The Junk Food Doctor: “This Food Is Worse Than Smoking!” & “This Diet Prevents 60% Of Disease!” – Chris Van Tulleken (Ultra-Processed People Author)

0:00:04 I ate a diet that’s very normal for a British tusk, I gained so much weight,
0:00:10 got in this vicious cycle of overeating, anxiety, sleeplessness, scanned my brain and if I continued
0:00:16 for a year, I would have killed Dr. Chris Ben Tulligan. Doctor, researcher and a BAFTA award-winning
0:00:21 broadcaster. Chris forensically examines the effects ultra-processed food have on us all.
0:00:27 75% of the calories that are consumed globally come from six companies. Food mafia. They are
0:00:32 controlling our food and what we eat engineered to be consumed to excess. Whether it’s a burger
0:00:36 from a fast food chain or supermarket bread, everything is adjusted so that things become
0:00:42 irresistible and a pandemic of diet-related diseases has taken over the world. One in five
0:00:47 people in this country get 80% of their calories from ultra-processed food. Poor diet has overtaken
0:00:52 tobacco as the leading cause of early death on planet Earth and by the age of five kids in this
0:00:58 country will be that much shorter nine centimeters compared to other countries and this is all
0:01:03 diet. Now you can’t stunt a body by nine centimeters and not also stunt them intellectually.
0:01:07 Why don’t we just all make better choices? I have almost no interest in personal responsibility.
0:01:12 This is about social justice and people without money, they’re forced to eat bad food. If you’ve
0:01:16 got rid of poverty, you would get rid of around 60% of the problem of diet-related disease.
0:01:19 What about the people that say this is just about calories in, calorie out?
0:01:23 There are two very big problems with that and this is very good robust science.
0:01:27 The first is that and if people are listening and they want to lose weight, the evidence says
0:01:43 Dr Chris Van Telekin, you wrote a book ultra-processed people.
0:01:50 I know from firsthand experience that writing books is a painful experience. It takes a long,
0:01:57 long time to do it and you have an extensive experience across medicine, across different
0:02:05 sort of scientific disciplines. Why does this book and this subject matter? Matter to society
0:02:08 and maybe even more importantly, why did it matter enough to you?
0:02:16 It matters to all of us because for a very long time we’ve been incredibly confused about what to
0:02:24 eat and we’ve called the foods that harm us junk food and processed food and high-fat salt sugar
0:02:31 food. We’ve not had a way of labelling foods even as a pandemic of diet-related diseases taken over
0:02:36 the world really and this is particularly true now in low-income countries and particularly true
0:02:42 with low-income people living in the UK. So poor diet, which means a diet high in ultra-processed
0:02:48 food, has overtaken tobacco as the leading cause of early death on planet earth for humans,
0:02:54 the animals we farm and for wild animals of course because ultra-processed food is produced
0:02:59 by a food system that is the leading cause of cause of loss of biodiversity, the second leading
0:03:05 cause of carbon emissions and the leading cause of plastic pollution. So about 12 years ago,
0:03:13 the definition was developed to describe a Western industrial American diet and it was
0:03:17 done by a team in Brazil and much of the best work on this stuff has been done by teams in
0:03:21 Central and South America because what they saw in those countries, whereas this is crept up on
0:03:27 us in the UK, in places like Mexico and Colombia and Brazil, obesity was essentially unheard of
0:03:33 and within a decade it went to being the dominant public health problem. In towns in Mexico you
0:03:37 wouldn’t know anyone who was living with obesity and within a decade everyone would know someone
0:03:44 who’d had an amputation for type 2 diabetes. The only thing that had changed was the influx of
0:03:51 broadly an American diet, industrially processed foods. So the definition was invented 2009-2010
0:03:58 and we’ve had a decade of evidence now that is very clear that it is ultra-processed food that
0:04:03 is responsible not just for pandemic weight gain and obesity but also for a long list of other
0:04:10 health problems including early death. Why did this matter so much to you? What is the personal
0:04:17 reason here? I’m an identical twin. I’ve got a brother who lived with obesity for a very long
0:04:25 time and my weight would fluctuate. I’m insulated by privilege, by my surroundings, by education
0:04:31 but I’m always on the brink of weight gain and I recognized in myself that I lived with an addiction
0:04:36 to many ultra-processed products and my brother particularly did. And so at the core of the book
0:04:43 is this sort of moment of understanding where there are several sort of
0:04:49 fulcrums in the book I suppose but two of the key elements are first of all for many of us ultra-processed
0:04:53 food isn’t just harmful it is addictive and it makes all the criteria for addiction and it has
0:04:58 there’s so much evidence that for some people these products are as addictive as tobacco
0:05:04 products, drugs of abuse, alcohol, gambling but that nagging people is really really harmful.
0:05:09 So I’d had a very toxic relationship with my brother and in fact the whole family we’re very
0:05:13 close family but we had for the better part of a decade been nagging him to lose weight
0:05:19 and I took him to see a behavioral change expert who said to me I didn’t need to speak to it to
0:05:23 sound I need to speak to you. I said no no he’s the fat one you’ve got to speak to him he said no
0:05:29 you are the problem for your brother to lose weight will be to lose an argument that’s been a decade
0:05:36 long with you you are the barrier. And so because I’d been nagging him I owned his problem and he
0:05:43 didn’t own it. And so at the heart of the book is this this idea that nagging people generally
0:05:48 pushes them towards doing things that that are harmful it generally makes them more likely to
0:05:52 do the thing you’re you’re nagging them about. And I’ve tried to engage with these products
0:05:56 when we come to individual solutions I’ve tried to engage with ultra processed food as an
0:06:00 addictive substance a substance that I was addicted to. What is the balance there between
0:06:08 personal responsibility and being a victim of circumstance in the in the sort of food
0:06:12 landscape and society that we live in because there’s a there’s obviously been a huge debate
0:06:18 around obesity and weight you know there’s one school of thought maybe over on the more extreme
0:06:23 side that says just get out there and you know make better choices in your life and go I don’t
0:06:27 know go for a run or something. And then there’s another school of thought that says weight gain
0:06:34 and obesity are a byproduct of genetic the our genes and the environment we live in what is the
0:06:40 truth in your view and in the case of your brother. I think we have really really good evidence
0:06:47 that personal responsibility that these arguments around willpower and personal responsibility are
0:06:58 morally scientifically and economically redundant they have no value. So when it comes to population
0:07:05 health there are loads of different ways we can argue this if we look at willpower in so far as
0:07:11 it’s ever been operationalized for research and there’s not a huge amount. The research and you
0:07:15 will know some of this the research is quite nuanced but broadly it serves as a proxy for
0:07:21 poverty. So the original marshmallow experiments which I think you’ve talked about where you
0:07:25 offer a child a marshmallow and say you know we’ll give you another one if we come back in five
0:07:30 minutes and you haven’t eaten this one. That experiment those children who were unable to
0:07:38 resist the marshmallow went on to really suffer in life they had much across all kinds of different
0:07:42 indicators their lives were much more troubled they had lower achievement economically and
0:07:48 socially. What it turned out is when you adjusted for maternal education the effect went away in
0:07:53 other words the kids who were taking the marshmallow were from poor households and they were making a
0:08:00 sensible choice they were taking an opportunity when it arose because if you come from a situation of
0:08:07 deprivation or disadvantage often things that are promised never materialize so once you
0:08:12 you controlled for that in the studies broadly your ability to resist a marshmallow
0:08:17 age four predicts the household you’re from you might be from a low education low income household
0:08:22 doesn’t predict anything else. So that’s one way of looking at willpower and there’s lots of other
0:08:28 of the evidence. The other thing is that if we look at weight in the mid 1970s and this is you
0:08:33 know American government data there was a sudden inflection in weight gain where the obesity pandemic
0:08:38 took off around 1975 and you look at a graph it’s bumbling along suddenly everyone goes up
0:08:44 I want to say everyone black white Hispanic men women you know five year olds 50 year olds
0:08:49 90 year olds everyone starts gaining weight so unless you’re going to propose when it comes to
0:08:57 weight gain that there was some failure of moral responsibility in young Hispanic men and older
0:09:04 black women and middle-aged white people you know that just doesn’t stack up what changed was the
0:09:11 food environment so my feeling is the only thing that is interesting to talk about is the structure
0:09:16 of the society around us and and we have really good evidence that when when you simply give people
0:09:21 money when we’ve done this this research has been done by economists by doctors by social scientists
0:09:26 when you give people money they make smart choices rich people don’t eat bad food because they don’t
0:09:32 want to eat bad food and people without money eat bad food because they’re forced to eat bad food
0:09:37 and the the cognitive dissonance that you and I were talking about quite often we will find people
0:09:44 with low incomes making quite cogent arguments about the food that they eat appearing to side
0:09:48 with the companies that are predating on them because otherwise how could you live with this
0:09:53 dissonance in your life otherwise you’re just a powerless victim of transnational food corporations
0:09:58 so I I have almost no interest in personal responsibility I think you if you give people
0:10:04 technical knowledge and you give people income and opportunity most people want to be healthy
0:10:11 and live good lives 1970 the food environment changes can you tell me exactly how the food
0:10:17 environment changed that caused multiple demographics to to gain weight there are two
0:10:22 answers that one the the sort of approximate reason is is the invention of ultra processed food
0:10:27 so the industrialization of food supply and you can you can talk about why that happened
0:10:32 in a lot of different ways part of it was to you know a booming population post-war
0:10:38 and these products are extremely convenient they allowed women to continue to be in the
0:10:42 workplace of course women had entered the war entered the workplace in the war so there were a
0:10:46 lot of things that were immediately appealing about these products tv dinners swanson tv dinners
0:10:52 appear in the in the fifties and by the time of the seventies these products had become very
0:10:57 widespread so in the same thing we were a decade behind in the UK but this this stuff is now our
0:11:03 national diet why exactly it took over is the subject of a lot of the research I’m doing at the
0:11:09 moment so now I work much more with economists than nutritionists and what we see is the
0:11:17 financialization of the food industry so the primary determinants of almost every action that
0:11:24 happens in almost every food company that supplies say 90 percent of our calories all the indicators
0:11:29 are financial they’re not to do with public health and so we can use financial indicators we can use
0:11:35 financial research to to show that the food industry does these things like buy cheap debt
0:11:41 use that to do share buybacks rather than generating value we can show that they vote down
0:11:45 activist investors will vote in institutional investors will vote down
0:11:52 public health proposals at shareholder meetings and so part of it is the takeover of the food system
0:11:57 from being a system where people would grow a lot of their own food make food at home they buy
0:12:04 ingredients from local shops to a small number of companies supplying food so now 75 percent of the
0:12:10 calories that are consumed globally come from six companies there are about 15 to 20 companies
0:12:18 that make most of the food we eat in the UK that primary that process the food so we’ve got a very
0:12:25 small number of agribusiness producers that make more or less 12 things that you know we eat broadly
0:12:31 pigs cows and chickens those are our meats we don’t really eat other meat maybe a bit of lamb
0:12:38 maybe goat maybe goose not really duck perhaps so we eat really three meats and then our main
0:12:45 sources of calories come from four or five crops corn rice wheat soy palm bit of sunflower
0:12:52 so the human diet which should encompass thousands perhaps tens of thousands of different species of
0:12:58 thing has now because of the pressures of of commercial efficiency become reduced to a very
0:13:05 small number of companies with enormous power producing making a very small number of food
0:13:11 products and needing to generate intellectual property kind of like sounds like a mafia of
0:13:18 sorts like a food mafia i’m going to let you say that yeah i was like no you don’t sound like me
0:13:25 say it i don’t want them coming for me um i think it i don’t mean it to sound malevolent so the argument
0:13:30 i’ve just made can sound a bit neo marxist or anti growth or anti capitalist and i really don’t
0:13:35 mean it to sound like that but it is important to understand the incentives within the system
0:13:41 and if the incentives are financial you’ll end up with ultra processed food so the logic of the food
0:13:46 is the cheapest possible ingredients with the longest possible shelf life and maximum intellectual
0:13:54 property what is ultra processed food so broadly there are three types of food there’s unprocessed
0:14:00 or whole food which might be like an apple or an oyster or you can drink milk out of a cow you
0:14:05 shouldn’t because you get brucellosis but you can do it that’s whole unprocessed food then there’s
0:14:12 processed food so there’s butter so we can take whole milk we can process it into butter or cheese
0:14:17 now we’ve been doing that so north african pastoralists started doing this in the sahara region
0:14:23 maybe seven eight thousand years ago started making dairy and if you can make butter you get all the
0:14:28 fat soluble vitamins from milk you get very high calorie and it almost never goes off it’s really
0:14:34 long shelf life similarly cheese add a bit fermented add some salt you get a long shelf life very
0:14:40 nutritional product so those are processed foods and we’ve been eating processed foods for over a
0:14:46 million years i mean humans are the only animals that have to process their foods we you know food
0:14:52 processing has shaped our jaws our teeth our guts so compared to any animal of similar size
0:14:58 we have tiny little teeth minuscule fragile jaws very short guts because we’ve extended
0:15:03 our digestive tracts out of our bodies and into our kitchens we chop food rather than chewing it
0:15:10 we cook it rather than digesting it so our food is is predigested so processed food is good tinning
0:15:17 canning concentrating fermenting salting smoking all these projects techniques were invented really
0:15:22 by women over hundreds of thousands of years working in caves and huts and shelters and then
0:15:29 kitchens and they produced modern food and diets from the high arctic to you know you see mammal
0:15:35 diets from the high arctic pescetarian diets in east asia vegan diets of south asia any traditional
0:15:41 diet you point to is basically associated with good health all of them they’ve all evolved in
0:15:46 different ways same is true of french cuisine rich in butter and red wine the only diet that
0:15:51 we’ve studied that really seems to bring health harms is an ultra processed diet so that is the
0:16:01 american financialized industrial diet so ultra processing is about using these commodity ingredients
0:16:07 that i just listed you know commodity ingredients like soy corn rice and a bit of meat reducing them
0:16:12 into powder form basically so if you grow corn the market i mean you understand all this much
0:16:18 better than me you you get money and finance the market for cobs of corn spread with butter and salt
0:16:22 is pretty limited if you grow cobs of corn you can sell a few of them but if you can turn the
0:16:28 rest of them into corn starch which you can modify and turn it so it’s like you can create any chemical
0:16:33 property that start you start you want you can turn it into corn oil and you can turn it into high
0:16:40 fractose corn syrup suddenly you have the ingredients for every single food product on the planet so the
0:16:45 logic is to take your corn break it into pastes and powders with an infinite shelf life then
0:16:52 recombine them with additives texturize them flavor them put a brand on it and then you can add just
0:16:58 enormous value and a lot of the ingredients we see in ultra processed food are waste products from
0:17:04 old food processing so way what the way proteins we see in our nutritional powders i mean this was
0:17:10 a waste product from dairy you know it used to be spread on fields or fed to cows but now the value
0:17:15 you add instead of it being used for fertilizer the value you add when you turn it into a nutritional
0:17:21 supplement is a thousand fold probably more than a thousand fold um citrus fiber you’ll see citrus
0:17:26 fibers and ingredients in a lot of bars sounds healthy doesn’t it like it’s um you know citrus
0:17:32 fruit fiber what could be and it probably is reasonably healthy it’s leftover from the juice
0:17:39 the juicing and tinning industries where you have to get the peel off fruit and if you put it through
0:17:43 a set of chemical processes you you can extract the fiber add it to the human food chain and
0:17:50 create enormous value so the logic of ultra processed food really is about creating products
0:17:55 with intellectual property that use the cheapest ingredients you can that will last for a long time
0:18:02 and from what i understood there the that last process sort of step three so you had whole foods
0:18:06 then you had process foods then you had ultra processed foods and in the ultra processed foods
0:18:10 can’t agree what they’re doing is taking the good stuff out and putting some bad stuff in
0:18:15 is that a simple way to think about it i would think i think that is a very simple way of that’s
0:18:23 a straightforward way of thinking about it the additives are not really the problem so the problem
0:18:29 i would say some of the additives we think are harmful we’ve got some quite good research around
0:18:35 some of the artificial sweeteners some of the modified starches xanthan gum um the emulsifiers
0:18:41 and some of the colorings and texturants then we have some research that says the fact the
0:18:46 food is is mechanically processed so hard it’s generally very soft so think of any ultra processed
0:18:51 food you can whether it’s a a burger from a fast food chain or a breakfast cereal or supermarket
0:18:58 bread um uh generally these calories are soft and we and they’re energy dense because they’re dry
0:19:04 and so dry food is important for shelf life the softness and the energy density means you consume
0:19:10 them very quickly and so you essentially consume them before you become full and so that’s one
0:19:16 of the ways they drive over excess eating uh okay so so if if you like the laundry list of the ways
0:19:24 in which the food harms us is softness energy density some direct harms from the additives
0:19:31 a lack of phytonutrients so it doesn’t contain much real food and real food real plants and animals
0:19:35 should have a great variety of molecules and chemicals that we don’t understand very well but
0:19:41 vitamins from a plant seem to interact with you very differently from than vitamins in an extract
0:19:47 but the main thing is the way the foods are developed so i spoke to so many people in the
0:19:51 food industry who were all wonderful by the way you know i i really enjoyed most of all talking to
0:19:56 them but the food scientists all said the same thing that the products are generally put through
0:20:02 um a focus group so you start with your box of cereal that you’ve been making for for decades and
0:20:06 you have formulation a and then you make a new formulation formulation b you put it through the
0:20:12 focus group if the focus group eats box b quicker than box a box b is the one that goes on the shelf
0:20:17 because if they eat it five percent quicker you’ll sell the boxes five percent faster that’s that’s
0:20:24 the financial indicator and so it’s not any one aspect of the food that’s harmful so much as when
0:20:31 the intention is to create products that people will use as much as possible then you end up with
0:20:36 addictive food interesting it the food is put through if you like a almost a Darwinian evolutionary
0:20:42 process where every single thing every dial is tweaked on every product every few months everything
0:20:49 is adjusted from the sweet salt sugar ratios to the texture in the mouth to the color of the packet
0:20:54 and everything is dialed up to 11 so that things become irresistible and maybe you don’t live with
0:21:01 this but people who many people listening will recognize in themselves that there are products
0:21:06 that they cannot stop eating they fantasize about them they think about them and once they start
0:21:12 eating them they will consume five adult portions and my i’ve got a six-year-old and a three-year-old
0:21:19 and my six-year-old can eat five adult portions of any sugary breakfast cereal in about 20 minutes
0:21:24 i brought some food along with me today i’m looking at it because i wanted to get distracted
0:21:32 i wanted to get your opinion on it so i brought a group of food products on the left here now
0:21:37 these are things that i i think growing up i thought were good yeah so
0:21:44 you’re very bold with these brands i mean you’re really limiting sponsorship opportunities
0:21:50 well you know you know i do think about that sometimes but i also don’t really care i think
0:21:57 i’m in the pursuit of truth here so much of why i do this is to educate myself and i i think if i
0:22:01 educate myself then i’ll help educate other people that’s why i’m also okay being a total idiot on
0:22:08 this subject matter because that is the truth so here i’ve got four products that are typically
0:22:15 seen as being quite healthy breakfast cereal cheerios i grew up thinking good for me um
0:22:21 actimal good for me diet coke great because there’s no sugar in there and then this is
0:22:29 whole grain whole grain bread 50 of your daily whole grain in just two slices great perfect
0:22:35 so for a start i have a slight unease i’m gonna talk about these products i’ve a slight unease
0:22:41 talking about any one product sure the evidence applies to the category of food and this kind of
0:22:47 stuff in a sense i think you’re abs these are such brilliant choices because this is the foundation
0:22:52 of our diet and one of the things that’s happening at the moment is is the food industry exploring
0:22:59 painting me as a snob because i’m i’m critiquing these sort of core things you know tins of beans
0:23:06 with flavoring or supermarket bread fish fingers i think this stuff is at the shallow end of the
0:23:11 pool in a way it’s not by any means the worst stuff but in a way it presents the biggest moral
0:23:19 hazard because we think it’s so healthy after diet coke yep so diet coke is my it’s my favorite
0:23:25 example because this is the ultimate health food according to the way we label food at the moment
0:23:31 it has four where’s the camera it’s all green on the uh four green traffic lights right what is
0:23:35 that what do they call that that traffic light system so this is the way we describe healthy
0:23:40 whether food is healthy or not in this country at the moment and this system is quite influenced by
0:23:46 the food industry and it breaks all foods down into fat saturated fat sugars and salt and says
0:23:52 that you know if those are the bad things and if a food is high in them it’ll it’ll have oranges and
0:23:56 greens so if you look at the Cheerios they’re most they’re mostly on the front it’s on the front
0:24:03 it’s optional by the way so it’s not always on every packet but the Cheerios are oranges and greens
0:24:08 yeah now part there is a baked in confusion for this because what do you do at a traffic light
0:24:14 that’s orange and green or red orange and green do you go do you stop is it on the active now
0:24:23 is it it’s not on there no i can see it on there so it may be on the bottom it’s optional so who
0:24:30 knows if you know we we don’t we don’t have any way in this country of describing either
0:24:34 healthy food or unhealthy food other than these traffic lights anyway this is a healthy food now
0:24:39 if we look at the ingredients on the Diet Coke carbonated water fine now there’s a color called
0:24:46 caramel e150d caramel makes you think of your traditional it’s a french 19th century invention
0:24:51 burn sugar crème brûlée it’s like it’s a bit naughty but it’s fine caramel e150d has nothing
0:24:57 to do with caramel it is carbohydrate treated with a mixture of acids and and and heat to produce
0:25:05 things that contain ammonium and sulfite so it’s it’s it’s a food additive color with no no benefits
0:25:11 nothing to do with caramel artificial sweeteners aspartame and that’s the sulfame k now sweeteners
0:25:16 are tricky because we know sugar is harmful because it rots teeth and it promotes weight gain
0:25:21 because it makes you eat more the weird thing about sweeteners is they don’t seem to help with
0:25:28 weight loss at all they may some of them seem to be more metabolically harmful than sugar itself
0:25:34 humans are quite good at eating sugar when we lollipops continuously as kids or have
0:25:40 sugary drinks it’s not good for us but human societies have for millennia existed with a
0:25:46 huge amount of honey and refined carbs so sugar we can handle although we should reduce her intake
0:25:51 sweeteners are quite weird because they’re a nutritional lie you put sweet taste on the tongue
0:25:59 which says to your body sugar is coming so maybe put up some insulin maybe um start preparing in
0:26:03 other ways physiologically to receive refined carbohydrates and when that refined carbohydrate
0:26:07 when the sugar never arrives it seems to be physiologically confusing so the world health
0:26:13 organization now says sweeteners aren’t better than sugar when it comes to weight loss and there
0:26:18 is there is an anxiety about aspartame and cancer that i’m i’m personally not not in a big sweat
0:26:22 about there’s some there’s some evidence but not at not at normal doses then we’ve got natural
0:26:26 flavorings we’ve got caffeine flavoring an addictive drug and phosphoric acid and citric
0:26:33 acid natural it said natural flavorings i mean that’s good well flavorings are flavorings flavorings
0:26:39 should signal nutritional content when you eat a tomato it has flavor not for fun it has maybe
0:26:44 because it signals the nutritional content of the tomato when you put flavorings out of context
0:26:48 isn’t even if you extract them from the tomato or the strawberry or the peach it’s very confusing
0:26:54 for you physiologically you’ve you have a very sophisticated internal system to link flavor
0:27:02 molecules which are broadly smell and taste molecules salt sweet bitter sour and some
0:27:07 savory ones you your body has a way of linking all that information with nutritional information
0:27:12 that you get from your gut subconsciously when you muddle it all up in a product like this
0:27:18 it’s very confusing the phosphoric acid will dissolve the minerals out of your bones as well
0:27:23 as dissolving your teeth so what we have here is a solution of flavorings an addictive drug an acid
0:27:27 that will leach stuff out of your bones and sweeteners that seem to be metabolically confusing
0:27:32 and certainly aren’t better than sugar and yet we think of this as a health product so that for me
0:27:39 is the archetypal confused way of thinking about food i and what we also know is that when it comes
0:27:45 to kids the age of my youngest so the age three they’re drinking on average one can of artificially
0:27:51 sweetened drinks every single day so we’ve we’ve taxed sugar sugar has come out of our diet we’ve
0:27:58 seen no weight loss no indication that it’s helping health and what we are doing is consuming huge
0:28:03 numbers now of these artificial sweeteners which we also know affect our microbiome what is a
0:28:09 better alternative that’s popular and on the market then because it appears to me that all of
0:28:14 the drinks in the bloody supermarket have artificial sweeteners and flavorings and they do because
0:28:18 of the sugar tax so it’s almost impossible now to buy fizzy tax without sweeteners to buy fizzy
0:28:26 drinks without sweetness um so for kids i try and not give any advice to anyone ever
0:28:35 but my kids um my kids eat a lot of upf but they don’t have fizzy drinks i think i think fizzy drinks
0:28:40 are really quite harmful across the board so so kids should just drink milk and water milk if
0:28:49 they can have it and grown-ups um can do pretty well on milk and water if you drink milk what
0:28:54 about breakfast cereals and Cheerios and things like that so breakfast cereals are really convenient
0:29:02 i mean let me see the Cheerios so i think these uh so these these probably do meet the def yeah
0:29:09 these do meet the definition oh they are yeah so we’ve got things like um palm oil caramelized sugar
0:29:15 syrup uh colors anatone or bixen and an antioxidant and so this is ultra processed
0:29:22 it’ll have some fiber you’ll have it with whole milk i don’t want to demonize breakfast cereals my
0:29:28 kids eat uh breakfast cereals for breakfast but it’s not like eating porridge which is just whole
0:29:36 grains or real bread this is this is and what you will find is if you give this to a kid um compared
0:29:41 to porridge is they will be able to eat much much more of this and there is that there’s a lot of
0:29:47 marketing that this is a really really healthy product and i would say the evidence says that this
0:29:52 falls into a category of foods that we actually know are associated with negative health outcomes
0:29:58 it says on the side there doesn’t it a list of all the health benefits a really good way of telling
0:30:03 if a food is ultra processed is if there is any health claim on the packet it’s almost certainly
0:30:07 ultra processed and part of that is to do with this intellectual property thing that the only
0:30:12 food you can make lots of money out of is is a branded product so there’s no money in broccoli
0:30:19 milk steak eggs um supermarkets quite often make losses on all those things there’s no health claim
0:30:27 on broccoli or on plums or on milk there’s no health claim on steak it’s only the ultra processed
0:30:33 things that you get marketed to you in this way because there’s enough money to do it the actamels
0:30:37 interesting as well the immune support well it says immune support and it says vitamin
0:30:44 d and b6 so that rich in vitamin d immune support that is definitely healthy
0:30:53 i mean this is this is a this is where we need we should have done the maths and shown how much
0:31:00 sugar there was in each pot these are very high calorie shots of sugary liquid that will harm
0:31:07 teeth and i don’t know why you’d have this if you could just have real yogurt and or milk
0:31:12 and the reason they back add the vitamins is to be able to make health claims so
0:31:18 generally foods with added vitamins um real food doesn’t need added vitamins and we’re again we’re
0:31:25 pretty sure that and i’m i’m conscious of what i’m talking to you here i’ve got i i’m i’m uh uh
0:31:34 uh i probably have to tread a bit carefully supplementing vitamins into food doesn’t seem
0:31:41 to have many health benefits for healthy people so we’ve got quite a lot of very big data on this
0:31:47 and there are lots of studies that show benefits that are funded by people who make vitamins but
0:31:53 broadly the independent evidence shows that um when you get vitamins and minerals in the context
0:31:58 of food they’re really good for you and when you take them in pill or supplement form they don’t
0:32:03 seem to have many benefits if you are healthy and this food here this bottle of coke i’ve got
0:32:09 kind of pringles and uh cocoa pops kellox cereal this is the stuff that i typically think of is
0:32:16 like bad processed ultra process stay away from you would but give me the cocoa pops so the cocoa
0:32:22 pops we look at these traffic lights okay green green orange orange pretty healthy i mean there is
0:32:29 a there is a monkey on the pack selling it to my to my kids yeah it says high in vitamin
0:32:35 fiber vitamin d iron yeah iron supporting your family’s health right saddy goodness i mean
0:32:43 everything about this tells you that this is a product not just safe for kids but intended for
0:32:48 kids and we’ll know you like you can’t sell things if they’re not healthy there must be some regulator
0:32:54 dealing with that and this is the thing that my six year old will eat five adult portions of
0:33:01 so when you eat five adult portions the the traffic lights only apply to a 30 gram serving
0:33:10 for you now a 30 gram serving is is a handful like that it’s one big spoonful okay so this is
0:33:17 the product that i i recognize addictive behavior in my kids and frankly myself i mean i could eat
0:33:21 you know 300 grams of it and the other thing that i i went and got from the supermarket because
0:33:27 i was thinking about what i typically think is ultra processed and good for me i went and got this
0:33:36 frozen pizza here and then i went and got a test goes finer so this is high end you know
0:33:44 much more expensive not frozen pizza and i thought surely this pizza here is better for a lot better
0:33:53 for me than this one here so again that there’s a complexity talking about is one better than the
0:33:58 other because we’ve we’ve never done a trial testing them against each other they’re both
0:34:01 ultra processed i know because i’ve looked at the ingredients they both contain ingredients
0:34:09 that you don’t have in a domestic kitchen like palm fat or dextrose and they’re both made really
0:34:15 in a sense by the same company so both of they’re both made by plcs who will be owned by
0:34:22 institutional investors with requirements for growth so they come from the same food system
0:34:28 with the same incentives about production and my bet is that you or i would be able to eat
0:34:33 the entire pizza at a single sitting um and we’d be still licking the pack of both of them
0:34:38 so this is food that in a sense is is engineered to be consumed to excess
0:34:46 you did an experiment didn’t you quite famous experiment now where you put yourself on an
0:34:52 ultra processed food diet can you tell me about that experiment and the symptoms that you saw
0:34:58 when you did lived off ultra processed food pretty much exclusively so i ate a diet that’s
0:35:03 very normal for a british teenager i ate 80 percent of my calories from ultra processed food
0:35:09 so for a for a teenager in in you know the my kid school for example it would this would be a
0:35:13 completely normal thing to do one in five people in this country get 80 percent of their calories
0:35:19 from epf so i wasn’t really putting my body on the line um i was switching from 20 percent to 80
0:35:25 percent um kind of two really big things happened there was some health effects so um in terms of
0:35:30 the physical effects on my body i gained so much weight and i wasn’t it wasn’t supersized
0:35:36 me i wasn’t forcing it in this was done as part of a um a scientific experiment for a big study
0:35:39 that i’m now running at university college London where i where i work as an academic
0:35:46 i gained so much weight that in if i continued for a year i would have doubled my body weight
0:35:52 we scanned my brain before and after i work with colleagues at the national hospital for
0:35:56 neurology and neuroscience so neurology and neurosurgery so this these were scans done very
0:36:00 expertly and while i’m only one patient you can you can subtract the noise you can be very
0:36:08 sure that what you see is real we saw enormous increases in connectivity between the the automatic
0:36:14 behavior habit bits the back of the brain and those reward addiction bits right in the middle
0:36:19 of the brain so we can’t exactly say what’s happening but certainly behaviors and rewards
0:36:24 are getting much much more connected most significantly i think we saw a change in my
0:36:31 hormonal response to a meal so when you eat real food whilst you’re eating you’re chewing all kinds
0:36:35 of hormonal and neurological changes happen in your body that will come to a point they’ll say
0:36:39 look you’ve had enough you’re fine you can stop eating now and that’s called satiety and we’ve
0:36:45 evolved this mechanism since living things first started eating food hundreds of millions of years
0:36:51 ago and all animals have it and humans have it too what we saw is that the at the end of a standard
0:36:58 meal at the end of this month my hunger hormones remain sky high so this is food that is interfering
0:37:04 with our body’s evolved mechanisms to say i am done it’s time to stop eating but there was there
0:37:08 was this other thing that happened kind of the most important thing and it’s the core of the book
0:37:13 is that midway through this diet which i was quite enjoying you know if you’re if you’re sort of
0:37:18 middle-aged man trying to you know the quest is always to lose lose weight and i could go back to
0:37:22 eating the foods of my childhood and i was eating hot wings and all this stuff that i hadn’t eaten
0:37:27 for years i was really enjoying it but i was also doing all this research partly for the book and i’m
0:37:32 you know as a scientist i study nutrition and uh i was talking to a colleague in brazil called
0:37:38 finanda roub and she just kept saying this isn’t food chris it’s an industrially produced
0:37:44 edible substance and i sat down that evening to meet eat a meal of takeaway fried chicken and i
0:37:50 i could hardly finish it and she had flicked this switch in my brain where all of this ultra
0:37:56 processed food had become disgusting but i then had to keep eating it for another fortnight and so
0:38:01 it was a bit like the very famous book the easy way to quit smoking where you smoke all the way
0:38:06 through reading the book while you learn about smoking and by the end of the diet i i mean i now
0:38:11 don’t want to eat any ultra processed products so the the gift i’m trying to give the reader
0:38:18 is if you’re living with addiction my invitation at the beginning is eat along eat while you read
0:38:24 don’t forbid this stuff to yourself let yourself wallow in it immerse it taste it and you’ll start
0:38:28 to and read the ingredients lists while you eat and you’ll realize that all the food is
0:38:34 it has the same flavor profile it’s all equally salty and sugary and sweet it’s all acidic um
0:38:40 and you will gradually become disgusted and i that’s not a promise that seems to be what’s
0:38:45 happening to a lot of people and that is a very well evidence technique when it comes to living
0:38:50 with addiction so the world health organization who i work with recommends the easy way to quit
0:38:58 smoking for quitting smoking uh as as being as useful as patches or any other technique so i’m
0:39:04 for the individual treating it as an addictive substance may be really useful for some people
0:39:08 what was the impact on your sort of mental health and how you felt
0:39:12 from a sort of psychology perspective because i you know we’ve seen the this huge rise in
0:39:18 sort of mental health diagnoses across the board especially in younger younger people
0:39:23 but it seems to be pretty consistent throughout different ages and demographics and i wondered
0:39:28 if there’s a link between ultra processed foods and mental health crises that we’re living through
0:39:34 we’ve got really good epidemiological data so we now have hundreds of prospective studies
0:39:40 which are the best the kind of studies we use to link smoking to to cancer that it is not just
0:39:45 associated with physical ill health metabolic disease inflammatory disease cardiovascular
0:39:52 disease cancers early death it’s also associated with anxiety depression and also dementia and
0:39:59 my experience of being on the diet was that um there was a there was a there was a thing that
0:40:03 i think the research doesn’t capture which is because it’s salty i was getting up to pee more
0:40:08 at night and i was i don’t know if we can say this i was getting really constipated and uncomfortable
0:40:15 because it’s quite low in fiber and so i got in this vicious cycle of sleeplessness and i’d often
0:40:19 find myself where at the fridge in the kind of small hours of the morning and the food felt
0:40:25 like the solution to the problem so i got in this spiral of sleeplessness anxiety overeating and we
0:40:31 know that stress and elevated cortisol also generally increases your desire for for low quality
0:40:38 food and makes people overeat so in a way that kind of middle-aged stress anxiety this sort of mild
0:40:45 mental health symptoms that so many people live with often it is just driven by by the food
0:40:51 i read this stat in your book that according to the world’s obesity federation 51 percent of the
0:40:56 world or more than four billion people will be obese or overweight within the next 12 years
0:41:02 so i like to say they will live with obesity rather than that rather than use obese as an
0:41:08 adjective because i think the biggest problem for people who live with obesity is stigma it’s
0:41:16 that being obese is your identity and what we actually know is the the the world obesity federation
0:41:22 are doing some really good work identifying this as the major public health problem the ticklishness
0:41:27 talking about this is it’s really hard to say that obesity is a problem without also saying
0:41:31 that people who live with it are the problem and if you’re not careful a war on obesity becomes a
0:41:36 war on people who live with it and i think the evidence is very clear it’s just about the food
0:41:42 environment so yes you can make these very powerful economic arguments that we simply
0:41:51 cannot afford to have a food system that’s driving this rate of disease i think the moral
0:41:58 arguments are much more powerful that this is stuff that causes human suffering so i i would not
0:42:05 actually tax ultra processed food and i certainly wouldn’t ban it i think all my arguments are about
0:42:12 increasing freedom increasing choice increasing opportunity and that’s quite conscious i mean
0:42:17 you know this as a skillful communication you talk about kind of doing exactly this in your book
0:42:24 where i’m trying to make an argument that will appeal to the political right that are much more
0:42:30 on the side of of uh you know free market low regulation and in fact we can have regulations
0:42:36 completely compatible with huge economic growth and what i’m asking for is a food system where
0:42:42 people with low incomes have access to healthy affordable food because a lot of people would
0:42:46 say and this is sort of part two of your book that okay so the solution here is really just
0:42:51 for people to make better choices when they’re i don’t know in their fridges or when they’re
0:42:57 walking through a supermarket why don’t we just all make better choices i mean you you will you
0:43:01 may have a much more profound i think you’re asking this question in a provocative way i think you
0:43:08 will understand it much better than me i’ve always had choice and so when i choose to buy things i
0:43:15 they’re unhealthy it is with a degree of choice i do it my patients um i run a clinic at the hospital
0:43:20 for tropical disease where i work and most of my patients have no addresses they’re very disadvantaged
0:43:25 they’re migrants asylum seekers um they come from very low income families because those are the
0:43:31 people who get infections now when i say to them go and eat some healthy food they all know what
0:43:36 healthy food is they’ve often got very they’re very diverse community we’ve often got very rich
0:43:42 traditions of healthy food from the the communities or the cultures they’ve come from they are completely
0:43:46 unable to buy it in the case of the asylum seekers they’re an eight pounds a day and they can’t work
0:43:51 you can’t you can’t say to someone spend your eight pounds a day on apples and broccoli and they haven’t
0:43:57 got knives to cut it with then we know a million households in this country don’t have fridges
0:44:02 freezers stovetop cookers so there are a huge number of families that only have a microwave to cook
0:44:08 and fresh food while there is always a politician willing to advance this argument like but you
0:44:12 can buy a bag of lentils if you go to the cash and carry you can buy rice or lentils for you
0:44:19 know a couple of quid for 10 kilos it costs money to eat it it costs time time is the most expensive
0:44:25 thing for people with low incomes they need pots pans cutting boards knives tupperware if you’re
0:44:29 going to batch cook which is the only way to make home cooking economical you’ve got a
0:44:36 deep freeze to store it in so saying to people with low incomes you know make healthier choices it is
0:44:43 it is nonsense it’s just it’s and so i feel very strongly the world does not need another person
0:44:49 like me saying that and in fact no one i mean we all people hate being told what to do there was
0:44:54 a study done on toddlers in 1920 that you write about which is quite illuminating where they
0:45:00 got to choose their own food from a selection of ununprocessed foods and the children instinctively
0:45:05 chose their own diet which met their nutritional needs and calorie calorie intake what was that
0:45:11 experiment and what does that indicate to us about the nature of this argument what as it relates to
0:45:16 just being able to control what we eat and choose what we want if we look at the animal kingdom
0:45:20 even if you look at something you might think has quite a simple diet like a
0:45:24 like a big herbivore living in you know any of the big herbivores living on any of the big
0:45:27 planes in the world and you think well they just eat grass they don’t we’ve done loads of experiments
0:45:31 where you put sounds a bit unkind but you put a hole in the neck of the animal and you put a bag
0:45:35 on the hole and you collect the plants they’re eating and you can do this in a way that’s
0:45:40 relatively humane and what we discover is if we study goats or cows they’re eating 50 or 60
0:45:46 different plants a day calories are abundant and what those animals are doing is balancing all
0:45:51 their nutritional needs from all those different plants and selecting them and learning about
0:45:55 the flavour profile and the mineral content they’re moving to avoid predators and the rains
0:46:02 to different soils so animals are incredibly sophisticated at at perfectly balancing their
0:46:08 nutritional needs from their environment and obesity is uh non-existent in the wild animal
0:46:12 kingdom in urban animals actually that start to scavenge from humans there is some evidence
0:46:18 of obesity but in wild animals there is there is no obesity humans it turns out obviously
0:46:24 have the same ability and so a scientist called clara davis who’s an amazing woman she was she
0:46:29 was a gay woman uh one of the first medical graduates in in north america and she did this
0:46:33 experiment where she was that she was taking abandoned kids in the sense she was functioned
0:46:39 almost like an orphanage and each child got access to 34 different whole foods every single day
0:46:45 and it was things like there was raw bone marrow and cooked rice and yogurt and milk and they had
0:46:50 a little bowl of salt they could have as much or as little salt as they wanted and her question was
0:46:56 could the kids balance their nutritional needs and the best example is a kid called earl who she
0:47:00 took in a few months old and he came in with rickets so he had very bad vitamin d deficiency
0:47:06 had bendy bones and they did some x-rays and you could see the rickets on the x-rays and every
0:47:12 single day he would lug an entire cup of cod liver oil which at the time was one of the only
0:47:18 really the only source of vitamin d and he drank this every single day enthusiastically he always
0:47:24 wanted his cod liver oil and on the day his rickets were healed and you couldn’t see them any more
0:47:29 on the x-rays he stopped drinking the cod liver oil never asked for it again and none of the kids
0:47:34 without vitamin d deficiency would drink would touch the cod liver oil so something in earl’s
0:47:40 body was saying i will when i need this stuff i’ll have it once i don’t need it anymore i won’t
0:47:46 have any more of it and all the kids that she studied over many many years with access to a
0:47:51 full range of foods perfectly matched all their nutritional needs they all grew really well they
0:47:55 were intellectually well developed they’re extremely healthy and they didn’t have any of the
0:48:02 sort of food refusal problems that that parents have nowadays so and she knew very well that the
0:48:08 point was the kids only had access to good food she wasn’t giving them access to industrially
0:48:13 processed junk foods which were still slightly available in in the 20s it was a really cool
0:48:19 experiment for me i take away from that that our bodies can kind of self-regulate what we need
0:48:24 if they’re in an environment where the options are good so if i’m a parent and i’m sure i’ll
0:48:31 be a parent in the next couple of years i hope so if i just make sure in my house all the food
0:48:37 options are good for my kids whole foods all the good stuff you’ve described presumably then i can
0:48:44 just unlock the cupboards and let them run free i love talking to people who might become parents
0:48:50 about what they think me i mean i’m like wow you just i mean yeah good luck to you let’s
0:48:55 can we have this conversation again in about six years can you tell me why i’m so well you’re
0:49:01 not wrong you’re completely right it will be impossible for you to limit the influx of ultra
0:49:05 processed food into your house so clearly i’ve written the book on this i study this yeah we’d
0:49:10 love to do that i want my kids to be normal being normal is really important as a kid
0:49:16 and food isn’t just stuff we put in to build our bodies food binds us to the people around us food
0:49:21 is part of our community and our culture in the uk our food culture is ultra processed food and if
0:49:28 you don’t eat and drink ultra processed food you become a slightly odd person and so i still eat
0:49:35 it when i go to friends houses because otherwise i look like some you know uh fanatical food snob
0:49:40 yeah so and it’s the same with my kids so so uh grandparents friends relatives all bring it
0:49:45 around you don’t control what they eat at school um you know my youngest one’s a really nice nursery
0:49:51 but it’s still ultra processed food from uh from the minute she gets there to when she leaves so
0:50:00 very good luck to you but this is why i argue i i nod to if an individual wants to read my book
0:50:05 i think they will come away with technical knowledge that they will be able to use and and
0:50:11 i wish them well with that the big argument of the book is about this this is about social justice
0:50:18 you know it is it is really appalling that even for people with with a lot of means real food
0:50:24 is incredibly affordable and unavailable what about the people that say this is just about calories
0:50:30 and calorie out the you know fitness community a lot of the weight loss community just say what
0:50:33 you’ve got to do and i’ve actually got a friend that said this to me quite passionately he says
0:50:38 what i do is i just measure the amount of calories i’m taking in measure the calories
0:50:42 that are coming out and i make sure that there’s a calorie deficit and if you have a calorie
0:50:46 deficit he actually says to me one day he goes you can eat whatever you want and you’ll be fine
0:50:55 mathematically he’s he’s not entirely wrong that there are there are some very very there are two
0:51:01 very very big problems with that the first is that while some people can just eat two instructions
0:51:07 many of us have genes that uh lead us to engage with food in a more interesting way you know i care
0:51:12 about food i love food i’m driven to it so you your friend should come around my house in the
0:51:18 morning with a box of cocoa pops and try and get my daughter to eat one adult portion and good luck
0:51:23 to him i mean they’ll be screaming and crying and she’ll be grabbing the box so the food it’s a bit
0:51:28 like saying to smokers all you have to do is just smoke one cigarette don’t smoke the whole pack just
0:51:34 have like one to be social or people who live with addiction to alcohol will just have one drink and
0:51:40 that won’t do you any harm the the food really is addictive for many people but there is this other
0:51:45 bit of the equation which is really fascinating which is that when we do more activity of the
0:51:50 kind that most of us do it doesn’t seem to have an enormous impact on the calories that we burn
0:51:58 and this is very good robust science going back to the going back to the 90s um the the most if i
0:52:03 tell this is a story which i think is the way you do it um there was a scientist called Herman Ponser
0:52:08 and he wanted to know how many more calories he’d burn if he went and lived as a hunter-gatherer
0:52:13 with the Hadza tribe in Tanzania so he went and studied them and he put he used to think
0:52:17 called double labeled water where you can measure very accurately calorie expenditure and he put
0:52:21 them in metabolic hoods and he studied them for months and months and he came back and he looked
0:52:26 at his data and he thought he’d got it all wrong because the data showed that for um essentially
0:52:31 if you or I went and lived in Tanzania we walked 15 kilometers a day hunting antelope and digging
0:52:37 tubers out of the ground we wouldn’t burn any more calories per day and he just could not make
0:52:41 sense of this so then he went back and looked at all the data available in the literature we’ve
0:52:46 studied animals we’ve studied different human populations there are um we’ve studied subsistence
0:52:51 farmers compared to secretarial workers in the states we’ve looked at miners the same thing is
0:52:56 true in all the studies when you do sustained activity over a long period it doesn’t massively
0:53:01 impact your calories now some exceptions if you do polar exploration if you cycle in the Tour de
0:53:05 France if you go to the gym for an hour and a half every day six days a week you probably
0:53:11 do burn a few more calories but activity of the kind we all do doesn’t seem to and that explains
0:53:19 why exercise is good for us because if you don’t do exercise I burn 3000 calories a day rough let’s
0:53:25 say with slightly different body compositions but roughly you and I burn 3000 calories a day
0:53:31 if you do your hour and a half of exercise every day you’re stealing energy from your other budgets
0:53:38 you’re taking it away from inflammation away from hormones and away from anxiety that’s why exercise
0:53:43 seems to be good for us because I’m sitting here and I’m relatively said said and true with my two
0:53:48 kids I don’t go to the gym for an hour a day so I spend my calories but they’re spent on inflammation
0:53:53 and anxiety and relatively high hormone levels and is this what we call the fixed energy model
0:53:59 I read that in your book that term yeah so that’s that’s um that’s that’s the model and there are
0:54:05 lots of exceptions but what that model tells us along with all the other available data is that
0:54:12 when we are talking about populations who live with obesity increasing activity will be really
0:54:16 good for them but it will not have a significant effect on body weight so when we’re talking about
0:54:22 the pandemic of obesity activity isn’t hugely important and if people are listening and they
0:54:29 want to lose weight many people have the experience that um putting a healthy diet in the context of
0:54:33 lots of other healthy things is often really a good way of bringing about behavioral change you’ll
0:54:38 feel good in other ways but the activity in the exercise if you think that putting in your slog
0:54:45 at the gym every most of us can manage 40 minutes every other day tops and I I get nowhere near that
0:54:51 it’s not going to have an impact on your weekly calories even if even if we accepted that that
0:54:55 even if we did think that it increased the number of calories you burn there’s other evidence that
0:55:01 says you either eat more because your your body isn’t just the mathematical machine that your
0:55:07 your friend proposes but also if you add up the calories and you go to the gym for half an hour
0:55:11 four times a week it’s just not very many calories in terms of your weekly calories unless even if
0:55:17 you’re cycling as hard as you can I can I can definitely relate I work out every day because
0:55:22 just because I if I do it every day seven days a week I have a PT every single day and the reason
0:55:29 I do that is purely because I am best disciplined when I have a clear routine so knowing that it’s
0:55:33 part of my habit and that it’s actually today it’s in my calendar yesterday it was in my calendar
0:55:37 even I even have lunch in my calendar now because I’m just trying to make sure that I have some kind
0:55:44 of routine um with my with my eating or else I just won’t eat I remember on Friday I my first meal
0:55:49 was at 6 p.m because I was podcasting had some stuff with the BBC and I don’t want to do I don’t
0:55:54 want to eat before I do anything because my I’ll slump my point here though is with my
0:55:59 personal trainer every day if I don’t change my diet very little happens with my body actually I
0:56:04 end up growing a bit more muscles I end up getting a bit stronger but in terms of weight loss the fat
0:56:09 it just sits there yeah interestingly though from a psychology perspective I’ve spoken to a lot of
0:56:13 scientists and doctors who have said your body will basically overcompensate for what you’ve
0:56:17 just burned if you went go for a five or 10 mile run your body wants to defend its weight because
0:56:22 that’s defending its survival chances for me one of the things that happens is if I go out go and
0:56:28 work out in the gym because it was so painful I’ll then come home and look at the flapjack or the
0:56:34 cookie or whatever and I’ll think that’s two steps backwards that’s interesting whereas some people
0:56:41 will come look at the flapjack and go I’ve earned that but to counteract my own point that also
0:56:47 happens sometimes I go well I can have it because I just ran or whatever um what I what I might do
0:56:53 is I might avoid the flapjack the obviously bad thing but then I might eat more of something that
0:56:59 I think isn’t bad you sort of you’ll have a sort of nutritional bar or something that is sold to
0:57:04 you as being part of that kind of access yeah and I’ll eat four of those but when you speak to one
0:57:07 of the really interesting things is when you speak to nutritionists and I’ve spoken to a couple who
0:57:15 work with really elite sports teams um those athletes generally eat food so they that they
0:57:20 have chefs that make and they might make quite an elaborate flapjack but it will be a flapjack
0:57:24 made with the ingredients you would have in your kitchen and they will often drink milk while they’re
0:57:30 cycling or running and they’ll eat pieces of chicken rather than other things this topic of willpower
0:57:34 again we kind of started with it I love because willpower comes up a lot in your stuff and it’s
0:57:39 been so interesting listening to your your stuff about it yeah I have to be honest I have evolved
0:57:45 in my thinking about it because I’ve listened to both sides of the argument around willpower
0:57:52 and it does appear to me that there is probably something else going on but with all these studies
0:57:57 on willpower it’s hard to establish causation because there are other other factors that are
0:58:01 quite clearly could confound the variables in place so it’s something that I’ve gone back and
0:58:06 forward on you talk about twin studies in the context of willpower and what that can teach us
0:58:11 why did why did you talk about twin studies in chapter nine part of it was done by a colleague
0:58:18 called Claire Llewellyn and um what Claire was looking at was the herit i mean this is a bit
0:58:22 convoluted let me see if I can do this the heritability of obesity genes so there’s a weird
0:58:28 thing we see this with with um it’s a bit easy to understand with IQ but it’s true of IQ genes
0:58:36 and obesity genes that in some places if your parents have genes for obesity you will have a
0:58:41 90 chance of inheriting the obesity but in other families it’s more like 10 percent same as true
0:58:48 with with IQ so um what Claire Llewellyn showed was that if you came from a situation of deprivation
0:58:54 if you came from a low-income household your genes for obesity are much more likely to be expressed
0:59:00 so you would inherit those you’d inherit those genes and you would develop obesity now the
0:59:09 the social importance of this was because IQ studies originally showed that intelligence was
0:59:19 hereditary and this caused huge problems because um it was done in the states and uh minority groups
0:59:25 were measured as having lower intelligence and this provided that kind of core argument of saying
0:59:30 well some people are genetically less intelligent and there’s a woman called Sandra Skarn she did the
0:59:36 first intelligent first studies and it was twin studies that showed it were that um whilst
0:59:42 intelligence is heritable in some communities it isn’t in others and basically it works like this
0:59:47 if you come from a well-off household all your genes whether they’re for a healthy body shape
0:59:54 or for intelligence they’re all maxed out and so you all the variability is genetic in the population
0:59:58 if you come from a low-income household you might have genes for height that never get
1:00:02 expressed you might have genes for intelligence that because you have been poorly nourished you
1:00:09 haven’t been as educated as well those genes for intelligence never get expressed so you have a really
1:00:15 complicated picture where genes can be inherited but not expressed in different communities according
1:00:20 to how those populations are treated and so that’s one of the crucial things in psychology is when we
1:00:26 only study white middle-class populations when we only study psychology students we get very very
1:00:31 different answers to when we go and look at populations who live with disadvantage or low
1:00:37 income so essentially what one of the big findings from Claire Llewellyn’s work is if you’ve got rid
1:00:43 of poverty you would get rid of around 60 percent of the problem of diet related disease and you
1:00:49 and your brother because you are twins are quite a good example of this I guess because you reference
1:00:54 how he went and lived in Boston and was having a stressful time in gained weight I mean every time
1:00:58 I go to America we travel out there to record the podcast it’s just absolutely fucking wild
1:01:07 look we I just feel terrible I always gain weight and it’s just unavoidable if you’re doing
1:01:12 work like you do in the States and you’re you’re in hotels and you’re on the move and you’re
1:01:17 traveling you you cannot eat good food that mini bar in the bloody hotel which they just keep
1:01:21 topping up I remember I was saying to the team I was like I put the cookies in the fucking bin
1:01:26 and then I came back the next day and they put two bags there yeah they think you’ve eaten the
1:01:31 cookies yeah they thought I enjoyed them I mean the marketing that’s a form of marketing and if
1:01:37 you think that you are struggling I’ll come back to Boston but if you think that someone like you
1:01:42 struggles in a hotel room when they put cookies and all this junk there and you have to sort of put
1:01:47 it out of sight for a British teenager this is true for teenagers in states Canada Australia
1:01:52 they are saturated in marketing in a way that you would be completely invisible to you and I
1:01:56 it’s I mean you you may remember this from childhood it’s on your bus tickets when you buy
1:02:01 stationery at the shop it’ll be on your receipt it’s on your music apps because we pay for our
1:02:08 music apps but kids don’t it’s on their social media the companies get their phone numbers directly
1:02:13 from they enter competitions and then they send them meal deals and messages ping ping ping to
1:02:22 their phones so they it’s 360 24/7 immersion in marketing of addictive products and so it’s
1:02:29 it’s not that confusing why 25 percent of British kids live with obesity not just overweight anyway
1:02:35 so Boston yeah my twin my twin moved to Boston it was a situation of some stress he’d had a
1:02:42 kid a son Julian with someone in a way that wasn’t planned I suppose Julian knows this
1:02:48 I mean Julian’s the whole it’s all part of a very dear family now but it was very
1:02:52 stressful he went there to do a master’s degree he lived above a burger shop and he
1:02:58 he kind of ate his problems and he he gained 30 kilos and that that is an example of we both
1:03:02 have a genetic vulnerability but my life in the UK was very stable and I was in a different food
1:03:08 environment in the UK you move my genes my clone genetically we’re identical you move my clone to
1:03:15 the states stress him out a bit he gains 30 kilos I mean it’s it’s nothing has our willpower changed
1:03:22 has our personal responsibility changed you know a set of accidents and and
1:03:30 coincidences and the food environment and what determined his weight there’s nothing to do with
1:03:34 willpower whenever I feel like I’m in a situation where I don’t have autonomy and control I’m like
1:03:41 and when I hear about this sort of food environment we’re living in and the big food mafia and the
1:03:46 marketing and pinging me left right and center and all the products that are in some of these ultra
1:03:50 processed foods that are making me feel addicted to them that I just it’s just triggering my brain
1:03:55 in a in a way that I can’t seem to control either I go I wanted to be able to do something about it
1:03:59 on an individual level I want to be able to take back control without having to wait for bloody
1:04:06 Downing Street or the White House to change things I love that and what what I try and propose in
1:04:13 the book is that you need to make that journey probably when you start reading the book you’re
1:04:16 you’re in this sort of unconscious stage if you don’t think of yourself as either a victim or
1:04:21 anything you’re just eating your food and the midway through the book I think I do propose to
1:04:25 you that you are a victim and that’s a hard thing for any of us to listen to most of us don’t want
1:04:31 to be victims and I think you have to make the journey from victim to activist pretty quickly
1:04:38 and you can be an activist in your own life for yourself and you can if you have resources and
1:04:44 money and skills you you can get rid of ultra processed food lots of people actually can’t I
1:04:48 just I’ve just got to be really blunt here like there is there is an anxiety I had writing this
1:04:54 book that for the core audience of readers who can afford books most of them will be able to buy
1:05:00 sourdough from a fancy bakery rather than you know the loaf of bread we just looked at but for
1:05:04 the people who are most affected by the problem that it simply won’t be a choice for someone like
1:05:10 you yes you you need to take that kind of emotional reaction and turn it into direct that rage
1:05:15 rather than than directing it inwards it’s directing it out to a food system that controls you I mean
1:05:20 one of the one of the political narratives we hear is is that any kind of regulation is nanny
1:05:25 statism it’s about government overreach at the moment we live in a nanny state the nannying is
1:05:31 done by transnational food corporations they don’t pay any particular tax in this country they’re
1:05:35 you know they do employ some people but these these are not companies that are part of our
1:05:41 sort of culture and yet they are controlling our our food and what we eat and I think we need to
1:05:46 rest a little bit of control back off those of those companies but that group of people that
1:05:51 maybe weren’t the majority of people you were speaking to with your book that don’t have the
1:05:58 privilege that me and you have to make better choices as it relates to food or to buy the pots
1:06:03 and pans and chopping boards or get a chef to cook it for us whatever what do you say to them what
1:06:09 do they do I mean this is why I don’t give advice because there is there we are at this moment where
1:06:16 we do have to politically treat the companies like the tobacco companies now at the moment for
1:06:21 many people trying to quit ultra processed food will be like trying to quit smoking in the 1960s is
1:06:26 it really addictive so the do you want me to do a bit on the the evidence for the the the the
1:06:31 definition of a dick because people food addiction has been really scientifically complex for a long
1:06:37 time because baked into the notion of addiction is that the only strategy that ever works is abstinence
1:06:42 you cannot be a dick abstinent from food and so food can’t be addictive so for a long time we said
1:06:48 well food is a behavioral addiction where it is the the food behavior is not the food itself
1:06:54 the definition of ultra processed food allows you to describe the category of substances that
1:07:00 are addictive and when we go and speak to people who say I live with addiction to food and you say
1:07:04 what do you what do you feel addicted to it’s always ultra processed products it’ll be very
1:07:07 different some people it’s going to be the dark colors some people it’s biscuits some people
1:07:14 it’s pizzas but it’s always up air the definition of addiction is continued use of a substance
1:07:19 despite knowledge of harms physical or psychological and despite repeated attempts to quit and
1:07:26 you and I will both know people in our own lives who continue to eat this food I was definitely one
1:07:32 of these people despite knowing it was harming me and wanting to stop eating it so that’s why
1:07:36 I think I have two groups of readers some people are just going to want to cut down you you might
1:07:40 be someone who’s maybe eating a little bit more than you want and you just want to go I’m going
1:07:44 to maximize my health and I’m just going to I’m going to have it it’s a treat on a Friday night
1:07:50 and that’s fine it’s like it can be like booze or a or the occasional cigarette for some people
1:07:56 that one cigarette that one glass of wine but for many probably 40 percent of people I don’t know
1:08:01 about your audience but across the country 40 percent of people will have a troubled relationship
1:08:06 with it and for those people abstinence may be a an easier strategy so yeah I think it’s addictive
1:08:12 when we look at scans it’s addictive when we do surveys it’s addictive when we um look at the
1:08:18 profile of genes and the other um surrounding factors that lead to addiction it’s caused by
1:08:24 the same things and there’s lots of basic science about um the speed of consumption and addiction
1:08:31 so addictive things are normally very quickly consumed shots crystal meth um tobacco products
1:08:37 if you chew tobacco if you have slow release methylphenidate it’s a treatment for ADHD it’s
1:08:44 not addictive um if you have weak session beer it’s not addictive like tequila shots are so
1:08:48 the speed of hit seems to be important and that may be partly to do with the softness of UPF you
1:08:54 get it you get a very quick hit of your nutrition is there a link between ultra processed foods and
1:09:01 neurodiversity you know ADHD those kinds of things because there’s some emerging evidence about ADHD
1:09:06 I’m speaking to um there’s a working group at the Royal College of Psychiatrists who are really
1:09:12 interested in the links between binge eating disorders and other eating disorders and um
1:09:17 an ultra processed food um I think we are only at the very beginning of discovering the health
1:09:23 effects but remember from from very early on in childhood a huge number of kids in this country
1:09:28 are on a diet of ultra almost pure ultra processed food but that’s often in a situation where there
1:09:36 is also other sources of um trauma of um there’ll be other health factors that be poor housing um
1:09:42 it will go hand in hand with lots of other things so it’s an adjunct to other other problems I would
1:09:48 think there will be a link but teasing it all out is going to be complicated a high UPF diet is linked
1:09:55 to more deaths globally than tobacco high blood pressure or any other health risk 22% of all deaths
1:10:00 that’s the start I got from your book and also increased consumption of UPF ultra processed foods
1:10:05 is linked to the following diseases all cause mortality cardiovascular disease cancers high
1:10:10 blood pressures fatty liver disease inflammatory bowel disease depression worse blood fat profile
1:10:19 irritable bowel syndrome dementia and I can’t even say that other one for frailty frailty just for
1:10:21 being weak and old
1:10:31 part five of your book is what am I supposed to do about it and I’ve kind of answered it
1:10:36 I want to make sure I’m really clear in my own life here I can because I have the privilege of
1:10:40 doing so I can make better food choices the first part of it is awareness knowing what
1:10:45 ultra processed foods are and I believe I’ve got that definition from you step two is I really
1:10:50 need to do an audit of the things that I’m consuming frequently to make sure that I’m at least
1:10:57 intentional about my consumption of ultra processed foods and then I can make better choices to bring
1:11:01 in more whole foods into my into my diet um because you’re right there’s so many things
1:11:05 that I’m consuming that I thought were good for me I mean I drank bloody orange juice for
1:11:10 sunny d for 20 years because I just thought it was great for me vitamin d or something I can’t
1:11:16 remember so sunny yeah exactly and it was it was marketed at me um awareness is step one making
1:11:22 making more informed choices I guess is step two for me um and then there’s a broader point which is
1:11:29 about trying to change the system for others which I I can do by having these kind of conversations
1:11:37 I guess the I love that the the steps are coming from you that I don’t have a I I honestly don’t
1:11:43 care what people eat I I like freedom I don’t like being told what to do and so I am not
1:11:47 prescriptive about what anyone should know we’re in the book diet do I say you should
1:11:52 like as a normative statement you should eat less up so if you want to knowing what you know
1:12:00 that’s up to you I don’t think anyone has a duty to be healthy to generate economic growth I just
1:12:04 think no one has to be born you’re born you should be able to live your life as you want
1:12:12 what I do think is what I want for for everyone is that they can they have agency so that they
1:12:19 are not subject to constant predatory marketing and they have true choice so all the policies
1:12:25 that I’m proposing and I’m part of a big group working on this are about making real food
1:12:31 affordable and available so in terms of the the hierarchy of what needs to be done for everyone
1:12:37 the number one thing is tackle poverty poverty is a political choice there is enormous wealth in
1:12:46 this country and uh and people born into disadvantage should not have a different childhood than people
1:12:49 who are born rich and and and it feels kind of almost revolutionary to say that but it’s really
1:12:56 obvious to me like why I mean I can talk about this all day but but health outcomes are so different
1:13:01 for people born in poverty for people who live across the road from from from my kids so that’s
1:13:07 the number one thing the second thing is um some very light regulation I don’t want to tax things I
1:13:12 don’t want to ban things we need to appropriately label unhealthy food and at the moment the labels
1:13:18 are so confusing as to be unusable we need to put in our national nutrition guidance that there is
1:13:22 good evidence linking ultra processed food as a category to all these poor health outcomes and we
1:13:28 should recommend uh the government should recommend that people do try and consume less now there will
1:13:32 be a real problem for the government doing that because the government creates a food environment
1:13:36 and it’s really hard for a government to say look on the one hand don’t eat all this and then on the
1:13:40 other hand that is all you can afford to eat so that’s going to create a real political problem
1:13:47 that’s sort of what we’re up against um the most important policy step is to get industry out of
1:13:55 the room when it comes to making policy so this is so the I just spoke at the world obesity federation
1:14:03 in New York um there are UN aligned WHO aligned group outside of the UK there is no discussion
1:14:07 about the role of ultra processed food that pandemic obesity is primarily due
1:14:12 to this western industrial diet everyone agrees on this countries like Argentina
1:14:18 a can of cola has three big black hexagons on it bigger than the logo of the company that makes the
1:14:22 cola same with most of the breakfast cereals you know there are warnings in the national guidance
1:14:30 so globally people are very very aware of this in the UK um there is real control of the public
1:14:36 health narrative by the by the food and drink industry so as an example all our major charities
1:14:39 that influence policy and a lot of policy comes from charity they’re all paid by companies that
1:14:46 make by UPF so if we look at the British nutrition foundation it is majority funded by all the major
1:14:52 food companies you can name Coca-Cola Nestle Cargill all of them um Cancer Research UK
1:14:57 Diabetes UK the British Dietetic Association all of them are funded by companies that make
1:15:03 ultra processed food so we need we need to start treating the companies like the tobacco industry
1:15:08 and say no no your money is is not good and we won’t take it because it influences food policy
1:15:13 that’s kind of the most important step and so part of being an activist in this area for me is
1:15:21 not taking food industry money myself and so that that is a very painful weekly process
1:15:28 because if you write a book about food you get offered you know I mean enormous amounts of money
1:15:36 to go and to go and work for the food industry how did how did your food consumption change
1:15:40 from the beginning of this book to the end of this book what were there any particular
1:15:46 choices that you have unmade or made because of what you learned in the process of writing this
1:15:54 book I think resisting addictions if you live with addiction is almost impossible that’s the
1:16:00 whole point about addiction and what you need to do is to make the journey from being addicted
1:16:06 to being disgusted and love and disgust are quite they’re they’re anatomically close in the brain
1:16:12 then you’re logically quite related and many of us have experienced this falling out of love process
1:16:17 where something you’re in something or someone you’re infatuated with that is irresistible you
1:16:22 want to spend all your time engaging with um suddenly becomes something you really don’t want
1:16:26 to do and smokers will describe it some people have this experience in human relationships
1:16:31 um it can happen that switch can be flicked quite quickly and I think if you’re someone
1:16:36 who lives with addiction you need to figure out how to flick that switch that at the moment if
1:16:43 you’re addicted to this food and you’re constantly trying to resist it it will be too much so I
1:16:47 think that that is kind of the priority if you’re living with the addiction it’s to try and get to
1:16:55 disgust and that’s what happened to me is the food became you know this thing about the uncanny valley
1:17:01 where if if um there’s a thing in animations where if animations are very cartoony they’re fine
1:17:06 but if they become quite human they suddenly start looking weird there’s some films where
1:17:12 they get it a bit wrong um uh where the cartoon characters are too realistic they become almost
1:17:18 zombie or corpse-like so this this uncanny valley that animation goes through where it becomes
1:17:22 weird and then when they’re ultrahuman they’re they’re fine again the food for me was a bit
1:17:26 like that it entered this sort of uncanny valley where it’s it’s similar to food but it it isn’t
1:17:35 food and so so now I just don’t want any of it but I will eat it to be polite this stuff that I
1:17:41 that I brought with me you know the the pizza’s I’ve got the cocoa pops I’ve got the the cocoa
1:17:51 cola here is this food I don’t think it meets so food is very poorly defined we don’t have a working
1:17:59 definition of food sort of in-law but I think food is substance that you eat for nourishment and it
1:18:04 should be about nourishment culturally socially personally psychologically as well as physically
1:18:11 and these products are developed to generate financialized growth for institutional investors
1:18:17 they’re not made by people who love you who want to nourish you and so I don’t think it meets
1:18:22 what I think is a useful cultural definition of food I think it’s very useful to not think of them
1:18:30 as food and I don’t think a mixture of um coloring addictive drugs and phosphoric acid could be called
1:18:36 food in any sense of the word it doesn’t have nutrition it only has things that will we’re
1:18:40 we’re pretty sure that almost every ingredient does you harm in some way so I don’t see how that
1:18:46 could be called food it’s a way of commodifying your ill health for the benefit of a very small
1:18:53 number of people are you optimistic oh that’s such a great question like I live with and I want the
1:19:00 real answer that’s a sort of oh you could ask me you get a different answer each morning so at the
1:19:06 moment uh here are my sources of optimism there is another way of doing this I have a friend who
1:19:11 runs a not-for-profit drug company works as a normal drug company has a huge quantity of revenue
1:19:17 only one person took a pay cut that was the CEO so he doesn’t own it everyone else is paid exactly
1:19:22 as if they’re at a normal pharmaceutical company the purpose of it and he paid back investors it’s
1:19:26 a really it would be cool for you to interview him actually he’s one of the smartest people I know
1:19:34 he came from big pharma and because he’s not obliged to institutional investors he develops
1:19:37 drugs for low income settings he also sells them in middle and high income settings and
1:19:42 does really a great job but the purpose of the company is to reduce health care inequalities
1:19:48 now there are lots of people who are working on a similar model that will sit within you know a
1:19:55 capitalist structure that will pay back investors but where food needn’t becomes so beholden to
1:19:58 institutional investors so I think there are financial reasons for optimism there are economic
1:20:04 models we can we can propose corporate structures we can incorporate things in different ways
1:20:08 that will serve the community in different ways so that’s one source of optimism the second source
1:20:15 of optimism is we sort of did it with tobacco and the cool terrible thing about tobacco is we
1:20:22 regulated the tobacco industry and got smoking rates right down and the growth of equity value
1:20:28 of the tobacco companies has continued more or less uninterrupted throughout now part of that comes
1:20:32 from selling cigarettes in other countries some of it comes from the rise of vaping but nonetheless
1:20:37 we did manage to get control of tobacco so as a public health activist I have a template I know how
1:20:43 to do it I know how to tackle marketing and we have a roadmap and we also know that people are
1:20:49 furious I mean people are enraged for 40 years we’ve watched particularly our children not just
1:20:55 get bigger but get shorter so if you have kids if you have kids in this country by the age of five
1:21:01 they will be that much shorter than if you had kids in Scandinavia or Bulgaria or the Netherlands
1:21:07 okay that at the age of five that much nine centimeters that is the difference between a
1:21:12 British five-year-old and a Bulgarian five-year-old and he sees all diet so it’s not just our kids live
1:21:17 with obesity they are stunted now you can’t stunt a body by nine centimeters at the age of five
1:21:22 and not also stunt them intellectually so people are furious we sort of know this is happening we
1:21:28 know we can’t stop eating this food we obesity is all around us and so I I think there is real
1:21:35 real momentum for people to reclaim their foods and we do we do have a lot of amazing food cultures
1:21:41 in this country that we can draw on for kind of rich phenomenal diets might explain why the US is so
1:21:45 poor from an education standpoint to some degree you know what I mean because they always rank
1:21:50 at the very bottom of the education right it’s the same it’s about the same in the US the stunt
1:21:54 the physical stunting really physical stunting once we once you get rid of cigarette smoking
1:22:00 during pregnancy which is still far too high it’s really it’s really all due to diet so there’s all
1:22:07 those causes of optimism and yet I also am up against the power any one of these corporations
1:22:14 has revenues equivalent to the GDP of a pretty decent sized country like Venezuela Croatia
1:22:19 yeah so and that’s any one of the companies this is just such a conspiracy theory that I
1:22:25 just popped into my head about my own childhood I’m the youngest of four right and if we just
1:22:31 look at the brothers so there’s three of us brothers I’m the youngest brother and Kevin
1:22:37 my oldest brother is a monster he’s like six five or something even Jason is like six three
1:22:43 and then I’m short and I’m like short in comparison to six one but there’s so much there’s so much
1:22:47 shorter than me and I did I was thinking about it just speaking my mother did make home cook
1:22:52 food she was at home during my my older brothers and sisters as they were growing up so she was
1:22:57 cooking in the house the whole time African food lots of whole foods and chickens and vegetables
1:23:01 and salads whatever a traditional like any traditional diet yeah and then she started
1:23:08 businesses and stopped coming home so I was a scavenger and I had like free reign to go to
1:23:11 the sweet shop and eat not not so good thing so I was just thinking about I’ve always wondered
1:23:17 why I’m why I’m shorter than them and I’m younger but maybe there’s studied physically and intellectually
1:23:21 maybe I think you’re gonna have difficulty selling people yeah I mean it is an intriguing
1:23:28 point we know about youngest people in in the in in Europe the youngest children are shorter
1:23:33 about I don’t know I don’t know that they did they’re about five IQ points uh less smart because
1:23:40 this is the family as well my brother’s absolute they’re like um they’re like mathletes in the UK
1:23:44 my brother was rewriting the textbook he was on the front of the Plymouth Herald because of his
1:23:47 bloody the grades that he got I think that’s the Plymouth Herald it’s one of the newspapers
1:23:52 he was in there and Kevin was even smarter he was a super another super genius I got kicked out of
1:23:57 school I was it’s really interesting I mean that idea of eating a sort of traditional home cooked
1:24:05 whole food diet versus your probably quite high UPF I mean I it was the data’s you know
1:24:10 your your one case but we build evidence out of case studies you know I love that idea I’m not sure
1:24:15 I can really accept you as kind of intellectually physically stunted sitting across from you no
1:24:19 but academically they were just so much so they still are so far ahead of me in fact Jason now
1:24:24 works in my company just to help me with everything because he’s so smart there’s there’s a pair of
1:24:28 twins I know who’s separated at birth adopted in China separated at birth they’re quite well
1:24:33 now I’ve I’ve interviewed them for a podcast and one grew up in Norway one grew up in the States
1:24:38 genetically identical and the Norwegian twin is is that much taller than the American twin so we
1:24:44 we do see these natural experiments too crazy how’s your brother getting on so he maybe the biggest
1:24:49 effect of the book is he kind of I stopped a message in the book and I would say this because
1:24:53 people people are listening and it listens to selfish we were like how do I lose the way how
1:24:59 do I quit UPF well I’ve said that but the the bigger thing is don’t beat your loved ones over
1:25:03 the head with this so many people like I’m gonna buy your book for my wife or husband or daughter
1:25:10 I’m gonna tell my kids and and when we let people go we stop owning their problems it gives them
1:25:16 agency it empowers them and and then it’s up to them to decide and they if they have the resources
1:25:22 and the opportunities generally they will and so a big a kind of core message to the book is
1:25:26 stop nagging your loved ones about their food their food is controlled by forces that are
1:25:31 far bigger than you they know what to eat nagging people about their weight only stresses them out
1:25:37 and makes it worse so when I it was when I let go properly of what Zandi eats and stop really
1:25:45 really stopped caring about him and and started to kind of not see him as an extension of myself
1:25:50 because when he he would be big in public you know we work together as television presenters and
1:25:55 I feel like God you’re embarrassing me like we’re trying to talk about health and medicine to kids
1:26:00 and look at you and when I let all that go and saw him it’s like you know he’s such a wonderful
1:26:05 person I love him so much who cares about his weight that enabled him to sort of engage with it
1:26:11 then lots of other things happened he’s just got married to a public health academic um uh
1:26:16 he’s got resources he got a bit older I mean all kinds of things happen so much of life is is
1:26:22 luck we can tell these narratives of how someone got from A to B but he’s very fortunate and I
1:26:29 think celebrating weight loss is just something I’m I’m so anxious about doing but he yeah he
1:26:33 a big product of the book was an improvement in my relationship with him because I stopped
1:26:41 caring what he ate I find it so interesting why people decide to make changes in their life and
1:26:47 it’s so different for everybody I’ve I’ve wandered and pondered whether sometimes we need a little
1:26:57 bit more pain you know I can’t forget a conversation I had with a manager of one of the top music
1:27:01 artists in this country that was struggling and this person was a friend of mine the person
1:27:06 struggling and I kind of went to him and I was like listen how can I help and he goes you can’t
1:27:11 he goes um I’ve managed a lot of music artists that have struggled with addictions of various
1:27:16 kinds and at some point they’ll reach a rock bottom and they’ll decide themselves that
1:27:20 they need to make a change and it’s such a hard thing to accept just to kind of
1:27:25 let someone in your view go into freefall in an area of your life you want to catch them you want
1:27:33 to hold them up and support them that that moment of clarity of decision that’s when we’ve all had
1:27:38 it the switch suddenly flicks that can never arise as long as someone else is telling it and the
1:27:44 the clearest example of this is the washing up that my you know we’ve got a family and everyone’s
1:27:48 and sometimes as I’m about to heroically at the end of a meal get up and do all the washing up
1:27:52 my wife will say to me could you clear these plates and do the washing up and I’ve gone
1:27:58 from being an empowered person with agency about to heroically do my bit for the family to being
1:28:04 someone doing the bidding of someone else and I it enrages me and we do it to each other
1:28:10 so just allowing other people to grasp their problems and deal with them or not is you know
1:28:15 that’s that’s it’s a really hard journey for a doctor because doctors are all about telling you
1:28:20 about yourself and I try and do it less and less it kind of reminds me a little bit of what I was
1:28:26 saying earlier about um I don’t like it when it feels like I’m being controlled yeah and that’s
1:28:29 kind of what the in food food environment we live in makes me feel like it makes me feel
1:28:35 like I don’t have a choice you don’t and I want to have a choice you don’t really have a choice
1:28:38 I mean if you have enough money and you’re really prepared to get up early in the morning
1:28:45 you have some choices but our food food choices are severely curtailed and if you’re on a motorway
1:28:48 if you’re traveling around this country if you just try if you just try and go out on that
1:28:53 high street out there and just buy yourself a quick lunch there aren’t a lot of choices
1:28:59 the pain thing’s interesting we need a little bit of pain in our diet we need foods that are bitter
1:29:05 and real and chewy and crunchy and make us work for them and take time to prepare and
1:29:11 one of the big switches is trying to see food preparation not as a chore but as something
1:29:17 that connects you to your ancestors I mean you know we’ve survived because we come from this long
1:29:22 chain of people who just spent hours a day grinding and pulverizing and salting and mashing and
1:29:27 figuring out how to make food to nourish us and it’s the thing we should do with other people
1:29:33 and you know that trying to enjoy food prep is a big change for me second ago I asked you if
1:29:39 you’re optimistic and you gave me I dodged it you gave me the you did a little bit but you gave me
1:29:44 the reasons for being optimistic what are the reasons you’re pessimistic I think because when
1:29:51 it came to tobacco control it took from from the certainty that tobacco caused not just lung
1:29:56 cancer but but strokes heart attacks and a whole range of other health outcomes including
1:30:02 early death the same list of health outcomes that ultra-processed food causes from that knowledge
1:30:10 to proper regulation took 50 60 years and because around a significant a significant
1:30:14 percentage of women still smoke throughout pregnancy in this country you know which is a
1:30:20 good benchmark of not succeeding there they’re highly motivated to stop and unable to and we see
1:30:26 the rise of vapes so it’s an arms race you know I’m a virologist by training my phd is in studying
1:30:33 how viruses compete with humans and in an arms race you never get ahead for very long it’s like
1:30:36 business and business is a great example of an arms race you understand arms race is better than
1:30:41 anyone you can’t just build your company be like well that’s that’s done home I go let’s watch the
1:30:47 money flow you someone’s always always trying to overtake you and so we’re we’re as a community
1:30:53 of activists what we need to build is a is a sustainable form of activism that is you build
1:30:58 regulation you build on that you keep generating evidence and there are some we have more and
1:31:02 more ways of doing it with these sustainable non-profit not-for-profit food companies for
1:31:10 example as a way of funding activism so are you optimistic I have to be I mean nothing
1:31:15 worth achieving will be achieved in our lifetime so this will not be just the work of my lifetime
1:31:21 and I’m inheriting this work many of us are inheriting this work from a generation of people
1:31:28 who’ve been slaving at this since Nestle were indicted for aggressively marketing infant
1:31:34 formula in very very low-income settings and really harming children in low-income countries
1:31:39 so you know that that was kind of the first engagement with big food where people
1:31:44 were angry and we could really point to a problem and those activists now they’re my
1:31:48 they’re 20 30 years older than me and they’re they’re sort of handing knowledge to me and a
1:31:52 whole bunch of other people across around the around the world people from the global south
1:31:56 people from very diverse communities and so we’re you know I’m going to hand this to my kids but
1:32:00 you know there’s a fight and you can be on one side of it I guess
1:32:05 Chris we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question
1:32:09 for the next guest not knowing who they’re going to leave it for and the question that’s been left
1:32:20 for you is what will we also has a little bracket since as you regret in 10 years about how we brought
1:32:31 up our children today I can tell you because I already regret it and it’s it’s not spending
1:32:40 the kind of quality time that I’ve just given you with them that you know to spend time with you
1:32:44 today I prepared I thought about it I’ve read your book I’ve you know I’ve been listening to
1:32:49 podcast for ages and as a result we’ve had at least what feels to me like quite a meaningful
1:32:53 engagement it’s really nice I leave kind of enriched and my kids get this these sort of
1:32:59 snatches at time of time and you talk about diarising lunch and I know this is this thing you
1:33:04 talk about in lots of places it’s not just giving the crumbs to your family but it’s like giving
1:33:10 investing in your family the way you do in your work and I don’t do it because you know my wife’s
1:33:18 pregnant I’ve got two kids six and three and it’s just a scramble so that’s what I will regret and
1:33:21 and it’s great actually being given the opportunity to articulate that and go okay if I’m going to
1:33:26 regret it who do I want to be and you know I love that question I’m going to go away and try and
1:33:32 force time with them that I’m present and often they don’t want they’re not interested but it’s
1:33:38 just being there listening to them and investing in them regularly in the way that I do with everything
1:33:44 else in my life Chris thank you so much because you you um I feel like this book I think it’s been
1:33:50 in the Sunday Times bestseller chart for like 25 24 weeks or something mental you knocked me off
1:33:56 number one oh listen you’re I’m just visiting you live there so I’ll be there for another five
1:34:02 seconds you’re I’m sure you’ll be there for for many many many more weeks and you’re starting a
1:34:07 really important revolution and conversation around what we eat a really important one and
1:34:14 books come along once in a once in a while once every couple of years once in a generation that
1:34:20 really meet culture at the exact moment with the exact language with the exact appreciation of the
1:34:30 reader the nuance the inclusivity not taking provocative stances that are so far on the
1:34:34 right or so far on the left that they alienate a certain group they kind of bring everyone in
1:34:40 and they appreciate both sides of that nuance and that perspective and this is exactly what
1:34:51 this book does perfectly timed written perfectly to appeal to both sides of the most tricky narratives
1:34:56 and that is why it’s such a brilliant book and that’s why everybody needs to read it because as
1:35:01 you said I think before we started recording it’s starting a conversation that we really need to
1:35:06 start and it’s and it’s these books that end up changing changing the world and changing
1:35:12 legislation so congratulations first and foremost but thank you secondly for writing
1:35:15 such an important book at such an important time I’m really blushing I mean there’s this
1:35:19 there’s very few people I’d rather hear that from than you know it really means a huge amount so
1:35:37 thank you
1:35:43 you
1:35:46 (upbeat music)