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Chris Van Tulleken

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116
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2023-10-23
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2023-10-23
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  1. “would grow a lot of their own food, make food at home, they're buying ingredients from local shops, to a small number of companies supplying food. So now 75% of the calories that are consumed globally come from six companies. There are about 15 to 20 companies that make most of the food we eat in the UK that process the food. So we've got a very small number of agribusiness producers that make more or less 12 things that we eat broadly pigs, cows and chickens. Those are our meats. We don't really eat other meat, maybe a bit of lamb, maybe, goat, maybe goose, not really, duck, perhaps. So we eat really three meats and then our main sources of calories come from four or five crops corn, rice, wheat, soy, palm, bit of sunflower. So the human diet which should encompass thousands.”

    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

  2. “Why exactly it took over is the subject of a lot of the research I'm doing at the moment. So now I work much more with economists than nutritionists. And what we see is the financialization of the food industry. So the primary determinants of almost every action that happens in almost every food company that supplies, say, 90% of our calories, all the indicators are financial. They're not to do with public health. And so we can use financial indicators. We can use financial research to show that the food industry does these things like buy cheap debt, use that to do share buybacks rather than generating value. We can show that they vote down activist investors will vote institutional investors, will vote down public health proposals at shareholder meetings. And so part of it is the takeover of the food system from being a system where people”

    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

  3. “Are two answers to that one, the sort of proximate reason is the invention of ultra-processed food. So the industrialization of food supply. And you can talk about why that happened in a lot of different ways. Part of it was to, you know, a booming population post-war. And these products were extremely convenient. They allowed women to continue to be in the workplace. Of course, women had entered the warplace in the war. So there were a lot of things that were immediately appealing about these products, TV dinners, Swanson TV dinners appear in the 50s. And by the time of the 70s, these products had become very widespread. So the same thing we were a decade behind in the UK. But this stuff is now our national diet.”

    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

  4. “So, my feeling is the only thing that's interesting to talk about is the structure of the society around us. And we have really good evidence that when you simply give people money, we've done this, this research has been done by economists, by doctors, by social scientists. When you give people money, they make smart choices. Rich people don't eat bad food because they don't want to eat bad food. And people without money eat bad food because they're forced to eat bad food. And the cognitive dissonance that you and I were talking about quite often we will find people with low incomes making quite cogent arguments about the food that they eat appearing to side with the companies that are predating on them because otherwise how could you live with this dissonance in your life? Otherwise you're just a powerless victim of transnational food corporations. So I have almost no interest in personal responsibility. I think you if you give people technical knowledge.”

    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

  5. “Broadly, your ability to resist a marshmallow age four predicts the household you're from, you might be from a low education, low income household doesn't predict anything else. So that's one way of looking at willpower, and there's lots of other evidence. The other thing is that if we look at weight in the mid-1970s, and this is American government data, there was a sudden inflection in weight gain where the obesity pandemic took off around 1975. And you look at a graph, it's bumbling along, suddenly everyone goes up. When I say everyone, black, white, Hispanic, men, women, you know, five-year-olds, fifty-year-olds, ninety-year-olds, everyone starts gaining weight. So unless you're going to propose when it comes to weight gain, that there was some failure of moral responsibility in young Hispanic men and older black women and middle aged white people. You know, that just doesn't stack up. What changed was the food environment?”

    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

  6. “Research, and you will know some of this. The research is quite nuanced, but broadly it serves as a proxy for poverty. So the original marshmallow experiment, which I think you've talked about, where you offer a child, a marshmallow and say, you know, we'll give you another one if we come back in five minutes and you haven't eaten this one. That experiment, those children who were unable to resist the marshmallow, went on to really suffer in life. They had much across all kinds of different indicators. Their lives were much more troubled. They had lower achievement economically and socially. What it turned out is when you adjusted for maternal education, the effect went away. In other words, the kids who were taking the marshmallow were from poor households, and they were making a sensible choice. They were taking an opportunity when it arose, because if you come from”

    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

  7. “I think we have really, really good evidence That personal responsibility, these arguments around will parent personal responsibility are morally scientifically and economically redundant. They have no value. So when it comes to population health, there are loads of different ways we can argue this. If we look at willpower, insofar as it's ever been operationalized for research, and there's not a huge amount.”

    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

  8. “And so, at the heart of the book is this idea that nagging people generally pushes them toward doing things that are harmful. It generally makes them more likely to do the thing you're nagging them about. And I've tried to engage with these products when we come to individual solutions. I've tried to engage with ultra-processed food as an addictive substance, a substance that I was addicted 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

  9. “But that nagging people is really, really harmful. So I'd had a very toxic relationship with my brother. And in fact, the whole family, we're very close family, but we had, for the better part of a decade, been nagging him to lose weight. And I took him to see a behavioral change expert who said to me, I don't need to speak to Sand. I need to speak to you. And I said, no, no, he's the fat one. You've got to speak to him. He said, no, you are the problem. For your brother to lose weight will be to lose an argument that's been a decade long with you. You are the barrier. And so because I'd been nagging him, I owned his problem and he didn't own 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

  10. “I'm an identical twin. I've got a brother who lived with obesity for a very long time. And I would, my weight would fluctuate. I'm insulated by privilege, by my surroundings, by education, but I'm always on the brink of weight gain. And I recognized in myself that I lived with an addiction to many ultra-processed products. And my brother particularly did. And so at the core of the book is Was this sort of moment of understanding where I there are several sort of fulcrums in the book, I suppose, but two of the key elements are, first of all, for many of us ultra-processed food isn't just harmful, it is addictive, and it makes all the criteria for addiction and it has, there's so much evidence that for some people these products are as addictive as tobacco products, drugs of abuse, alcohol, gambling.”

    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

  11. “Team in Brazil, and much the best work on this stuff has been done by teams in Central and South America because what they saw in those countries, whereas this has crept up on us in the UK, in places like Mexico and Colombia and Brazil, obisti was essentially unheard of, and within a decade it went to being the dominant public health problem. In towns in Mexico, you wouldn't know anyone who was living with obesity, and within a decade everyone would know someone who'd had an amputation for type 2 diabetes. The only thing that had changed was the influx of, broadly an American diet, industrially processed foods. So the definition was invented two thousand nine, twenty ten, and we've had a decade of evidence now that is very clear that it is ultra processed food that is responsible not just for pandemic weight gain and obesity, but also for a long list of other health problems, including early death.”

    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

  12. “It matters to all of us because for a very long time we've been incredibly confused about what to eat. And we've called the foods that harm us junk food and processed food and high-fat salt sugar food. And we've not had a way of labeling foods even as a pandemic of diet-related disease has taken over the world, really. And this is particularly true now in low-income countries and particularly true with low-income people living in the UK. So poor diet, which means a diet high in ultra-processed food, has overtaken tobacco as the leading cause of early death on planet Earth. For humans, for the animals we farm, and for wild animals, of course, because ultra-processed food is produced by a food system that is the leading cause of cause of loss of biodiversity, the second leading cause of carbon emissions, and the leading cause of plastic pollution. About twelve years ago, the definition was developed to describe a Western industrial American diet.”

    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

  13. “Are two very big problems with that, and this is very good robust science. The first is that, and if people are listening and they want to lose weight, the evidence says 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

  14. “I have almost no interest in personal responsibility. This is about social justice. People without money, they're forced to eat bad food. If you've got rid of poverty, you would get rid of around 60% of the problem of diet-related disease.”

    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

  15. “They are controlling our food and what we eat. Engineered to be consumed to excess, whether it's a burger from a fast food chain or a supermarket bread, everything is adjusted so that things become irresistible. And a pandemic of diet-related diseases has taken over the world. One in five people in this country get 80% of their calories from ultra-processed food. Poor diet has overtaken tobacco as the leading cause of early death on planet Earth. And by the age of five, kids in this country will be that much shorter, 9 cm compared to other countries. And it is all diet. Now you can't stunt a body by 9 centimetres and not also stunt them intellectually.”

    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

  16. “I ate a diet that's very normal for a British purse. I gained so much weight. Not in this vicious cycle of overeating, anxiety, sleeplessness, scanned my brain, and if I continued for a year, I would have Dr. Chris Van Tulkenken.”

    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