Almost everything you eat has been reformulated, but the plans are still getting bigger.

Farmers receive, on average, 27 per cent of consumer expenditure on foods consumed at home and a far lower percentage of food consumed away from home.1

There are two main policy ideas that come out of the story of formula marketing that inform how we should consider the regulation of NOVA class 4 foods. First, the people who make policy and inform policy should not take money directly or indirectly from the food industry. Second, the best way to increase rights and freedoms is to restrict marketing.

This means those who seek to limit the harms of these companies must have an adversarial relationship with them. It doesn’t mean that the food industry is inherently immoral or that policymakers shouldn’t talk to industry. But I think it does mean that no one should take money.

You may think of policy as being written by politicians,’ Crawley explained, ‘but the specifics are frequently hammered out by special interest groups – specifically charities and NGOs and professional groups representing health professionals.

Of course, you can’t design national food policy without speaking to industry. But you can make sure that none of the people who write and develop the policy take money from the industry they seek to regulate. The relationship cannot be one of partnership.

It is the ultra-processing, not the nutritional content, that’s the problem.

The delusion is the idea that we can eat according to numbers rather than appetite.

A calorie was a calorie, regardless of whether it came from carbs or fat.

Ultra-processing reduces micronutrients to the point that modern diets lead to malnutrition even as they cause obesity.12, 13, 14, 15

Giles Yeo had told me that genes affect eating behaviour, including the speed at which people eat and the foods they choose.

UPF, especially products with particular combinations of salt, fat, sugar and protein, can drive our ancient evolved systems for ‘wanting’: ‘Some ultra-processed foods may activate the brain reward system in a way that is similar to what happens when people use drugs like alcohol, or even nicotine or morphine.

She also told me about how the preservatives and emulsifiers in UPF disrupt the microbiome, how the gut is further damaged by processing that removes the fibre from food, and how high levels of fat, salt and sugar each cause their own specific harms. And there was one small comment that stuck. Whenever I talked about the ‘food’ I was eating, she corrected me: ‘Most UPF is not food, Chris. It’s an industrially produced edible substance.

Humans and animals will learn to love almost any flavour with a smell barcode that is associated with nutritional reward.

The main difference in the effects of the two diets that Hall observed was that people ate the UPF much more quickly.

looking at the full spectrum of evidence available, provided you keep consuming the same number of calories, the fall in insulin that comes from cutting carbs doesn’t seem to make you store less fat or burn more energy.

At these journal clubs, Greg and the other senior lab members taught me that science is not a list of rules or facts, but a living argument.

The classification system is now called the NOVA system, and it divides food into four groups.1 The first is ‘unprocessed or minimally processed foods’ – foods found in nature like meat, fruit and vegetables, but also things like flour and pasta. Group 2 is ‘processed culinary ingredients’, including oils,‡ lard, butter, sugar, salt, vinegar, honey, starches – traditional foods that might well be prepared using industrial technologies. They’re not things we can survive on, because they tend to be nutrient-poor and energy-dense. But mix them with stuff from the first group, and you’ve got the basis of some delicious food. Group 3 is ‘processed food’, ready-made mixtures of groups 1 and 2, processed mainly for preservation: think tins of beans, salted nuts, smoked meat, canned fish, chunks of fruit in syrup and proper freshly made bread. And then we come to Group 4, ‘ultra-processed foods’. It’s long, perhaps the longest definition I’d ever read of a scientific category: ‘Formulations of ingredients, mostly of exclusive industrial use, made by a series of industrial processes, many requiring sophisticated equipment and technology.

a world that would offer everyone more opportunity and choice. So, there are no proposals to tax things or ban them – only a demand to improve information about UPF, and access to real food.

The paper transformed my understanding of myself, even if it took me a while to get my head around the idea that, at least in part, I’m an assembly of old viruses at war with my other genes. It may change the way you see yourself, too. You aren’t simply living alongside this arms race between different genes – you’re the product of it, an uneasy coalition of competing genetic elements.

We eat, then, as part of a set of interlinking, entangled arms races, competing for energy flowing between life forms. Like all arms races, this competition has generated complexity, and so everything about eating is complex.

In 2022, a study published in the journal Neurology looked at data from over 72,000 people.30 Increasing intake of UPF by 10 per cent was associated with a 25 per cent increase in the risk of dementia and a 14 per cent increase in the risk of Alzheimer’s disease.

It turns out that economists use the same set of equations to describe corporate survival in economic arms races as ecologists use to explain the survival or extinction of species in biological arms races. Companies and groups of living organisms (species, families and so on) are subject to the same laws whether their ecosystem is powered by money or energy.38-42

ultra-processed diet, people ate an average of 500 calories more per day than those on the unprocessed diet, and they gained weight in line with that. Perhaps even more surprisingly, participants actually lost weight when they were on the unprocessed diet, even though they could eat as much of it as they liked.

quick consumption also opens up the possibility of eating more than we need.

we cannot lose weight just by increasing activity. Variation in body-fat percentage is unrelated to physical activity level or energy expenditure.

It is a source of constant amazement to public health doctors that you can buy a cold Coke almost anywhere on earth but keeping a vaccine cool enough to get it from a factory to a child is a huge problem.

She and her colleagues found that, in families with secure incomes and high levels of food security, the heritability of their body weight was around the 40 per cent mark. But in households with the lowest incomes and the highest levels of food insecurity, it jumped to over 80 per cent. The genes that cause obesity are found equally in high-income and low-income households, but being in a high-income household is protective. Being born into a lower-income household can double the risk of obesity.

Most UPF is not food, Chris. It’s an industrially produced edible substance.

Using models like this Hall predicted several years ago that a low-carb diet would not have a significant effect on weight.

it means that we cannot lose weight just by increasing activity. Variation in body-fat percentage is unrelated to physical activity level or energy expenditure.