YouSaid · the spoken record

Dr. Chris Van Tulleken

lines on the record: 21
first: 2025-07-04
most recent: 2025-07-04
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“I don't think it meets. So food is very poorly defined. We don't have a working definition of food sort of in law, but I think food is substance that you eat for nourishment. And it should be about nourishment culturally, socially, personally, psychologically, as well as physically. And these products are developed to generate financialized growth for institutional investors. They're not made by people who love you, who want to nourish you. And so I don't think it meets what I think is a useful cultural definition of food. I think it's very useful to not think of them as food. And I don't think a mixture of coloring addictive drugs and phosphoric acid could be called food in any sense of the word. It doesn't have nutrition. It only has things that will, we're pretty sure that almost every ingredient does you harm in some way. So I don't see how that could be called food. It's a way of commoditizing.”
2025-07-04 · The Diary of a CEO · Most Replayed Moment: The Truth Behind "Healthy" Food Labels - Dr. Chris Van Tulleken · 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 So this is food that in the senses is engineered to be consumed to excess.”
2025-07-04 · The Diary of a CEO · Most Replayed Moment: The Truth Behind "Healthy" Food Labels - Dr. Chris Van Tulleken · 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 serving for you. Now a 30 gram serving is a handful like that. It's one big spoonful. 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.”
2025-07-04 · The Diary of a CEO · Most Replayed Moment: The Truth Behind "Healthy" Food Labels - Dr. Chris Van Tulleken · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You would, but give me the cocoa pop. So the cocoa pops. 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.”
2025-07-04 · The Diary of a CEO · Most Replayed Moment: The Truth Behind "Healthy" Food Labels - Dr. Chris Van Tulleken · 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.”
2025-07-04 · The Diary of a CEO · Most Replayed Moment: The Truth Behind "Healthy" Food Labels - Dr. Chris Van Tulleken · 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 again, we're pretty sure that I'm conscious who I'm talking to here. I probably have to tread a bit carefully”
2025-07-04 · The Diary of a CEO · Most Replayed Moment: The Truth Behind "Healthy" Food Labels - Dr. Chris Van Tulleken · 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 this way because there's enough money to do it. The actumel's interesting as well. The immune support.”
2025-07-04 · The Diary of a CEO · Most Replayed Moment: The Truth Behind "Healthy" Food Labels - Dr. Chris Van Tulleken · 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.”
2025-07-04 · The Diary of a CEO · Most Replayed Moment: The Truth Behind "Healthy" Food Labels - Dr. Chris Van Tulleken · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So Breakfast Seals are really convenient. I mean, let me see the cheerios. So I think these So these probably do meet these do meet the 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 fibre, 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...”
2025-07-04 · The Diary of a CEO · Most Replayed Moment: The Truth Behind "Healthy" Food Labels - Dr. Chris Van Tulleken · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They do because of the sugar tax, so it's almost impossible now to buy fizzy tax without sweet drinks without sweetness. So for kids, I try and not give any advice to anyone ever, but my kids 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.”
2025-07-04 · The Diary of a CEO · Most Replayed Moment: The Truth Behind "Healthy" Food Labels - Dr. Chris Van Tulleken · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 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.”
2025-07-04 · The Diary of a CEO · Most Replayed Moment: The Truth Behind "Healthy" Food Labels - Dr. Chris Van Tulleken · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Natural flavorings. I mean, that's good. 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. Very confusing for you physiologically.”
2025-07-04 · The Diary of a CEO · Most Replayed Moment: The Truth Behind "Healthy" Food Labels - Dr. Chris Van Tulleken · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And there is an anxiety about aspartame cancer that I'm personally not in a big sweat about. 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.”
2025-07-04 · The Diary of a CEO · Most Replayed Moment: The Truth Behind "Healthy" Food Labels - Dr. Chris Van Tulleken · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You eat more. The weird thing about sweetness 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 eat 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.”
2025-07-04 · The Diary of a CEO · Most Replayed Moment: The Truth Behind "Healthy" Food Labels - Dr. Chris Van Tulleken · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it may be 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 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.”
2025-07-04 · The Diary of a CEO · Most Replayed Moment: The Truth Behind "Healthy" Food Labels - Dr. Chris Van Tulleken · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, this is the way we describe whether 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 for 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?”
2025-07-04 · The Diary of a CEO · Most Replayed Moment: The Truth Behind "Healthy" Food Labels - Dr. Chris Van Tulleken · 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?”
2025-07-04 · The Diary of a CEO · Most Replayed Moment: The Truth Behind "Healthy" Food Labels - Dr. Chris Van Tulleken · 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 to talk 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. Because 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 flavoring or supermarket bread, fish fingers. 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.”
2025-07-04 · The Diary of a CEO · Most Replayed Moment: The Truth Behind "Healthy" Food Labels - Dr. Chris Van Tulleken · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. And so part of it is the takeover of the food system from being a system where people would grow a lot of their own food, make food at home, they buy 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.”
2025-07-04 · The Diary of a CEO · Most Replayed Moment: The Truth Behind "Healthy" Food Labels - Dr. Chris Van Tulleken · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There are two answers to that. One, the sort of proximate reason is the invention of ultra-processed food. So the industrialization of food supply. You can talk about why that happened in a lot of different ways. Part of it was to 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 workplace 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.”
2025-07-04 · The Diary of a CEO · Most Replayed Moment: The Truth Behind "Healthy" Food Labels - Dr. Chris Van Tulleken · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 if you give people technical knowledge and you give people income and opportunity, most people want to be healthy and live good lives.”
2025-07-04 · The Diary of a CEO · Most Replayed Moment: The Truth Behind "Healthy" Food Labels - Dr. Chris Van Tulleken · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT