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By Matthew Rees

Food and Health Fact #195:

Chris van Tulleken, MD, on the profile and popularity of ultra-processed food

The following is an excerpt from Ultra-Processed People: The Science Behind Food That Isn’t Food, by Chris van Tulleken, MD. Read my Wall Street Journal review of the book here.  

Our senses of taste and smell, our immune system, our manual dexterity, our tooth and jaw anatomy, our eyesight: it’s hard to think of any aspect of human biology, physiology or culture that isn’t primarily shaped by our historic need for energy. Over billions of years our bodies have superbly adapted to using a wide range of food.

But over the past 150 years food has become . . . not food.

We’ve started eating substances constructed from novel molecules and using processes never previously encountered in our evolutionary history, substances that can’t really even be called “food.” Our calories increasingly come from modified starches, from invert sugars, hydrolyzed protein isolates and seed oils that have been refined, bleached, deodorized, hydrogenated – and interesterified. And these calories have been assembled into concoctions using other molecules that our senses have never been exposed to either: synthetic emulsifiers, low-calorie sweeteners, stabilizing gums, humectants, flavor compounds, dyes, color stabilizers, carbonating agents, firming agents and bulking – and anti-bulking – agents.

These substances entered the diet gradually at first, beginning in the last part of the nineteenth century, but the incursion gained pace from the 1950s onwards, to the point that they now constitute the majority of what people eat in the UK and the USA, and form a significant part of the diet of nearly every society on earth. . . .

These [ultra-processed] foods have been put through an evolutionary selection process over many decades, whereby the products that are purchased and eaten in the greatest quantities are the ones that survive best in the market. To achieve this, they have evolved to subvert the systems in the body that regulate weight and many other functions.

Want to read more about ultra-processed food in Food and Health Facts? Americans’ calorie consumption of ultra-processed foodsUltra-processed foods get consumed fasterUltra-processed food consumption by American children