Taking a stand against ultra-processed food
Imagine eating only fast food and highly processed food for a whole month. What would it do to your body?
Chris van Tulleken, an associate professor at University College London and practising infectious diseases doctor, conducted a four-week experiment on himself, under the watchful eyes of one of Britain's top obesity experts.
In the documentary, available on YouTube, he ate a diet in which fast food and processed food constituted 80 per cent of his calories - a sharp contrast to his usual diet where such foods constituted only 20 per cent of the calories.
During the four weeks, he was subjected to rigorous medical testing, undergoing blood tests, body fat analysis and brain scans.
The experiment was simple. He would eat when hungry, just like he normally did, and all other aspects of his lifestyle would remain the same.
The results were stunning: a weight gain of 6.5kg and his body mass index tipped into the obese range in that short time.
Blood taken showed that his hunger hormone had gone up by 30 per cent, while the hormone to indicate fullness to the body went down.
During the experiment, van Tulleken was almost constantly hungry, and he found himself eating in a trance-like state, as if addicted to the food.
This was confirmed by his brain scans, which showed that the reward centres of the brain were all lighting up when he thought about eating, and his neural pathways looked like the brains of people with alcohol or nicotine addiction.
The BBC documentary has since spawned a best-selling book by van Tulleken, Ultra-processed People (2023).
Its thesis is that food produced by large corporations contains cheap ingredients and chemicals that hack the brains, inducing people to eat more. The offerings - which have been over-processed, or ultra-processed - are saltier, sweeter and softer than
their natural, and more wholesome, counterparts.
Of such ultra-processed food, "most of the calories come from food products containing novel, synthetic molecules, never found in nature", writes van Tulleken.
In the book, the author points at the trillion-dollar food industry which is driving the global obesity epidemic. It describes how the four-week experiment is taking place across the globe, for periods far longer than a month, resulting in accelerated
weight and fat gain.
The problem is especially acute in poorer countries, where populations rely on cheap and processed food to ward off hunger.
There are two reasons mega corporations highly engineer the food they produce. The first is to lower the cost and maximise profitability. Additives such as emulsifiers and modified starches found in ultra-processed food reduce the cost of production,
resulting in more profits.
The second reason is to maximise the taste of the food to induce people to eat more of it, ultimately leading to greater profitability for large corporations.
So how does ultra-processed food infiltrate the home? The book points to it happening from the time our kids are newborns.
Infant formula is an ultra-processed food with chemicals added into the final product. Free samples of infant formula given out in labour and delivery wards provide large corporations a beachhead into the home.
As the child grows older, corporations build on their beachhead by advertising during prime-time cartoons. The attractive packaging of the food in supermarkets serves to further entice the child.
It is interesting to note that ultra-processed food companies have also retooled for the age of gaming and social media. They have moved into advertising games, or advergames, to engage kids. In research reviewed in the book, "after playing advergames
promoting ultra-processed food, children consumed more nutrient-poor snack foods and fewer fruit and vegetables".
As a family, we have been sensitised to processed food for a while now. When we returned from the United States about 10 years ago, our kids had grown accustomed to having large amounts of ultra-processed food in their diets because of their school lunches
there.
These were some of the things we did to wean our kids off it upon returning to Singapore.
- Read the label
The best foods are those without labels, such as fruit and vegetables. We would stock our home with these and point to the refrigerator during snack time instead of tearing open a package. Before we bought packaged food, we read the labels, scrutinising information like country of origin and ingredients on the labels.
We avoided food from countries with lax food regulation, especially when it came to chemicals and coatings on the food. If the ingredient list contained numerous additives, emulsifiers, or synthetic ingredients like artificial flavourings, we tended to avoid it.
A simple rule of thumb was that if we could not pronounce an ingredient on the label, we skipped it. - Make your own food
In recent years, we have started to avoid breakfast cereals.
They are ultra-processed and typically high in sugar content and loaded with chemicals and additives. We have started to make our own cereal instead, which has been a game changer when it comes to taste and our ability to customise it however we want.
Rather than relying on store-bought bread, which is also full of chemicals and additives, my wife has been making what we consume in our household. I am proud to say that we have not had to buy a loaf of bread in three years. When it comes to food, everyone in the family gets in on the act, either in the preparation of the food or in washing up after. We believe that cooking is far too important an activity for one member of the household to shoulder alone. And the act of preparing the food gives us a deeper connection with what we eat.
I am glad that both my sons can cook because I see it as an essential life skill for them to lower their consumption of ultra-processed food. - Eat together
In the words of Michael Pollan, the author of The Omnivore's Dilemma (2006): "Food marketers would rather have us eat lots of stuff by ourselves in isolation than eating together. They love getting us to eat in front of the television set, on our own, on the run, and in the car".
The family table is a means for us to keep one another accountable for what we eat.
Eating is not just the consumption of calories, but it is also a ritual that we observe to celebrate our time together as family.
At our dining table, we are socialising our kids on what and how they should eat to keep themselves and their own families healthy in the future.
In many ways, our family dinners are how we take a stand against ultra-processed food.
Abel Ang is the chief executive of a medical technology company and an adjunct professor at Nanyang Business School.
Source: The Straits Times
