YouSaid · the spoken record

Chris Van Tulleken

lines on the record: 116
first: 2023-10-23
most recent: 2023-10-23
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Back to the 90s. The most, if I tell this as a story, which I think is the way you do it, there was a scientist called Hermann Ponser, and he wanted to know how many more calories he'd burn if he went and lived as a hunter-gatherer with the Hadza tribe in Tanzania. So he went and studied them and he used a thing called double labeled water where you can measure very accurately calorie expenditure and he put them in metabolic hoods and he studied them for months and months and he came back and he looked at his data and he thought he got it all wrong because the data showed that for essentially if you or I went and lived in Tanzania and we walked”
2023-10-23 · The Diary of a CEO · The Junk Food Doctor: "This Food Is Worse Than Smoking!" & "This Diet Prevents 60% Of Disease!" - Chris Van Tulleken (Ultra-Processed People Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mathematically he's not entirely wrong that there are some very, very, there are two very, very big problems with that. The first is that while some people can just eat to instructions, many of us have genes that lead us to engage with food in a more interesting way. You know, I care about food, I love food, I'm driven to it. So your friends should come around my house in the morning with a box of cocoa pops and try and get my daughter to eat one adult portion. And good luck to him. I mean, they'll be screaming and crying and she'll be grabbing the box. So the food, it's a bit like saying to smokers, all you have to do is just smoke one cigarette. Don't smoke the whole pack. Just have like one to be social or people who live with addiction to alcohol just have one drink and that won't do you any harm. The food really is addictive for many people. But there is this other bit of the equation which is really fascinating, which is that when we do more activity of the kind that most of us do, it doesn't seem to have an enormous impact on the calories that we burn. And this is very good robust science going back.”
2023-10-23 · The Diary of a CEO · The Junk Food Doctor: "This Food Is Worse Than Smoking!" & "This Diet Prevents 60% Of Disease!" - Chris Van Tulleken (Ultra-Processed People Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I nod to if an individual wants to read my book, I think they will come away with technical knowledge that they will be able to use, and I wish them well with that. The big argument of the book is about this is about social justice. It is really appalling that even for people with a lot of means, real food is incredibly affordable and unavailable.”
2023-10-23 · The Diary of a CEO · The Junk Food Doctor: "This Food Is Worse Than Smoking!" & "This Diet Prevents 60% Of Disease!" - Chris Van Tulleken (Ultra-Processed People Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I want my kids to be normal. Being normal is really important as a kid. And food isn't just stuff we put in to build our bodies. Food binds us to the people around us. Food is part of our community and our culture. In the UK, our food culture is ultra-processed food. And if you don't eat and drink ultra-processed food, you become a slightly odd person. And so I still eat it when I go to friends' houses because otherwise I look like some, you know, fanatical food snob. And it's the same with my kids. So grandparents, friends, relatives all bring it round. You don't control what they eat at school. You know, my youngest ones are really nice nursery, but still ultra processed food from the minute she gets there to when she leaves. So very good luck to you. But this is why I argue”
2023-10-23 · The Diary of a CEO · The Junk Food Doctor: "This Food Is Worse Than Smoking!" & "This Diet Prevents 60% Of Disease!" - Chris Van Tulleken (Ultra-Processed People Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, you're not wrong. You're completely right. It will be impossible for you to limit the influx of ultra-processed food into your house. So clearly, I've written the book on this. I study this. I would love to do that.”
2023-10-23 · The Diary of a CEO · The Junk Food Doctor: "This Food Is Worse Than Smoking!" & "This Diet Prevents 60% Of Disease!" - Chris Van Tulleken (Ultra-Processed People Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I love talking to Who might become parents about what they think me? I mean, I'm like, wow, you just, I mean, yeah, good luck to you. Can we have this conversation again in about six years?”
2023-10-23 · The Diary of a CEO · The Junk Food Doctor: "This Food Is Worse Than Smoking!" & "This Diet Prevents 60% Of Disease!" - Chris Van Tulleken (Ultra-Processed People Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The only, really the only source of vitamin D. And he drink this every single day enthusiastically. He always wanted his cod liver oil. And on the day his rickets were healed and you couldn't see them anymore on the x-rays, he stopped drinking the cod of oil, never asked for it again, and none of the kids without vitamin D deficiency would drink would touch the cod liver oil. So something in Earl's body was saying, I will, when I need this stuff, I'll have it. And once I don't need it anymore, I won't have any more of it. And all the kids that she studied over many, many years with access to a full range of foods perfectly matched all their nutritional needs, they all grew really well, they were intellectually well developed, they're extremely healthy, and they didn't have any of the sort of food refusal problems that parents have nowadays. And she knew very well that the point was the kids only had access to good food. She wasn't giving them access to.”
2023-10-23 · The Diary of a CEO · The Junk Food Doctor: "This Food Is Worse Than Smoking!" & "This Diet Prevents 60% Of Disease!" - Chris Van Tulleken (Ultra-Processed People Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Start to scavenge from humans, there is some evidence of obesity, but in wild animals there is no obesity. Humans, it turns out, obviously, have the same ability, and so a scientist called Clara Davis, whose amazing woman, she was a gay woman, one of the first medical graduates in North America. And she did this experiment where she was taking abandoned kids in essentially functioned almost like an orphanage. And each child got access to 34 different Whole Foods every single day. And it was things like there was raw bone marrow and cooked rice and yogurt and milk, and they had a little bowl of salt. They could have as much or as little salt as they wanted. And her question was, could the kids balance their nutritional needs? And the best example was a kid called Earl, who she took in a few months old, and he came in with ricket, so he had very bad vitamin D deficiency, had bendy bones. And they did some x-rays, and you could see the rickets on the x-rays. And every single day he would glug an entire cup of cod liver oil, which at the time was one of the”
2023-10-23 · The Diary of a CEO · The Junk Food Doctor: "This Food Is Worse Than Smoking!" & "This Diet Prevents 60% Of Disease!" - Chris Van Tulleken (Ultra-Processed People Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If we look at the animal kingdom, even if you look at something you might think has quite a simple diet, like a big herb before living in any of the big herbals living on any of the big plains of the world, you think, well, they just eat grass. They don't. We've done loads of experiments where you put, sounds a bit unkind, but you put a hole in the neck of the animal and you put a bag on the hole and you collect the plants they're eating. And you can do this in a way that's relatively humane. And what we discover is if we study goats or cows, they're eating 50 or 60 different plants a day. Calories are abundant. And what those animals are doing is balancing all their nutritional needs from all those different plants and selecting them and learning them about the flavor profile and the mineral content, they're moving to avoid predators in the rains to different soils. perfectly balancing their nutritional needs from their environment. And obesity is non-existent in the wild animal kingdom, in urban animals.”
2023-10-23 · The Diary of a CEO · The Junk Food Doctor: "This Food Is Worse Than Smoking!" & "This Diet Prevents 60% Of Disease!" - Chris Van Tulleken (Ultra-Processed People Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So there are a huge number of families that only have a microwave to cook. And fresh food, while there is always a politician willing to advance this argument, like, but you can buy a bag of lentils. If you go to the cash and carry, you can buy rice or lentils for, you know, a couple of quid for ten kilos. It costs money to heat it. It costs time. Time is the most expensive thing for people with low incomes. They need pots, pans, cutting boards, knives, tupperware. If you're going to batch cook, which is the only way to make home cooking economical, you've got a deep freeze to store it in. So saying to people with low incomes, you know, make healthier choices, it is nonsense. It's just, and so I feel very strongly, the world does not need another person like me saying that. And in fact, no one. I mean, we all hate being told what to do.”
2023-10-23 · The Diary of a CEO · The Junk Food Doctor: "This Food Is Worse Than Smoking!" & "This Diet Prevents 60% Of Disease!" - Chris Van Tulleken (Ultra-Processed People Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Much better than me I've always had choice. And so when I used to buy things that are unhealthy, it is with a degree of choice. My patients, I run a clinic at the hospital for tropical disease where I work, and most of my patients have no addresses. They're very disadvantaged. They're migrants, asylum seekers. They come from very low-income families because those are the people who get infections. Now, when I say to them, go and eat some healthy food, they all know what healthy food is. They've often got very, they're very diverse community. They've often got very rich traditions of healthy food from the communities of the cultures they've come from. They are completely unable to buy it. In the case of the asylum seekers, there are an £8 a day and they can't work. You can't say to someone, spend your £8 pounds a day on apples and broccoli. They haven't got knives to cut it with. Now we know a million households in this country don't have fridges, freezers.”
2023-10-23 · The Diary of a CEO · The Junk Food Doctor: "This Food Is Worse Than Smoking!" & "This Diet Prevents 60% Of Disease!" - Chris Van Tulleken (Ultra-Processed People Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean you may have a much more profound, I think you're asking this question in a provocative way. I think you will understand it.”
2023-10-23 · The Diary of a CEO · The Junk Food Doctor: "This Food Is Worse Than Smoking!" & "This Diet Prevents 60% Of Disease!" - Chris Van Tulleken (Ultra-Processed People Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would not actually tax ultra-processed food and I certainly wouldn't ban it. I think all my arguments are about increasing freedom, increasing choice, increasing opportunity. And that's quite conscious. I mean, you know this as a skillful communicator. You talk about kind of doing exactly this in your book, where I'm trying to make an argument that will appeal to the political right that are much more on the side of free market low regulation. And in fact, we can have regulations completely compatible with huge economic growth. And what I'm asking for is a food system where people with low incomes have access to healthy, affordable food.”
2023-10-23 · The Diary of a CEO · The Junk Food Doctor: "This Food Is Worse Than Smoking!" & "This Diet Prevents 60% Of Disease!" - Chris Van Tulleken (Ultra-Processed People Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The World Obesti Federation are doing some really good work identifying this as the major public health problem. The ticklishness talking about this is it's really hard to say that obesity is a problem without also saying that people who live with it are the problem. And if you're not careful, a war on obesity becomes a war on people who live with it. And I think the evidence is very clear. It's just about the food environment. Yes, you can make these very powerful economic arguments that we simply cannot afford to have a food system that's driving this rate of disease. I think the moral arguments are much more powerful that this is stuff that causes human suffering.”
2023-10-23 · The Diary of a CEO · The Junk Food Doctor: "This Food Is Worse Than Smoking!" & "This Diet Prevents 60% Of Disease!" - Chris Van Tulleken (Ultra-Processed People Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I like to say they will live with a beastie rather than use obese as an adjective because I think the biggest problem for people who live with obesity is stigma. It's that being a beast is your identity. And what we actually know is that”
2023-10-23 · The Diary of a CEO · The Junk Food Doctor: "This Food Is Worse Than Smoking!" & "This Diet Prevents 60% Of Disease!" - Chris Van Tulleken (Ultra-Processed People Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There was a thing that I think the research doesn't capture, which is because it's salty. I was getting up to pee more at night. And I don't know if we can say this. I was getting really constipated and uncomfortable because it's quite low in fiber. And so I got in this vicious cycle of sleeplessness and I'd often find myself where at the fridge, in the kind of small hours of the morning, and the food felt like the solution to the problem. So I got in this spiral of sleeplessness, anxiety, overeating. And we know that stress and elevated cortisol also generally increases your desire for low quality food and makes people overeat. So in a way, that kind of middle-aged stress anxiety, those sort of mild mental health symptoms that so many people live with.”
2023-10-23 · The Diary of a CEO · The Junk Food Doctor: "This Food Is Worse Than Smoking!" & "This Diet Prevents 60% Of Disease!" - Chris Van Tulleken (Ultra-Processed People Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We've got really good epidemiological data. So we now have hundreds of prospective studies, which are the best, the kind of studies we use to link smoking to cancer, that it is not just associated with physical ill health, metabolic disease, inflammatory disease, cardiovascular disease, cancers, early death. It's also associated with anxiety depression and also dementia. My experience of being on the diet was that”
2023-10-23 · The Diary of a CEO · The Junk Food Doctor: "This Food Is Worse Than Smoking!" & "This Diet Prevents 60% Of Disease!" - Chris Van Tulleken (Ultra-Processed People Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And by the end of the diet, I mean, I now don't want to eat any ultra processed products. So the gift I'm trying to give the reader is if you're living with addiction, my invitation at the beginning is eat along, eat while you read. Don't forbid this stuff to yourself. Let yourself wallow in it, immerse it, taste it, and you'll start and read the ingredients lists while you eat. And you'll realize that all the food is, it has the same flavor profile. It's all equally salty and sugary and sweet. It's all acidic. And you will gradually become disgusted. And that's not a promise. That seems to be what's happening to a lot of people. And that is a very well evidenced technique when it comes to living with addiction. So the World Health Organization, who I work with, recommends the easy way to quit smoking for quitting smoking as being as useful as patches or any other technique.”
2023-10-23 · The Diary of a CEO · The Junk Food Doctor: "This Food Is Worse Than Smoking!" & "This Diet Prevents 60% Of Disease!" - Chris Van Tulleken (Ultra-Processed People Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It but I was also doing all this research partly for the book, and as a scientist, I study nutrition. And I was talking to a colleague in Brazil called Fernanda Rauber, and she just kept saying, this isn't food, Chris. It's an industrially produced edible substance. And I sat down that evening to meet her a meal of takeaway fried chicken. And I could hardly finish it. And she had flicked this switch in my brain where all of this ultra-processed food had become disgusting. But I then had to keep eating it for another fortnight. And so it was a bit like the very famous book The Easy Way to Quit Smoking.”
2023-10-23 · The Diary of a CEO · The Junk Food Doctor: "This Food Is Worse Than Smoking!" & "This Diet Prevents 60% Of Disease!" - Chris Van Tulleken (Ultra-Processed People Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Whilst you're eating your chewing, all kinds of hormonal and neurological changes happen in your body that will come to a point they'll say look, you've had enough, Stephen, you're fine. You can stop eating now. And that's called satiety and you've evolved this mechanism since living things first started eating food hundreds of millions of years ago. And all animals have it and humans have it too. What we saw is that at the end of a standard meal, at the end of this month, my hunger hormones remain sky high. So this is food that is interfering with our bodies evolved mechanisms to say I am done, it's time to stop eating. But there was this other thing that happened, one of the most important thing, and it's the core of the book, is that midway through this diet, which I was quite enjoying, you know, if you're sort of middle-aged man trying to, you know, the quest is always to lose weight and I could go back to eating the foods of my childhood and I was eating hot wings and all this stuff that I hadn't eaten for years.”
2023-10-23 · The Diary of a CEO · The Junk Food Doctor: "This Food Is Worse Than Smoking!" & "This Diet Prevents 60% Of Disease!" - Chris Van Tulleken (Ultra-Processed People Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We scanned my brain before and after I worked with colleagues at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neuroscience, so neurology and neurosurgery. So these were scans done very expertly. And while I'm only one patient, you can subtract the noise. You can be very sure that what you see is real. We saw enormous increases in connectivity between the automatic behavior habit bits, the back of the brain, and those reward addiction bits right in the middle of the brain. So we can't exactly say what's happening, but certainly behaviors and rewards are getting much, much more connected. Most significantly, I think, we saw a change in my hormonal response to a meal. So when you eat real food,”
2023-10-23 · The Diary of a CEO · The Junk Food Doctor: "This Food Is Worse Than Smoking!" & "This Diet Prevents 60% Of Disease!" - Chris Van Tulleken (Ultra-Processed People Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I ate a diet that's very normal for a British teenager. I ate 80% of my calories from ultra-processed food. So for a teenager in my kids' school, for example, this would be a completely normal thing to do. One in five people in this country get 80% of their calories from EPF. So I wasn't really putting my body on the line. I was switching from 20% to 80%. Kind of two really big things happened. There was some health effects. So in terms of the physical effects on my body, I gained so much weight. And it wasn't supersized me. I wasn't forcing it in. This was done as part of a scientific experiment for a big study that I'm now running at University College London where I work as an academic. I gain so much weight that in if I continued for a year I would have doubled my body weight.”
2023-10-23 · The Diary of a CEO · The Junk Food Doctor: "This Food Is Worse Than Smoking!" & "This Diet Prevents 60% Of Disease!" - Chris Van Tulleken (Ultra-Processed People Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So again, there's a complexity talking about is one better than the other because we've never done a trial, testing them against each other. They're both ultra processed, I know because I've looked at the ingredients. They both contain ingredients that you don't have in a domestic kitchen like palm fat or dextrose. and they both made really in a sense by the same company so both of they're both made by plcs who will be owned by institutional investors with requirements for growth so they come from the same food system with the same incentives about production and my bet is that you or i would be able to eat the entire pizza at a single sitting and we'd be still licking the pack of both of them so this is food that in a sense is engineered to be consumed to excess”
2023-10-23 · The Diary of a CEO · The Junk Food Doctor: "This Food Is Worse Than Smoking!" & "This Diet Prevents 60% Of Disease!" - Chris Van Tulleken (Ultra-Processed People Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, iron supporting your family's health, Rice added goodness. I mean, everything about this tells you that this is a product not just safe for kids, but intended for kids. And we'll know you like you can't sell things if they're not healthy. There must be some regulator dealing with that. And this is the thing that my six-year-old will eat five adult portions of. So when you eat five adult portions, the traffic lights only apply to a 30 gram surfing for you. Now, a 30 gram serving is a handful like that. It's one big spoonful. Okay. So this is the product that I recognize addictive behavior in my kids and frankly myself. I mean, I could eat, you know, 300 grams of it.”
2023-10-23 · The Diary of a CEO · The Junk Food Doctor: "This Food Is Worse Than Smoking!" & "This Diet Prevents 60% Of Disease!" - Chris Van Tulleken (Ultra-Processed People Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You would, but give me the cocoa pop, so the cocoa pops. If we look at these traffic lights, okay, green, green, orange, orange, pretty healthy. I mean, there is a monkey on the pack selling it to my kids.”
2023-10-23 · The Diary of a CEO · The Junk Food Doctor: "This Food Is Worse Than Smoking!" & "This Diet Prevents 60% Of Disease!" - Chris Van Tulleken (Ultra-Processed People Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Supplementing vitamins into food doesn't seem to have many health benefits for healthy people. So we've got quite a lot of very big data on this. And there are lots of studies that show benefits that are funded by people who make vitamins, but broadly the independent evidence shows that when you get vitamins and minerals in the context of food, they're really good for you. And when you take them in pill or supplement form, they don't seem to have many benefits if you are healthy.”
2023-10-23 · The Diary of a CEO · The Junk Food Doctor: "This Food Is Worse Than Smoking!" & "This Diet Prevents 60% Of Disease!" - Chris Van Tulleken (Ultra-Processed People Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, this is a. This is where we need, we should have done the maths and shown how much sugar there was in each pot. These are very high calorie shots of sugary liquid that will harm teeth and I don't know why you'd have this if you could just have real yogurt and or milk. And the reason they back add the vitamins is to be able to make health claims. So generally foods with added vitamins, real food doesn't need added vitamins. And we're, again, we're pretty sure that And I'm conscious who I'm talking to here. I probably have to tread a bit carefully”
2023-10-23 · The Diary of a CEO · The Junk Food Doctor: "This Food Is Worse Than Smoking!" & "This Diet Prevents 60% Of Disease!" - Chris Van Tulleken (Ultra-Processed People Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Really good way of telling if a food is ultra processed is if there is any health claim on the packet, it's almost certainly ultra processed. And part of that is to do with this intellectual property thing, that the only food you can make lots of money out of is a branded product. So there's no money in broccoli, milk, steak, eggs. Supermarkets quite often make losses on all those things. There's no health claim on broccoli or on plums or on milk. There's no health claim on steak. It's only the ultra processed things that you get marketed to you in. The Actomel is interesting as well, the immune support.”
2023-10-23 · The Diary of a CEO · The Junk Food Doctor: "This Food Is Worse Than Smoking!" & "This Diet Prevents 60% Of Disease!" - Chris Van Tulleken (Ultra-Processed People Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Marketing that this is a really, really healthy product. And I would say the evidence says that this falls into a category of foods that we actually know are associated with negative health outcomes.”
2023-10-23 · The Diary of a CEO · The Junk Food Doctor: "This Food Is Worse Than Smoking!" & "This Diet Prevents 60% Of Disease!" - Chris Van Tulleken (Ultra-Processed People Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So Breakfast Seals are really convenient. I mean, let me see the cheerio. So I think these These probably do meet these definition. So we've got things like palm oil, caramelized sugar syrup, colors, anatonorbixin, and an antioxidant. So this is ultra-processed. It'll have some fiber, you'll have it with whole milk. I don't want to demonize breakfast cereals. My kids eat breakfast cereals for breakfast, but it's not like eating porridge, which is just whole grains, or real bread. This is... And what you will find is if you give this to a kid compared to porridge, they will be able to eat much, much more of this. And there is that there's a lot of...”
2023-10-23 · The Diary of a CEO · The Junk Food Doctor: "This Food Is Worse Than Smoking!" & "This Diet Prevents 60% Of Disease!" - Chris Van Tulleken (Ultra-Processed People Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do because of the sugar tax. So it's almost impossible now to buy fizzy tax without sweetness So for kids, I try and not give any advice to anyone ever, but my kid's eat a lot of UPF, but they don't have fizzy drinks. I think fizzy drinks are really quite harmful across the board. So kids should just drink milk and water, milk if they can have it. Grown-ups. Do pretty well on milk and water if you drink milk.”
2023-10-23 · The Diary of a CEO · The Junk Food Doctor: "This Food Is Worse Than Smoking!" & "This Diet Prevents 60% Of Disease!" - Chris Van Tulleken (Ultra-Processed People Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Metabolically confusing and certainly aren't better than sugar, and yet we think of this as a health product. So that for me is the archetypal confused way of thinking about food. And what we also know is that when it comes to kids the age of my youngest, so the age of three, they are drinking on average one can of artificially sweetened drinks every single day. So we've taxed sugar, sugar has come out of our diet, we've seen no weight loss, no indication that it's helping health, and what we are doing is consuming huge numbers now of these artificial sweetness, which we also know affect our microbiome.”
2023-10-23 · The Diary of a CEO · The Junk Food Doctor: "This Food Is Worse Than Smoking!" & "This Diet Prevents 60% Of Disease!" - Chris Van Tulleken (Ultra-Processed People Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Natural flavorings. I mean Well Flavorings are flavorings. Flavorings should signal nutritional content. When you eat a tomato, it has flavor not for fun. It has flavor because it signals the nutritional content of the tomato. When you put flavorings out of context, even if you extract them from the tomato or the strawberry or the peach, it's very confusing for you physiologically. You have a very sophisticated internal system to link flavor molecules, which are broadly smell, and taste molecules, salt, sweet, bitter, sour, and some savory ones. Your body has a way of linking all that information with nutritional information that you get from your gut subconsciously. When you muddle it all up in a product like this, it's very confusing. The phosphoric acid will dissolve the minerals out of your bones as well as dissolving your teeth. So what we have here is a solution of flavorings and addictive drug, an acid that will leach stuff out of your bones and sweeteners that seem to be.”
2023-10-23 · The Diary of a CEO · The Junk Food Doctor: "This Food Is Worse Than Smoking!" & "This Diet Prevents 60% Of Disease!" - Chris Van Tulleken (Ultra-Processed People Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Loss, and there is an anxiety about aspartame cancer that I'm personally not in a big sweat about. There's some, there's some evidence, but not at normal dosage. Then we've got natural flavorings. We've got caffeine flavoring and addictive drug, and phosphoric acid and citric acid.”
2023-10-23 · The Diary of a CEO · The Junk Food Doctor: "This Food Is Worse Than Smoking!" & "This Diet Prevents 60% Of Disease!" - Chris Van Tulleken (Ultra-Processed People Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You eat more. The weird thing about sweeteners is they don't seem to help with weight loss at all. They may, some of them seem to be more metabolically harmful than sugar itself. Humans are quite good at eating sugar. When we lollipops, continuously as kids or have sugary drinks, it's not good for us. But human societies have for millennia existed with a huge amount of honey and refined carbs. So sugar we can handle, although we should reduce our intake. Sweeteners are quite weird because there are nutritional lie. You put sweet taste on the tongue, which says to your body sugar is coming, so maybe put up some insulin, maybe start preparing in other ways physiologically to receive refined carbohydrates. And when that refined carbohydrate, when the sugar never arrives, it seems to be physiologically confusing. So the World Health Organization now says sweetness aren't better than sugar when it comes to weight.”
2023-10-23 · The Diary of a CEO · The Junk Food Doctor: "This Food Is Worse Than Smoking!" & "This Diet Prevents 60% Of Disease!" - Chris Van Tulleken (Ultra-Processed People Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it may be on the It's optional, so who knows if we don't have any way in this country of describing either healthy food or unhealthy food other than these traffic lights. Anyway, this is a healthy food. Now, if we look at the ingredients on the Diet Coke, carbonated water, fine. Now, there's a color called caramel E150D. Caramel makes you think of your traditional, it's a French 19th century invention burned sugar, creme brulee. It's like it's a bit naughty, but it's fine. Caramel 150D has nothing to do with caramel. It is carbohydrate treated with a mixture of acids and heat to produce things that contain ammonium and sulfide. So it's a food additive color with no benefits, nothing to do with caramel. Artificial sweetness, aspartame and acid sulfame K. Now, sweeteners are tricky because we know sugar is harmful because it rots teeth and it promotes weight gain because it makes it.”
2023-10-23 · The Diary of a CEO · The Junk Food Doctor: "This Food Is Worse Than Smoking!" & "This Diet Prevents 60% Of Disease!" - Chris Van Tulleken (Ultra-Processed People Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, this is the way we describe whether a food is healthy or not in this country at the moment. And this system is quite influenced by the food industry. And it breaks all foods down into fat, saturated fat, sugars, and salt and says that, you know, those are the bad things and if a food is high in them, it'll have oranges and greens. So if you look at the cheerios, they're mostly on the front. It's on the front. It's optional, by the way. So it's not always on every packet, but the cheerios are oranges and greens. Now there is a baked in confusion to this because what do you do at a traffic light that's orange and green or red orange and green? Do you go? Do you stop? Is it on the Actamel?”
2023-10-23 · The Diary of a CEO · The Junk Food Doctor: "This Food Is Worse Than Smoking!" & "This Diet Prevents 60% Of Disease!" - Chris Van Tulleken (Ultra-Processed People Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The die coke is my favorite example because this is the ultimate health food according to the way we label food at the moment. It has four. Where's the camera?”
2023-10-23 · The Diary of a CEO · The Junk Food Doctor: "This Food Is Worse Than Smoking!" & "This Diet Prevents 60% Of Disease!" - Chris Van Tulleken (Ultra-Processed People Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So for a start, I have a slight unease. I'm going to talk about these products. I have a slight unease talking about any one product. The evidence applies to the category of food. And this kind of stuff, in a sense, I think these are such brilliant choices. This is the foundation of our diet. And one of the things that's happening at the moment is the food industry exploring painting me as a snob. Because I'm critiquing these sort of core things, you know, tins of beans with. I think this stuff is at the shallow end of the pool, in a way. It's not by any means the worst stuff, but in a way it presents the biggest moral hazard because we think it's so healthy. After the diet coke.”
2023-10-23 · The Diary of a CEO · The Junk Food Doctor: "This Food Is Worse Than Smoking!" & "This Diet Prevents 60% Of Disease!" - Chris Van Tulleken (Ultra-Processed People Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The food is put through for you like, almost a Darwinian evolutionary process where every single thing, every dial is tweaked on every product every few months, everything is adjusted from the sweet salt sugar ratios to the texture in the mouth to the color of the packet, and everything is dialed up to eleven so that things become irresistible. And maybe you don't live with this, but people who many people listening will recognize in themselves that there are products that they cannot stop eating. They fantasize about them, they think about them, and once they start eating them, they will consume five adult portions. And I've got a six-year-old and a three-year-old, and my six-year-old can eat five adult portions of any sugary breakfast cereal in about 20 minutes.”
2023-10-23 · The Diary of a CEO · The Junk Food Doctor: "This Food Is Worse Than Smoking!" & "This Diet Prevents 60% Of Disease!" - Chris Van Tulleken (Ultra-Processed People Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But the main thing is the way the foods are developed. So I spoke to so many people in the food industry who were all wonderful, by the way. You know, I've really enjoyed most of all talking to them. But the food scientists all said the same thing, that the products are generally put through a focus group. So you start with your box of cereal that you've been making for decades and you have formulation A, and then you make a new formulation, formulation B. You put it through the focus group. If the focus group eats box B quicker than box A, box B is the one that goes on the shelf because if they eat it 5% quicker, you'll sell the boxes 5% faster. And that's the financial indicator. And so it's not any one aspect of the food that's harmful so much as when the intention is to create products that people will use as much as possible, then you end up with addictive food.”
2023-10-23 · The Diary of a CEO · The Junk Food Doctor: "This Food Is Worse Than Smoking!" & "This Diet Prevents 60% Of Disease!" - Chris Van Tulleken (Ultra-Processed People Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The softness and the energy density means you consume them very quickly, and so essentially consume them before you become full. And so that's one of the ways they drive over excess eating. So if you like the laundry list of the ways in which the food harms us is softness, energy density, some direct harms from the additives, a lack of phytonutrients, so it doesn't contain much real food, and real food real plants and animals should have a great variety of molecules and chemicals that we don't understand very well, but vitamins from a plant seem to interact with you very differently from vitamins in an extract.”
2023-10-23 · The Diary of a CEO · The Junk Food Doctor: "This Food Is Worse Than Smoking!" & "This Diet Prevents 60% Of Disease!" - Chris Van Tulleken (Ultra-Processed People Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Would think, I think that is a very simple way. That's a straightforward way of thinking about it. The additives are not really the problem. So the problem, I would say, some of the additives we think are harmful. We've got some quite good research around some of the artificial sweeteners, some of the modified starches, xanthem gum, the emulsifiers, and some of the colourings and texture and we have some research that says the fact the food is mechanically processed so hard, it's generally very soft. So think of any ultra processed food you can, whether it's a burger from a fast food chain or a breakfast cereal or supermarket bread. Generally these calories are soft and their energy dense because they're dry and so dry food is important for shelf life.”
2023-10-23 · The Diary of a CEO · The Junk Food Doctor: "This Food Is Worse Than Smoking!" & "This Diet Prevents 60% Of Disease!" - Chris Van Tulleken (Ultra-Processed People Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Enormous value. And a lot of the ingredients we see in ultra processed food are waste products from old food processing. So the whey proteins we see in our nutritional powders. I mean, this was a waste product from dairying. It used to be spread on fields or fented cows. But now the value you add instead of it being used for fertilizer, the value you add when you turn it into a nutritional supplement is a thousand fold, probably more than a thousand fold citrus fiber. You'll see citrus fiber is an ingredient in a lot of bars. Sounds healthy, doesn't it? Like citrus fruit, fiber, what could be, and it probably is reasonably healthy. It's left over from the juice, the juicing and tinning industries where you have to get the peel off fruit. And if you put it through a set of chemical processes, you can extract the fiber, add it to the human food chain, and create enormous value. So the logic of ultra-processed food really...”
2023-10-23 · The Diary of a CEO · The Junk Food Doctor: "This Food Is Worse Than Smoking!" & "This Diet Prevents 60% Of Disease!" - Chris Van Tulleken (Ultra-Processed People Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is about using these commodity ingredients that I just listed, you know, commodity ingredients like soy, corn, rice, and a bit of meat, reducing them into powder form, basically. So if you grow corn, the market, I mean, you understand all this much better than me. You get money and finance. The market for cobs of corn, spread with butter and salt, is pretty limited. If you grow cobs of corn, you can sell a few of them, but if you can turn the rest of them into corn starch, which you can modify and turn it so it's like you can create any chemical property of that starch starch you want, you can turn it into corn oil and you can turn it into high fractose corn syrup. Suddenly you have the ingredients for every single food product on the planet. So the logic is to take your corn, break it into pastes and powders with an infinite shelf life, then recombine them with additives, texturize them, flavor them, put a brand on it, and then you can add just.”
2023-10-23 · The Diary of a CEO · The Junk Food Doctor: "This Food Is Worse Than Smoking!" & "This Diet Prevents 60% Of Disease!" - Chris Van Tulleken (Ultra-Processed People Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All of them, and they've all evolved in different ways. Same is true of French cuisine, rich in butter and red wine. The only diet that we've studied that really seems to bring health harms is an ultra-processed diet. So that is the American financialized industrial diet. So ultra processing”
2023-10-23 · The Diary of a CEO · The Junk Food Doctor: "This Food Is Worse Than Smoking!" & "This Diet Prevents 60% Of Disease!" - Chris Van Tulleken (Ultra-Processed People Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Food processing has shaped our jewels, our teeth, our guts. So compared to any animal of similar size, we have tiny little teeth, minuscule, fragile jaws, very short guts, because we've extended our digestive tracts out of our bodies and into our kitchens. We chop food rather than chewing it. We cook it rather than digesting it. So our food is pre-digested. So processed food is good. Tinning, canning, concentrating fermenting, salting, smoking, all these projects techniques were invented really by women over hundreds of thousands of years working in caves and huts and shelters and then kitchens. They produced modern food.”
2023-10-23 · The Diary of a CEO · The Junk Food Doctor: "This Food Is Worse Than Smoking!" & "This Diet Prevents 60% Of Disease!" - Chris Van Tulleken (Ultra-Processed People Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, broadly there are three types of food there's unprocessed or whole food which might be like an apple or an oyster or you can drink milk out of a cow you shouldn't because you get brucellosis but you can do it That's whole unprocessed food then there's processed food so there's butter so we can take whole milk we can process it into butter or cheese now we've been doing that so North African pastoralists started doing this in the Sahara region maybe seven eight thousand years ago started making dairy and if you can make butter you get all the vitamin fat soluble vitamins from milk you get very high calorie and it almost never goes off it's really long shelf life similarly cheese add a bit ferment it add some salt you get a long shelf life very nutritional product so those are processed foods and we've been eating processed foods for over a million years I mean humans are the only animals that have to process their foods you know”
2023-10-23 · The Diary of a CEO · The Junk Food Doctor: "This Food Is Worse Than Smoking!" & "This Diet Prevents 60% Of Disease!" - Chris Van Tulleken (Ultra-Processed People Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's. I don't mean it to sound malevolent. So the argument I've just made can sound a bit neo-Marxist or anti-growth or anti-capitalist. And I really don't mean it to sound like that, but it is important to understand the incentives within the system. And if the incentives are financial, you'll end up with ultra-processed food. So the logic of the food is the cheapest possible ingredients with the longest possible shelf life and maximum intellectual property.”
2023-10-23 · The Diary of a CEO · The Junk Food Doctor: "This Food Is Worse Than Smoking!" & "This Diet Prevents 60% Of Disease!" - Chris Van Tulleken (Ultra-Processed People Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Tens of thousands of different species of thing has now because of the pressures of commercial efficiency become reduced to a very small number of companies with enormous power producing making a very small number of food products and needing to generate intellectual property.”
2023-10-23 · The Diary of a CEO · The Junk Food Doctor: "This Food Is Worse Than Smoking!" & "This Diet Prevents 60% Of Disease!" - Chris Van Tulleken (Ultra-Processed People Author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT