49 pages • 1 hour read
Chris van TullekenUltra-Processed People: The Science Behind Food That Isn't Food
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Social Context: The World Obesity Crisis
As van Tulleken highlights, between 1980 and 2020, the rates of obesity in the UK and US have more than doubled. This means, according to the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, that 40% of Americans and more than one quarter of British people are now obese. Meanwhile, rates of obesity for children between ages two and 17 in the US have jumped from 5% in 1980 to 18% in 2022. This pattern is even more extreme in non-Western nations. While the absolute percentages remain lower, China has seen an 8,000% increase in obesity since 1980, and Mali has seen a 1,550% increase (247). Almost everywhere, obesity is rising fast and among almost every group. Indeed, the World Obesity Federation has suggested that half of the world could be obese or overweight by 2035, with one in four people being obese.
Governments are not any closer to a solution. Van Tulleken argues that obesity exacts a huge cost on healthcare systems and the welfare and life expectancy of those who suffer from it. He also states that obesity is comorbid with other life-threatening conditions such as Type 2 diabetes and heart disease. A potential critique of this is that being obese or overweight does not guarantee health issues and often correlates with healthcare discrimination:
‘It’s very clear that there are a lot of people […] [who are] called obese [who] don’t have any signs of disease and live long, healthy lives,’ says Lindo Bacon, a physiologist, author, and advocate for body positivity affiliated with the University of California, Davis. Bacon says a relentless focus on weight loss can come at the expense of vital medical care. For example, ‘My father and I both went to orthopedic surgeons because we were having bad knee pain.’ Bacon, whose weight qualified as normal, was offered surgery after physical therapy failed, but Bacon’s father was told only to lose weight (Frankel-Couzin, Jennifer. “A Lighter Burden.” Science, 29 July 2021).
Van Tulleken discusses how conventional advice to simply eat less and exercise more has made little difference in reducing obesity on a societal level, nor has the advice to eat less fat and, more recently, cut out sugar. Of course, some individuals have lost weight or avoided obesity through these prescriptions. But on a societal level, government advice and a proliferation of dieting programs, books, groups, and even drugs and surgeries have not made a difference.
As such, van Tulleken looks at obesity in a new way. First, he examines the health effects of food in terms of its degree of processing, and not its macronutrients, identifying an element in obesity that has not been examined before. The increasing consumption of food involving exclusively industrial processes and chemicals has also coincided with the rise in world obesity. This correlation has been especially conspicuous in newly developing nations, which have only recently started eating UPF. Secondly, van Tulleken shifts responsibility for obesity away from the individual and toward nonvolitional changes in how bodies regulate appetite. If UPF disrupts the natural hormonal signals telling us when to eat and when to stop, obesity is not a failure of “will” or “choice” but the result of a harmful and addictive new substance. In this way, understanding obesity as caused by UPF can remove the stigma around obesity. At the same time, it can point the way to more effective policy interventions.
Genre Context: The UPF “Diet” and Addiction Recovery Books
In the Introduction, van Tulleken emphasizes that Ultra-Processed People is not a weight loss book. By this, he means that the book does not offer guidance on how to lose weight, nor does he propose an idealized diet or method to accomplish that goal. Rather, he questions whether any method can help people safely and sustainably lose weight. He also queries the hidden premise involved in weight loss books that one should lose weight. Instead, Ultra-Processed People is primarily a work of popular science combined with economic and social analysis. Its principal goal is allowing the reader to understand a material and socio-economic phenomenon, UPF, and outlining ways this phenomenon, and its attendant industry, might be challenged or changed.
There is a personal and autobiographical dimension to Ultra-Processed People. The text touches on van Tulleken’s own, often problematic, relationship with food and his brother’s struggle with obesity. Van Tulleken attempts to help the reader engage with his analysis by connecting it to a personal narrative. In this sense, the book diverges from conventional works of science or social analysis, which are written in a strictly objective way.
During the writing of the book, van Tulleken put himself on an 80% UPF diet as an experiment. He encourages his readers to do something similar. As such, while Ultra-Processed People might not be a weight loss book, it does contain elements of a self-help work on addiction, like Allen Carr’s The Easy Way to Stop Smoking (1985). Van Tulleken argues that UPF is a quasi-addictive substance; it follows that many of us will, to varying extents, have an addictive relationship to these foods. Reading about the problems with UPF may help to cultivate a relationship of disgust toward them. Van Tulleken suggests that, like Carr’s method of “smoking while you read about how bad smoking is” (11), this can be effective for weakening addictions. Conversely, by eating UPF while one reads and feeling its effects on one’s own body, the reader may better understand UPF’s effects, as well as engage with and grasp the objective scientific and social analysis van Tulleken provides.
