00:00:00
I ate a diet that's very normal for a British person I gained so much weight got in this vicious cycle of overeating
00:00:06
anxiety sleeplessness scanned my brain and if I'd continued for a year I would
00:00:11
have Dr Chris Van toin doctor researcher and a b award-winning broadcaster Chris
00:00:17
forensically examines the effects Ultra processed food have on us all 75% of the
00:00:22
calories that are consumed globally come from six companies a food mafia they are controlling our food and what we eat
00:00:29
engineers to be consumed to excess whether it's a burger from a fast food chain or a supermarket bread everything
00:00:35
is adjusted so that Things become irresistible and a pandemic of diet related diseases has taken over the
00:00:41
world one in five people in this country get 80% of their calories from ultral processed food poor diet has overtaken
00:00:47
tobacco as the leading cause of early death on planet Earth and for the age of five kids in this country will be that
00:00:53
much shorter 9 cm compared to other countries and it is all diet now you can't stunt a body by 9 cm and not also
00:01:01
stunt them intellectually why don't we just all make better choices I have almost no interest in personal
00:01:06
responsibility this is about social justice and people without money they're forced to eat bad food if you got rid of
00:01:12
poverty you would get rid of around 60% of the problem of diet related disease what about the people that say this is
00:01:17
just about calories in calorie out there are two very big problems with that and this is very good robust science the
00:01:23
first is that and if people are listening and they want to lose weight the evidence
00:01:28
says I just want to start this episode with a message of thanks a thank you to
00:01:34
everybody that Tunes in to listen to this podcast by doing so you've enabled me to live out my dream but also for
00:01:40
many members of our team to live out their dreams too it's one of the greatest privileges I could never have dreamed of or imagined in my life to get
00:01:47
to do this to get to learn from these people to get to have these conversations to get to interrogate them from a very selfish perspective trying
00:01:53
to solve problems I have in my life so I feel like I owe you a huge thank you for being here and for listening to these
00:01:59
episodes and for making this platform what it is can I ask you a favor I can't tell you how much um you can change the
00:02:05
course of this podcast the the course of the guests were able to invite to the show and to the course of everything
00:02:10
that we do here just by doing one simple thing and that simple thing is hitting that subscribe button helps this channel
00:02:16
more than I could ever explain the guests on this platform are incredible because so many of you have hit that
00:02:21
button and I know when we think about what we want to do together over the next year on this show a lot of it is
00:02:27
going to be fueled by the amount of you that are subscribed and that tune into this show every week so thank you let's
00:02:33
keep doing this and I can't wait to see what this year brings for this show for us as a community and for this
00:02:38
[Music]
00:02:44
platform Dr Chris vanel you wrote a book ultr processed
00:02:52
people I know from firsthand experience that writing books is a painful experience it takes a long long time to
00:02:59
do it and you have an extensive experience across medicine um across
00:03:05
different sort of scientific disciplines why does this book and this
00:03:10
subject matter matter to society and maybe even more importantly why did it
00:03:16
matter enough to you it matters to all of us because for a very long time we've
00:03:22
been incredibly confused about what to eat and we've called the foods that
00:03:29
harmless junk food and processed food and high fat salt sugar food and we've we've not had a way of labeling Foods
00:03:36
even as a pandemic of diet related disease has take taken over the world really and this is particularly true now
00:03:42
in low-income countries and particularly true with low-income people living in the UK so poor diet which means a diet
00:03:49
high in ultra-processed food has overtaken tobacco as the leading cause of early death on planet Earth for
00:03:55
humans for the animals we farm and for wild animals of course because ultr
00:04:01
processed food is produced by a food system that is the leading cost of cause of loss of biodiversity the second
00:04:07
leading cause of carbon emissions and the leading cause of plastic pollution so about 12 years ago the definition was
00:04:15
developed to describe a western industrial American
00:04:20
diet and it was done by a team in Brazil and much of the best work on this stuff has been done by teams in Central and
00:04:25
South America because what they saw in those countries whereas this is crept up on in the UK in places like Mexico and
00:04:32
Colombia and Brazil obesity was essentially unheard of and within a decade it went to being the dominant
00:04:38
public health problem in towns in Mexico you wouldn't know anyone who was living with obesity and within a decade
00:04:44
everyone would know someone who'd had an amputation for type 2 diabetes the only thing that had changed
00:04:50
was the influx of broadly an American diet industrially processed foods so the
00:04:56
definition was invented 2009 20 2010 and we've had a
00:05:01
decade of evidence now that is very clear that it is ultr processed food
00:05:07
that is responsible not just for pandemic weight gain and obesity but also for a long list of other health
00:05:12
problems including early death why did this matter so much to you what is the personal reason here
00:05:20
I've I'm an identical twin I've got a a brother who lived with obesity for a very long time and I would my weight
00:05:28
would fluctuate I'm I'm insulated by by privilege by my surroundings by education but I'm always on the brink of
00:05:34
weight gain and I recognized in myself uh that I lived with an addiction to many ultr processed products and my
00:05:41
brother particularly did and so at the core of the book
00:05:46
is it was this sort of moment of understanding where I there are several
00:05:51
sort of fulcrums in the book I suppose but but two of the key elements are first of all for many of us ultr
00:05:57
processed food isn't just harmful it is addictive and it makes all the criteria for addiction and it has there's so much
00:06:02
evidence that for some people these products are as addictive as tobacco products drugs of abuse alcohol
00:06:09
gambling but that nagging people is really really harmful so I'd had a very toxic relationship with my brother and
00:06:15
in fact our the whole family we're very close family but we had for the better part of a decade been nagging him to
00:06:21
lose weight and I took him to see a behavioral change expert who said to me
00:06:26
I don't need to speak to to sand I need to speak to you I said no no he's the fat one you got to speak to him he said
00:06:32
no you are the problem for your brother to lose weight will be to lose an argument that's been a decad long with
00:06:38
you you are the barrier and so because I'd been nagging him I owned his problem
00:06:44
and he didn't own it and so at the heart of the book is this this idea that nagging people
00:06:51
generally pushes them toward doing things that that are harmful it generally makes them more likely to do
00:06:56
the thing you're you're naging them about and I've tried to engage with these products when we come to individual Solutions I've tried to
00:07:03
engage with ultrapress food as an addictive substance a substance that I was addicted to what is the balance
00:07:08
there between personal responsibility and being a victim of circumstance in
00:07:15
the in the sort of food landscape and society that we live in because there's a there's obviously been a huge debate
00:07:21
around obesity and and weight you know there's one school of thought maybe over on the more extreme side that says just
00:07:27
get out there and you know make better choices in your life and go I don't know go for a run or something and then
00:07:33
there's another school of thought that says weight gain and obesity are a byproduct of genetic the our genes and
00:07:41
the environment we live in what is the truth in your view and in the case of your brother I think we have really
00:07:47
really good evidence that personal responsibility that these arguments around will parent
00:07:54
personal responsibility are morally scientifically and economically
00:07:59
redundant they they have no value so when it comes to population
00:08:06
Health there are loads of different ways we can argue this if we look at
00:08:11
willpower in so far as it's ever been operationalized for research and there's not a huge
00:08:17
amount the research and you will know some of this the research is quite nuanced but broadly it serves as a proxy
00:08:23
for poverty so the original marshmallow experiment which I think you've talked about where you you offer a child a
00:08:31
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
00:08:36
that experiment those children who were unable to resist the marshmallow went on to really suffer in
00:08:44
life they had much uh across all kinds of different indicators their lives were much more troubled they had lower
00:08:49
achievement economically and and socially what it turned out is when you adjusted for maternal education the
00:08:55
effect went away in other words the kids who were taking the marshmallow were from poor households and they were
00:09:01
making a sensible choice they were taking an opportunity when it arose because if you come from a situation of
00:09:09
uh deprivation or disadvantage often things that are promised never materialize so once you you controlled
00:09:16
for that in the studies broadly your ability to resist a marshmallow age4
00:09:21
predicts the household you're from you might be from a low education low income household doesn't predict anything else
00:09:27
so that's one way of looking at willp Power and there's lots of other evidence the other thing is that if we look at
00:09:32
weight in the mid 1970s and this is um you know American government data there
00:09:38
was a sudden inflection in weight gain where that the Obesity pandemic took off around 1975 and you look at a graph it's
00:09:44
bumbling along it's suddenly everyone goes up when I say everyone black white hispanic men women you know 5ye olds 50y
00:09:52
olds 90y olds everyone starts gaining weight so unless you're going to propose
00:09:57
when it comes to weight gain that there was some failure of moral responsibility
00:10:02
in young hispanic men and older black women and middle-aged white
00:10:09
people you know that just doesn't Stack Up what changed was the food environment so my feeling is the only thing that is
00:10:16
interesting to talk about is the structure of the society around us and
00:10:21
and we have really good evidence that when when you simply give people money we've done this this research has been
00:10:26
done by economists by doctors by social scientists when you give people money they make smart choices rich people
00:10:33
don't eat bad food because they don't want to eat bad food and people without money eat bad food because they're
00:10:39
forced to eat bad food and the the cognitive dissonance that you and I were talking about quite often we will find
00:10:45
people with low incomes making quite cogent arguments about the food that they eat appearing to side with the
00:10:52
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
00:10:58
of of transnational food corporations so I I have almost no interest in personal
00:11:04
responsibility I think you if you give people technical knowledge and you give people income and opportunity most
00:11:11
people want to be healthy and live good lives 1970 the food environment
00:11:16
changes can you tell me exactly how the food environment changed that caused multiple demographics
00:11:23
to to to gain weight there are two answers to that one the the sort of
00:11:28
approximate reason is the invention of ultra-processed food so the industrialization of of food supply you
00:11:34
can you can talk about why that happened in a lot of different ways part of it was to you know a a booming population
00:11:41
post-war uh and these products were extremely convenient they allowed women to continue to be in the workplace of
00:11:47
course women had entered the war entered the workplace in the war so there were a lot of things that were immediately
00:11:52
appealing about these products TV dinners Swanson TV dinners appear in the in the 50s and by the time of the s
00:11:59
these products had become very widespread so in the same thing we were a decade behind in the UK but this this
00:12:05
stuff is now our national diet why exactly it took over is the subject of a lot of the research I'm
00:12:11
doing at the moment so now I work much more with economists the nutritionists
00:12:16
and what we see is the financialization of the food industry so the primary uh determinance of almost
00:12:25
every action that happens in almost every food company that supplies say 90% of our calories all the indicators are
00:12:32
Financial they're not to do with public health and so we can use Financial indicators we can use Financial research
00:12:38
to to show that the food industry does these things like buy cheap debt use that to do uh share BuyBacks rather than
00:12:47
generating value we can show that they vote down uh activist investors will vote institutional investors we'll vote
00:12:53
down Public Health proposals at uh shareholder meetings and so part of it
00:12:58
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
00:13:05
they buy ingredients from local shops to a small number of companies supplying food so now uh 75% of the calories that
00:13:13
are consumed globally come from six companies there are about 15 to 20
00:13:18
companies that make most of the food we eat in the UK that that primary that
00:13:24
process the food so we've got a very small number of Agri business produc juers that make more or less 12 things
00:13:31
that you know we eat broadly pigs cows and chickens those are our Meats we
00:13:37
don't really eat other meat maybe a bit of lamb maybe goat maybe Goose not really duck perhaps so we eat really
00:13:44
three meats and then our main sources of calories come from four or five crops
00:13:49
corn rice wheat soy Palm bit of sunflower so the human diet which should
00:13:56
Encompass thousands perhaps tens tens of thousands of different species of thing has now because of the pressures of of
00:14:04
commercial efficiency become reduced to a very small number of companies with enormous power um producing making a
00:14:12
very small number of food products and needing to generate intellectual property it's kind of like sounds like a
00:14:19
mafia of sorts like a food Mafia I'm going to let you say that yeah
00:14:25
well [ __ ] no don't let me say it don't want them coming for me um I think it's I don't mean it to sound
00:14:31
malevolent so the argument I've just made can sound a bit neo- Marxist or
00:14:36
anti-growth or antic capitalist and I I really don't mean it to sound like that but it is important to understand the
00:14:42
incentives within the system and if the incentives are Financial you'll end up with ultra processed food so the logic
00:14:48
of the food is the cheapest possible ingredients with the longest possible shelf life and maximum intellectual
00:14:54
property what is ultr processed food so broadly there are three types of food
00:15:01
there's unprocessed a whole food which might be like an apple or an oyster or you can drink milk out of a cow you
00:15:08
shouldn't because you get brucelosis but you can do it that's whole unprocessed food then there's processed food so
00:15:15
there's uh butter so we can take whole milk we can process it into butter or cheese now we've been doing that so
00:15:21
North African pastoralists started doing this in the Sahara region maybe 7 8,000
00:15:26
years ago started making Dairy and if you can make butter you get all the vitam fat soluble vitamins uh from
00:15:33
milk you get very high calorie and it almost never goes off it's really long shelf life similarly cheese add a bit
00:15:39
ferment it add some salt you get a long shelf life very nutritional product so those are processed foods and we've been
00:15:46
eating processed foods for over a million years I mean humans are the only animals that have to process their Foods
00:15:53
we it you know food processing has shaped our Jaws our teeth our guts so compared to any animal of similar size
00:16:00
we have tiny little teeth minuscule fragile Jaws very short guts because we've extended our digestive tracts out
00:16:08
of our bodies and into our kitchens we chop food rather than chewing it we cook it rather than uh digesting it so our
00:16:14
food is is pre-digested so processed food is good tinning canning
00:16:19
concentrating fermenting salting smoking all these projects techniques were invented really by women over hundreds
00:16:26
of thousands of years working in cave and huts and shelters and then kitchens they produced modern food and diets from
00:16:34
the high Arctic to you know sea mamal diets from the high Arctic pescatarian
00:16:39
diets in East Asia vegan diets of South Asia any traditional diet you point to
00:16:45
is basically associated with good health all of them they've all evolved in different ways same is true of French
00:16:51
cuisine rich in butter and red wine the only diet that we've studied that really
00:16:56
seems to bring Health harms is an ult ultr processed diet so that is the American financialized industrial diet
00:17:02
so ultr processing is about using these
00:17:08
commodity ingredients that I just listed you know commodity ingredients like soy corn rice and a bit of meat reducing
00:17:14
them into powder form basically so if you grow corn the market I mean you
00:17:20
understand all this much better than me you you get money in finance the market for cobs of corn spread with butter and
00:17:25
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
00:17:31
corn starch which you can modify and turn it so it's like you can create any chemical property that starch you want
00:17:38
you can turn it into corn oil and you can turn it into high fructose corn syrup suddenly you have the ingredients
00:17:44
for every single food product on the planet so the logic is to take your corn
00:17:50
break it into pastes and powders with an infinite shelf life then recombine them with additives texturize them flavor
00:17:57
them put aown brand on it and then you can add just enormous value and a lot of the ingredients we see in ultr processed
00:18:04
food are waste products from old food processing so whey what the Whey
00:18:09
proteins we see in our nutritional powders I mean this was a waste product from dairying you know we used to be
00:18:14
spread on fields or fed to cows but now the value you add instead of it being
00:18:20
used for fertilizer the value you add when you turn it into a nutritional supplement is a thousandfold probably
00:18:26
more than a thousandfold um Citrus fiber you'll see Citrus fiber is an ingredient in a lot of bars sounds healthy doesn't
00:18:32
it like it's um you know citrus fruit fiber what could be and it probably is reasonably healthy it's left over from
00:18:39
the juice the juicing and tinning Industries where you have to get the
00:18:44
peel off fruit and if you put it through a set of chemical processes you can extract the fiber add it to the human
00:18:50
food chain and create enormous value so the logic of ultr processed food really
00:18:55
is about creating products with intellectual property that use the cheapest ingredients you can that will
00:19:02
last for a long time and from what I understood there the that last process s
00:19:08
step three so you had Whole Foods then you had processed foods then you had Ultra processed foods and in the ultra
00:19:13
processed foods category what they're doing is taking the good stuff out and putting some bad stuff in is that a
00:19:19
simple way to think about it I would think I think that is a very simple way that's a straightforward way of thinking
00:19:25
about it the additives are not really the problem so the problem I would say
00:19:33
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
00:19:40
uh zanam gum um the emulsifiers and some of the colorings and textur and then we
00:19:46
have some research that says the fact the food is is mechanically processed so
00:19:52
hard it's generally very soft so think of any ultr processed food you can whether it's a a burger from a fast food chain or a bref bref cereal or
00:19:58
Supermarket bread um uh generally these calories are soft and and they're energy
00:20:05
dense because they're dry and so dry frood is important for shelf life the
00:20:10
softness and the energy density means you consume them very quickly and so you essentially consume them before you
00:20:16
become full and so that's one of the ways they drive over cons excess eating so so if if you like the laundry list of
00:20:24
the ways in which the food harms us is softness energy density some direct
00:20:30
harms from the additives a lack of phytonutrients so it doesn't contain much real food and real food real plants
00:20:39
and animals should have a great variety of molecules and chemicals that we don't understand very well but vitamins from a
00:20:45
plant seem to interact with you very differently from than vitamins in an extract but the main thing is the way
00:20:52
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 I I've really enjoyed most of all
00:20:59
talking to them but the food scientists all said the same thing that the products are generally put through um a
00:21:05
focus group so you start with your box of cereal that you've been making for for decades and you have formulation a
00:21:12
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
00:21:20
that goes on the Shelf because if they eat it 5% quicker you'll sell the boxes 5% faster and that's that's the
00:21:25
financial indicator and so it's not any one aspect of the food that's harmful so
00:21:31
much as when the intention is to create products that people will use as much as
00:21:37
possible then you end up with addictive food interesting it Evol the food is put
00:21:42
through if you like a almost a darwinian evolutionary process where every single thing every dial is tweaked on every
00:21:48
product every few months everything is adjusted from the sweet salt sugar ratios to the texture in the mouth to
00:21:55
the color of the packet and everything is DED up to 11 so that Things become irresistible and you maybe you don't
00:22:02
live with this but people who many people listening will recognize in themselves that there are products that
00:22:10
they cannot stop eating they fantasize about them they think about them and once they start eating them they will
00:22:16
consume five adult portions and my I've got a six-year-old and a three-year-old and my six-year-old can eat five adult
00:22:23
portions of any sugary breakfast cereal in about 20 minutes I brought some food
00:22:29
along with me today I'm looking at it cuz I wanted to get distracting I wanted to get your opinion
00:22:35
on it so I brought um a group of food products on the left here now these are
00:22:41
things that I I think growing up I thought were good yeah
00:22:48
so you're very bold with these Brands I mean you're really limiting sponsorship opportunities well you
00:22:54
know you know I do think about that sometimes but I also they don't really care I I think like I'm in The Pursuit
00:23:00
Of Truth here so much of why I do this is to educate myself and I I think if I educate myself then I'll help educate
00:23:07
other people that's why I'm also okay being a total idiot on this subject matter because that is the truth so here
00:23:13
I've got four products that are typically seen as being quite healthy breakfast cereal Cheerios I grew
00:23:20
up thinking good for me um actal good for me Diet
00:23:25
Coke great cuz there's no sugar in there and then this is whole grain whole grain bread 50% of
00:23:34
your daily whole grain in just two slices great perfect so for a start I have a slight
00:23:41
une EAS I am going to talk about these products I have a slight une talking about any one product the evidence
00:23:46
applies to the category of food and this kind of stuff in a sense I think you're ABS these are such brilliant
00:23:53
choices because this is the foundation of our diet and one of the things that's happening at the moment is is the food
00:23:59
industry exploring painting me as a snob because I'm I'm critiquing these
00:24:04
sort of core things you know tins of beans with flavoring or Supermarket bread fish
00:24:11
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
00:24:18
a way it presents the biggest moral hazard because we think it's so healthy can I have the diet coke y so Diet Coke
00:24:25
is my is my favorite example because this is the Ultimate Health Food
00:24:31
according to the way we label food at the moment it has four where's the camera it's all green on the um it's
00:24:37
four green traffic lights right what what does what do they call that that traffic light system on the so this is the way we describe healthy whether a
00:24:44
food is healthy or not in this country at the moment and this system is quite influenced by the food industry and it
00:24:49
breaks all foods down into fat sat saturated fat sugars and salt and says
00:24:55
that you know if those are the bad things and if a food is behind them it'll it'll have oranges and greens so
00:25:00
if you look at the Cheerios they're most they're mostly on the front it's on the front it's optional by the way so it's
00:25:07
not always on every packet but the Cheerios are oranges and greens yeah now
00:25:12
part there is a baked in confusion for this because what do you do at a traffic light that's orange and green or red
00:25:18
orange and green do you go do you stop is it on the ACL is it is it on it's not
00:25:23
on there no I couldn't see it on there it maybe on the bottom
00:25:30
it's optional so who knows if you know we we don't we don't have any way in
00:25:36
this country of describing either healthy food or unhealthy food other than these traffic lights anyway this is
00:25:42
a healthy food now if we look at the ingredients on the diet coke carbonated water fine now there's a color called
00:25:47
caramel e150d caramel makes you think of you traditional it's it's a French 19th
00:25:53
century invention burned sugar Creme Brule it's like it's a bit naughty but it's fine caramel e150d has nothing to
00:25:59
do with caramel it is um carbohydrate treated with a mixture of acids and and
00:26:04
uh and heat to produce uh things that contain ammonium and sulfite so it's
00:26:09
it's it's a food additive color um with no no benefits nothing to do with caramel um artificial sweeteners
00:26:15
aspartame and asame K now sweeteners are tricky because we know sugar is harmful
00:26:22
because it rots teeth and it promotes weight gain because it makes you eat more the weird thing about sweetness is
00:26:28
they don't seem to help with weight loss at all they may some of them seem to be
00:26:33
more metabolically harmful than sugar itself humans are quite good at eating sugar when we eat lollipops continuous
00:26:41
continuously as kids or have sugary drinks it's not good for us but human societies have for Millennia existed
00:26:48
with a huge amount of honey and refined carbs so sugar we can handle although we should reduce our intake sweeteners are
00:26:55
quite weird because they're a nutritional lie you put sweet taste on the tongue which says to your body sugar
00:27:01
is coming so maybe put up some insulin maybe um start preparing in other ways
00:27:08
physiologically to receive refined carbohydrate and when that refined carbohydrate when the sugar never arrives it seems to be physiologically
00:27:14
confusing so the World Health Organization now says sweeteners aren't better than sugar when it comes to
00:27:20
weight loss and there is there is an anxiety about aspartam and cancer that I'm I'm personally not not in a big
00:27:26
sweat about there's some there's some evidence but not not at normal dosage then we've got natural flavorings we've got caffeine flavoring an addictive drug
00:27:33
and phosphoric acid and citric acid natural it said natural flavorings I mean you know that's good well
00:27:39
flavorings are flavorings flavorings should signal nutritional content when you eat a tomato it has flavor not for
00:27:46
fun it has flavor because it signals the nutritional content of the Tomato when you put flavorings out of context e even
00:27:52
if you extract them from the tomato or the strawberry or the peach it's very confusing for you phys biologically
00:27:58
you've you have a very sophisticated internal system to link flavor molecules
00:28:03
which are broadly smell and taste molecules salt Sweet Bitter sour and
00:28:10
some Savory ones you you your body has a way of linking all that information with nutritional information that you get
00:28:16
from your gut subconsciously when you muddle it all up in a product like this it's very confusing the phosphoric acid
00:28:23
will dissolve the minerals out of your bones as well as dissolving your teeth so what we have here is a solution of
00:28:29
flavorings an addictive drug an acid that will Lee stuff out of your bones and sweeteners that seem to be
00:28:35
metabolically confusing and certainly aren't better than sugar and yet we think of this as a health product so
00:28:40
that for me is the archetypal confused way of thinking about food I um and what
00:28:45
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
00:28:51
one can of artificially sweetened drinks every single day so we've we've taxed
00:28:57
sugar sugar has come out of our diet we've seen no weight loss no indication
00:29:02
that it's helping health and what we are doing is consuming huge numbers now of these artificial sweetness which we also
00:29:08
know affect our microbiome what is a a better alternative that's popular on on
00:29:14
the market than because it appears to me that all of the drinks in the bloody Supermarket have artificial sweeteners
00:29:20
and flavorings and they do because of the sugar tax so it's almost impossible now to buy fizzy tax without sweeten to
00:29:26
to buy fizzy without sweetness um bet so for kids I try and not give any advice to anyone
00:29:34
ever but my kids um my kids eat a lot of UPF but
00:29:40
they don't have fizzy drinks I think I think fizzy drinks are really quite harmful across the board so so kids
00:29:47
should just drink milk and water milk if they can have it and grown-ups um can do pretty well on milk
00:29:55
and water if you drink milk what about breakfast cereals and Cheerios and things like that so breakfast cereals
00:30:02
are really convenient I mean let me see the Cheerios so I think these uh so these these probably do meet
00:30:09
the def yeah these do meet the definition oh they are yeah so we've got things like um uh palm oil caramelized
00:30:17
sugar syrup uh colors and Aton noxin and an antioxidant and so this is ultr
00:30:24
processed it'll have some Fiber you'll have it with whole milk I don't want to demonize breakfast cereals my kids eat
00:30:31
eat uh breakfast cereals for breakfast but it's not like eating porridge which
00:30:36
is just whole grains or real bread this is this is and what you will find is if
00:30:41
you give this to a kid um compared to porridges they will be able to eat much
00:30:46
much more of this and there is there's a lot of marketing that this is a really
00:30:52
really healthy product and I would say the evidence says that this falls into a cat category of foods that we actually
00:30:58
know are associated with negative Health outcomes it says on the side there doesn't it the list of all the health
00:31:04
benefits a really good way of telling if a food is ultr processed is if there is any health claim on the packet it's
00:31:11
almost certainly ultr 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 is a
00:31:18
branded product so there's no money in broccoli milk steak eggs um supermarkets
00:31:24
quite often make losses on all those things there's no heal claim on broccoli or on plums or on milk there's no Health
00:31:32
claim on on steak it's only the ultra process things that you get marketed to
00:31:37
you in this way because there's enough money to do it the acl's interesting as well the immune support well it says
00:31:43
immune support and it says vitamin D and B6 so that rich in Vitamin D immune
00:31:51
support that is definitely healthy I mean this is this is a
00:31:58
this is where we need we we we should have done the maths and shown how much sugar there was in each pot these are
00:32:04
very high calor shots of sugary liquid that will harm teeth and I don't know
00:32:10
why you'd have this if you could just have real yogurt and or
00:32:16
milk and the reason they back add the vitamins is to be able to make Health claims so generally foods with added
00:32:22
vitamins um real food doesn't need added vitamins and we're again we're pretty sure
00:32:28
that and I'm I'm conscious who I'm talking to here I've got to I'm I'm uh
00:32:34
uh uh I probably have to tread a bit carefully supplementing vitamins into
00:32:41
food doesn't seem to have many health benefits for healthy people so we've got
00:32:47
quite a lot of very big data on this um and there are lots of studies that show
00:32:53
benefits that are funded by people who make vitamins but broadly the independent evidence shows that um when
00:32:59
you get vitamins and minerals in the context of food they're really good for you and when you take them in pill or
00:33:05
supplement form they don't seem to have many benefits if you are healthy and this food here this bottle of coke I've
00:33:11
got can of Pringles and uh cocoa pops Kellogg cereal this is the stuff that I
00:33:17
typically think of as like bad processed Ultra processed stay away from you would
00:33:22
but give me the cocoa pops so the cocoa pops we look at these traffic lights okay green green orange orange pretty
00:33:30
healthy I mean there is a there is a monkey on the pack selling it to my to
00:33:35
my kids yeah it says high in vitamin high in fiber vitamin D iron yeah iron
00:33:41
supporting your family's health right s goodness I mean everything about this tells you that this is a product not
00:33:48
just safe for kids but intended for kids and we all know you like you can't sell
00:33:54
things if they're not healthy there must be some regulat dealing with that and this is the thing that my six-year-old
00:34:01
will eat five adult portions of so when you eat five adult portions the the the traffic lights only apply to a 30 G
00:34:08
serving for you now a 30 G serving is is a handful like that it's it's one big
00:34:15
spoonful okay so this is the product that I I recognize addictive behavior in
00:34:23
my kids and frankly myself I mean I could eat you know 300 grams but and the other thing that I I went and got from
00:34:28
the supermarket because I was thinking about what I typically think is ultra processed and good for me I went and got
00:34:35
this frozen pizza here and then I went and got a Tesco finer so this is high-end
00:34:44
you know much more expensive not frozen pizza and I thought surely this pizza
00:34:50
here is better for a lot better for me than this one
00:34:55
here so again that there's a complexity talking about is one better than the
00:35:01
other because we've we've never done a trial testing them against each other they're both Ultra processed I know
00:35:07
because I looked at the ingredients they both contain ingredients that you don't have in a domestic kitchen like um Palm
00:35:13
fat or dextrose um and they're both made really in a sense by the same company so
00:35:20
both of they're both made by plc's who will be owned by institutional investors with requirements for growth so they
00:35:27
come from the same food system with the same incentives about production and my
00:35:34
bet is that you or I would be able to eat the entire pizza at a single sitting um and we'd be still licking the pack of
00:35:40
both of them so this is food that in essens is is engineered to be consumed
00:35:46
to excess you did an experiment didn't you quite a famous experiment now where you
00:35:53
put yourself on an ultr processed food diet can you tell me about that experiment and the symptoms that you saw
00:36:00
when you did lived off Ultra processed food pretty much exclusively so I I ate a diet that's
00:36:07
very normal for a British teenager I ate 80% of my calories from Ultra processed food so for for a teenager in in you
00:36:14
know the my kid school for example that this would be a completely normal thing to do one in five people in this country
00:36:20
get 80% of their calories from UPF so I wasn't really putting my body on the line um I was switching from 20% to 80%
00:36:28
um kind of two really big things happened there was some health effects so um in terms of the physical effects
00:36:34
on my body I gained so much weight and I wasn't it wasn't supersizing me I wasn't forcing it in this was done as part of a
00:36:41
um a scientific experiment for a big study that I'm now running at at University College London where I where
00:36:46
I work as an academic I gained so much weight that in if I'd continued for a year I would have
00:36:53
doubled my body weight we scanned my brain before and after I work with colleagues at the
00:36:59
National Hospital for neurology and Neuroscience so neurology and neurosurgery so this these were scans done very expertly and while I'm only
00:37:05
one patient you can you can subtract the noise you can be very sure that what you see is real we saw enormous in increases
00:37:12
in connectivity be between the the automatic Behavior habit bits the back
00:37:18
of the brain and those reward addiction bits right in the middle of the brain so we can't exactly say what's happening
00:37:25
but certainly behaviors and rewards are getting much much more connected most significantly I think we saw a change in
00:37:32
my hormonal response to a meal so when you eat real food whilst you're eating you're chewing
00:37:39
all kinds of hormonal and neurological changes happen in your body that will come to a point they'll say look you've
00:37:44
had enough Stephen you're fine you can stop eating now and that's called satiety and we've evolved this mechanism
00:37:49
since living things first started eating food hundreds of millions of years ago and uh all animals have it and humans
00:37:56
have it too what we saw is that the at the end of a standard meal at the end of this month my hunger hormones remained
00:38:02
Skyhigh so this is food that is interfering with our body's evolved mechanisms to say I am done it's time to
00:38:10
stop eating but there was there was this other thing that happened kind of the most important thing and it's at the
00:38:16
core of the book is that Midway through this diet which I was quite enjoying you know if you're if you're a sort of
00:38:21
middle-aged man trying to you know the quest is always to lose lose weight and I could go back to eating the foods of
00:38:27
my childhood and I was eating hot wings and all this stuff that I hadn't eaten for years I was really enjoying it but I
00:38:33
was also doing all this research partly for the book and I'm you know as a scientist I study nutrition and uh I was
00:38:39
talking to a colleague in Brazil called Fernanda rbert and she just kept saying this isn't food Chris it's an
00:38:45
industrially produced edible substance and I sat down that evening to meet eat a a meal of of takeaway fried chicken
00:38:52
and I I could hardly finish it and she had flicked this switch in my brain where all of this ultrapress food had
00:38:59
become disgusting but I then had to keep eating it for another fortnite and so it
00:39:04
was a bit like the very famous book the easy way to quit smoking where you smoke all the way through reading the book
00:39:10
while you learn about smoking and by the end of the diet I I I mean I now don't want to eat any ultr processed products
00:39:17
so the the gift I'm trying to give the reader is if you're living with addiction my invitation at the beginning
00:39:24
is eat along eat while you read don't forbid this stuff to yourself let yourself wallow in it immerse it taste
00:39:31
it and you'll start to and read the ingredients lists while you eat and you'll realize that all the food is has
00:39:37
the same flavor profile it's all equally salty and sugary and sweet it's all acidic um and you will gradually become
00:39:45
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
00:39:52
technique when it comes to living with addiction so the World Health Organization who I work with recommends
00:39:58
the easy way to quit smoking for quitting smoking uh as as being as useful as patches or any other technique
00:40:06
so I'm For The Individual treating it as an addictive substance may be really
00:40:11
useful for some people what was the impact on your sort of mental health and how you felt from a sort of psychology
00:40:18
perspective because I you know we've seen this huge rise in sort of mental
00:40:23
health diagnosis across the board especially in younger younger people but it seems to be pretty consistent
00:40:28
throughout different ages and demographics and I wondered if there's a link between ultra-processed foods and
00:40:34
Mental Health crisis that we're living through we've got really good epidemiological data so we now have
00:40:41
hundreds of perspective studies which are the best the kind of studies we use to link smoking to to cancer that it is
00:40:48
not just associated with physical ill health metabolic disease inflammatory disease cardiovascular disease cancers
00:40:54
early death it's all also associated with anxiety depression and also
00:41:00
dementia and um my experience of being on the diet was that
00:41:05
um there was a there was a there was a thing that I think the research doesn't capture which is because it's salty I
00:41:10
was getting up to pee more at night and I was I don't know if I can say this I was getting really constipated and
00:41:15
uncomfortable because it's quite low in fiber and so I got in this vicious cycle
00:41:21
of sleeplessness and I'd often find myself where at the fridge in the kind of small hour at the morning and the
00:41:27
food felt like the solution to the problem so I got in this spiral of sleeplessness anxiety overeating and we
00:41:34
know that stress and elevated cortisol also generally increases your desire for for low quality food and makes people
00:41:40
overeat so in a way that kind of middle-aged stress anxiety the sort of
00:41:46
mild mental health symptoms that so many people live with often it is just driven
00:41:52
by by the food I read this um stat in your book according to the world's obesity Federation 51% of the world or
00:41:59
more than 4 billion people will be obese or overweight within the next 12 years
00:42:05
so I like to say they will live with obesity um rather than the rather than use obese as an adjective because I
00:42:11
think the biggest problem for people who live with obesity is stigma it's that
00:42:17
being obese is your identity and what we actually know is that the the world OBC
00:42:24
Federation are doing some really good work work identifying this as the major public health problem the ticklishness
00:42:30
talking about this is it's really hard to say that obesity is a problem without also saying that people who live with it
00:42:37
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
00:42:42
the evidence is very clear it's just about the food environment so yes you can make these very powerful economic
00:42:49
arguments that we simply cannot afford to have a food system that's driving
00:42:55
this rate of disease um I think the moral arguments are much
00:43:00
more powerful that this is stuff that causes human suffering so I I would not
00:43:06
actually tax Ultra processed food and I certainly wouldn't ban it I think all my
00:43:13
arguments are about increasing Freedom increasing Choice increasing opportunity
00:43:18
and that's quite conscious I mean you you know this as a as a skillful Communicator you talk about kind of
00:43:24
doing exactly this in your book where I'm trying to make an argument that will appeal to the political right that are
00:43:32
much more on the side of of uh you know free market low regulation and in fact
00:43:37
we can have regulations completely compatible with huge economic growth and what I'm asking for is a food system
00:43:44
where people with low incomes have access to healthy affordable food because a lot of people would say
00:43:50
and this is sort of part two of your book that okay so the solution here is really just for people to make better
00:43:56
choices when they're I don't know in their fridges or when they're walking through a supermarket why don't we just
00:44:02
all make better choices I mean you you will you may have a much more profound I I think you're asking this question in a
00:44:08
provocative way I think you will understand it much better than me I've always had choice and so when I choose
00:44:15
to buy things I that are unhealthy it is with a degree of choice I do my my
00:44:21
patients um I run a clinic at the hospital for tropical disease where I work and most of my patients have no
00:44:26
addresses they're very disadvantaged they're migrants Asylum Seekers um they come from very low-income families
00:44:32
because those are the people who get infections now when I say to them go and eat some healthy food they all know what
00:44:40
healthy food is they've often got very they very diverse community' got very rich traditions of healthy food from the
00:44:47
the communities of the cultures they've come from they are completely unable to buy it in the case of the Asylum Seekers
00:44:52
they're on 8 pound a day and they can't work you can't you can't say to someone on spend your eight pound a day on apples and broccoli and me they haven't
00:45:00
got knives to cut it with now we know a million households in this country don't have fridges freezers stove top cookers
00:45:07
so there are a huge number of families that only have a microwave to cook and fresh food while there is always a
00:45:14
politician willing to advance this argument like you can buy a bag of lentils if you go to the cash and carryer you can buy rice or lentils for
00:45:21
you know a couple of quid for 10 kilos it costs money to heat it it cost time
00:45:26
time is the most expensive thing for for people with low incomes they need pots pans cutting boards knives Tupperware if
00:45:33
you're going to batch cook which is the only way to make home cooking economical you got a deep freezer to store it in so
00:45:39
saying to people with low incomes you know make healthier choices it is it is
00:45:45
nonsense it's just it's it's and so I feel very strongly it the world does not
00:45:50
need another person like me saying that and in fact no one I mean we all people hate being told what to do there was a
00:45:57
study done on toddlers in 1920 that you write about which is quite Illuminating where they got to choose their own food
00:46:03
from a selection of un unprocessed foods and the children instinctively chose their own diet which met their
00:46:10
nutritional needs and Cal calorie intake what was that experiment and what does that indicate to us about the
00:46:16
nature of this argument what as it relates to just being able to control what we and choose what we
00:46:22
want if we look at the animal kingdom even if you look at something you might think has quite a simple diet like a
00:46:28
like a big herbivore living in you know any of the big herbivores living on any of the big PLS of the world and you think well they just eat grass they
00:46:34
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
00:46:40
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
00:46:46
eating 50 or 60 different plants a day calories are abundant and what those
00:46:52
animals are doing is balancing all their nutrition needs from all those different
00:46:57
plants and selecting them and learning them about the flavor profile and the mineral content they're moving to avoid
00:47:03
predators in the rains to different soils so animals are incredibly sophisticated at at perfectly balancing
00:47:10
their nutritional needs from their environment and obesity is uh non-existent in the wild animal kingdom
00:47:17
in urban animals actually that start to scavenge from humans there is some evidence of obesity but in wild animals
00:47:22
there is there is no obesity humans turns out obviously have the same ability and so a scientist called uh
00:47:29
claraa Davis who's amazing woman she was she was a a gay woman uh one of the first medical graduates in in North
00:47:36
America and she did this experiment where she was she was taking abandoned kids in ENT she was functioned almost
00:47:42
like an orphanage and each child got access to 34 different Whole Foods every
00:47:47
single day and it was things like there was raw bone marrow and cooked rice and yogurt and milk and they had a little
00:47:54
bowl of salt they could have as much or as little salt as they wanted and her question was could the kids balance
00:48:00
their nutritional needs and the best example was a kid called Earl who she uh took in a few months old and he came in
00:48:06
with Ricket so he had very bad vitamin D deficiency had bendy bones and they did some X-rays and you could see the
00:48:12
rickets on the x-rays and every single day he would glug an entire cup of cod
00:48:18
liver oil which at the time was one of the only really the only source of vitamin D and he drink this every single
00:48:25
day enthus I asically he always wanted his codli Roy and on the day his rickets
00:48:30
were healed and you couldn't see them anymore on the x-rays he stopped drinking the cod liver oil never asked
00:48:35
for it again and none of the kids without vitamin D deficiency would drink would touch the cod liver oil so
00:48:41
something in Earl's body was saying I will when I need this stuff I'll have it
00:48:47
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
00:48:53
with access to a full range of foods perfectly matched all their nutritional leads they all grew really well they
00:49:00
were intellectually welldeveloped they extremely healthy and they didn't have any of the sort of food refusal problems
00:49:05
that that parents have nowadays so and she knew very well that the point was
00:49:11
the kids only had access to good food she wasn't giving them access to um industrially processed junk foods which
00:49:17
were still slightly available in in the 20s it was a really cool experiment for me I take away from that that our bodies
00:49:24
can kind of self regulate what we need if they're in an environment where the
00:49:30
options are good so if I'm a parent and I'm sure I'll be a parent in the next couple of years I hope so um if I just
00:49:36
make sure in my house all the food options are good for my kids Whole Foods
00:49:42
all the good stuff you've described presumably then I can just unlock the cupboards and let them run free I love
00:49:49
talking to um people who might become parents about what they think I mean like wow
00:49:56
you just I mean yeah good good luck to you let's can we have this conversation again in about six years can you tell me
00:50:02
why I'm you're not wrong you're completely right it will be impossible for you to limit the influx of ultra
00:50:09
processed food into your house so clearly I've written a book on this I study this I would love to do that I
00:50:14
want my kids to be normal being normal is really important as a kid and food
00:50:20
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
00:50:25
and our culture in the UK our food culture is ultr processed food and if you don't eat and drink Ultra processed
00:50:32
food you become a slightly odd person and so I still eat it when I go to friends houses because otherwise I look
00:50:39
like some you know uh fanatical food snob so and it's the same with my kids
00:50:45
so so uh grandparents friends relatives all bring it round you don't control what they eat at school um you know my
00:50:51
youngest ones a really nice Nursery but still ultrapress food food from uh from
00:50:56
the minute she gets there to to when she leaves so um very good luck to you but
00:51:02
this is why I argue I I nod to if an individual wants to read my book I think
00:51:09
they will come away with technical knowledge that they will be able to use and and I wish them well with that the
00:51:16
big argument of the book is about this this is about social justice you know it is it is really appalling that even for
00:51:23
people with with a lot of means real food is incredibly affordable and unavailable as you guys may know this
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00:52:44
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00:52:50
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currently this product is only available in the US so anyone in the USA head to hu.com to get it before it runs out
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I'll speak to the team at hu in our board meetings and I'll let them know that you want it in your country what
00:53:24
about the people that say this is just about calories in calorie out the you
00:53:30
know Fitness Community lot of the weight loss Community just say what you've got to do and I've actually got a friend
00:53:35
that said this to me quite passionately he says what I do is I just measure the amount of calories I'm taking in measure
00:53:41
the calories that are coming out and I make sure that there's a calorie deficit and if you have a calorie deficit he
00:53:46
actually said to me one day he goes you can eat whatever you want and you'll be fine mathematically he's he's not
00:53:54
entirely wrong that there are there are some very very there are two very very big
00:54:00
problems with that the first is that while some people can just eat to instructions many of us have genes that
00:54:07
uh 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 you
00:54:14
your friend should come around my house in the morning with a box of cocoa pops and try and get my daughter to eat one
00:54:20
adult portion and good luck to him I mean they'll be screaming and crying and she'll be grabbing the bo
00:54:25
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
00:54:32
just have like one to be social or people who live with addiction to alcohol well just have one drink and
00:54:38
that won't do you any harm the the food really is addictive for many people but
00:54:43
there is this other bit of the equation which is really fascinating which is that when we do more activity of the
00:54:48
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
00:54:55
very good robust sence going back to the going back to the '90s um the the most if I tell this as a
00:55:02
story which I think it's the way you'd do it um there was a scientist called Herman poner and he wanted to know how
00:55:08
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
00:55:14
studied them and he put He used a thing called double labeled water where you can measure very accurately calorie
00:55:20
expenditure and he put them in metabolic hoods and he studied them for months and months and he came back and he looked looked at his data and he thought he'
00:55:27
got it all wrong because the data showed that for um essentially if you or I went and lived in Tanzania and we walked 15
00:55:33
kilometers a day hunting Antelope and digging tubers out of the ground we wouldn't burn any more calories per day
00:55:39
and he just could not make sense of this so then he went back and looked at all the data available in the literature
00:55:45
we've studied animals we've studied different human populations there are um we've studied subsistence Farmers
00:55:50
compared to secretarial workers in the states we've looked at miners the same thing is true in all the studies when
00:55:56
you do sustained activity over a long period it doesn't massively impact your calories now some exceptions if you do
00:56:03
polar expiration if you cycle in the tur France if you go to the gym for an hour and a half every day six days a week you
00:56:09
probably do burn a few more calories but activity of the kind we all do doesn't seem to and that explains why exercise
00:56:16
is good for us because if you don't do exercise I burn 3,000 calories a day
00:56:22
rough let's say we slightly different body compositions but roughly you and I burn 3,000 calories a day if you do your
00:56:29
hour and a half of exercise every day you're stealing energy from your other budgets you're taking it away from
00:56:36
inflammation away from hormones and away from anxiety and that's why exercise
00:56:41
seems to be good for us because I'm sitting here and I'm ready to live said said and TR with my two kids I don't go
00:56:47
to the gym for an hour a day so I spend my calories but they're spent on inflammation and anxiety and relatively
00:56:53
High hormone levels and is this what we call the fixed energy model I read that in your book that term yeah so that's
00:56:59
that's um that's that's the model and there are lots of exceptions um but what
00:57:05
that model tells us along with all the other available data is that when we are talking about populations who live with
00:57:13
obesity increasing activity will be really good for them but it will not have a significant effect on body weight
00:57:20
so when we're talking about the pandemic of obesity um activity isn't hugely important and if people are listening
00:57:25
and they want to lose weight many people have the experience that um putting a healthy diet in the context
00:57:32
of lots of other healthy things is often really a good way of bringing about behavioral change you'll feel good in other ways but the activity in the
00:57:39
exercise if you think that putting in your slog at the gym every most of us can manage 40 minutes every other day
00:57:46
tops and I I get nowhere near that it's not going to have an impact on your weekly calories e even if even if we
00:57:53
accepted that the even if we did think that it increased the number of calories you burn there's other evidence that
00:57:59
says you you either eat more because your your body isn't just the mathematical uh machine that your your
00:58:05
friend proposes um but also it's if you add up the calories and you go to the gym for half an hour four times a week
00:58:11
it's just not very many calories in terms of your weekly calories unless even if you're cycling as hard as you can for the whole thing I can I can
00:58:18
definitely relate I I work out every day because just because I if I didn't you do it every day you set you seven days a
00:58:24
week I have PT every single day and the reason I do that is purely because I am
00:58:29
best disciplined when I have a clear routine so knowing that it's part of my habit and that it's actually today it's
00:58:35
in my calendar yesterday it was in my calendar even I even have lunch in my calendar now because I'm just trying to
00:58:40
make sure that I have some kind of routine um with my with my eating or else I just won't eat I remember on
00:58:46
Friday I my first meal was at 600 p.m. because I was podcasting had some stuff with the BBC and I don't want to do I
00:58:53
don't want to eat before I do anything because my I'll slump my point here though is with my personal trainer every
00:58:59
day if I don't change my diet very little happens with my body I actually I end up growing a bit more muscles I end
00:59:05
up getting a bit stronger but in terms of weight loss the fast it just sits there yeah interestingly though from a
00:59:11
psychology perspective I've spoken to a lot of scientists and doctors who have said your body will basically overcompensate for what you've just
00:59:17
burned if you went go for a five or 10 mile run your body wants to defend its weight because that's defending its survival chances for me one of the
00:59:24
things that happens is if I go out go and work out in the gym because it was so painful I'll then come home and look
00:59:31
at the flapjack or the cookie whatever and I'll think that's two steps backwards that's interesting whereas
00:59:37
some people will come home look at the flapjack and go I've earned that but to counteract my own point that also
00:59:44
happens sometimes I go well I can have it because I just ran or whatever um what I what I might do is I might avoid
00:59:52
the flapjack the obviously bad thing but then I might eat more of something that
00:59:57
I think isn't bad you see what I'm saying you'll have a sort of nutritional bar or something that is sold to you as
01:00:03
being part of that kind of accer yeah and I'll eat four of those and when you speak to one of the really interesting
01:00:08
things is when you speak to nutritionists and I've spoken to a couple who work with really Elite Sports Teams um those athletes generally eat
01:00:17
food so they that they have chefs that make and they might make quite an elaborate Flapjack but it will be a
01:00:23
flapjack made with the ingredients you would have in your kitchen and they will often drink milk while they're cycling or running and they'll eat pieces of
01:00:30
chicken rather than other things this topic of willpower again we kind of
01:00:35
started with it I love because willpower comes up a lot in your stuff and it's been so interesting listening to your your stuff about it yeah I have to be
01:00:42
honest I have evolved in my thinking about it because I've listened to both sides of the argument around will power
01:00:49
and it does appear to me that there is probably something else going going on
01:00:54
but with all these studies on Willpower it's hard to establish causation because there are other factors that are quite
01:01:01
clearly could confound the variables in play so it's something that I've gone back and forward on you talk about twin
01:01:06
studies in the context of willp power and what that can teach us why did why did you talk about twin studies in
01:01:12
chapter nine part of it was done by a colleague called CL lellan and um what
01:01:19
CLA was looking at was the her this it's a bit convoluted let me see if I can do this the heritability of obesity genes
01:01:25
so there's a weird thing we see this with with um it's bit easy to understand with IQ but it's it's true of IQ genes
01:01:32
and obesity genes that in some places if your parents have genes for obesity you
01:01:39
will have a 90% chance of inheriting the Obesity but in other families it's more like 10% same is true with with IQ so um
01:01:48
what CLA lellan showed was that if you came from a situation of deprivation if you came from a low-income household
01:01:54
your genes for obesity are much more likely to be expressed so you would
01:02:00
inherit those you'd inherit those genes and you would develop obesity now the the social importance of this was
01:02:07
because IQ studies originally showed that intelligence was hereditary and
01:02:14
this caused huge problems because um it was done in the states and uh minority
01:02:22
groups were measured as having lower in elligence and this provided that kind of
01:02:27
core argument of saying well some people are genetically less intelligent and there's a woman called Sandra Scar and
01:02:33
she did the first intelligence first studies and it was twin studies that showed it were that um whilst
01:02:39
intelligence is heritable in some communities it isn't in others and basically it works like this if you come
01:02:46
from a well-off household all your genes whether they're for a healthy body shape
01:02:51
or for intelligence they're all maxed out and so you all the variability is genetic in the population if you come
01:02:58
from a low-income household you might have genes for height that never get expressed you might have genes for intelligence that because you have been
01:03:05
poorly nourished you haven't been as educated as well those genes for intelligence never get expressed so you
01:03:12
have a really complicated picture where genes can be inherited but not expressed
01:03:17
in different communities according to how those populations are treated and so that's one of the crucial things in
01:03:23
Psychology is when only study white middleclass populations when we only study psychology students we get very
01:03:30
very different answers to when we go and look at populations who live with disadvantage or low income so
01:03:37
essentially what one of the big findings from clell's work is if you got rid of poverty uh you would get rid of around
01:03:43
60% of the problem of diet related disease and you and your brother because you are
01:03:48
twins are quite a good example of this I guess because you reference how he went
01:03:53
and lived in Boston and was having a stressful time and gained weight I mean every time I go to America we we travel
01:03:59
out there to record the podcast it's just absolutely [ __ ] wild like we I just feel terrible um I I always gain
01:04:07
weight um I un avoid if you're doing work like you do in the states and
01:04:13
you're you're at hotels and you're on the move and you're traveling you you cannot eat good food that mini bar in
01:04:19
the bloody hotel which they just keep topping up I remember I was saying to the team I was like I put the cookies in the [ __ ] bin and then I came back the
01:04:26
next day and they' put two bags there like yeah they think you've eaten the cookie yeah they thought I enjoyed them
01:04:32
I mean the marketing that's a form of marketing and if you think that you are struggling I'll come back to Boston but
01:04:39
if you think that someone like you struggles in a hotel room when they've put cookies and all this junk there and
01:04:45
you have to sort of put it out of sight for a British teenager this is true for teenagers in States Canada Australia
01:04:52
they are saturated in marketing in a way that you would be completely invisible to you and I it's I mean you you may
01:04:57
remember this from childhood it's on your bus tickets when you buy stationary at the shop it'll be on your receip it's
01:05:02
on your music apps because we pay for our music apps but kids don't it's on their social media um the companies get
01:05:10
their phone numbers directly uh from they enter competitions and then they send them meal deals and messages ping
01:05:16
ping ping to their phones so they it's 360 247 immersion in marketing of
01:05:24
addicted products and so it's it's not that confusing why 25% of British kids
01:05:30
live with obesity not just overweight anyway so Boston yeah my twin my twin
01:05:36
moved to Boston it was a situation of some stress he'd had a a kid um uh a son
01:05:41
Julian uh with someone in a way that that wasn't planned I suppose Julian knows this uh I mean Julian's the whole
01:05:48
it's all part of a very dear family now um but it was very stressful he went there to do a master's degree he lived
01:05:54
above a burger shop and he he kind of ate his problems and he he gained 30 kilos and that that is an example of we
01:06:01
both have a genetic vulnerability but my life in the UK was very stable and I was in a different food environment in the
01:06:07
UK you move my genes my clone genetically we're identical you move my clone to the states stress him out a bit
01:06:14
he gains 30 kilos I mean it's it's nothing and oh has our willpower changed
01:06:19
has our personal responsibility changed you know a set of um accidents and and
01:06:27
uh uh coincidences and the food environment are what determine his
01:06:32
weight has nothing to do with willpower at all whenever I feel like I'm in a situation where I don't have autonomy
01:06:37
and control I'm like G and when I hear about this sort of food environment we're living in and the the big food
01:06:43
Mafia and the marketing and pinging me left right and center and all the products that are in some of these ultr
01:06:50
processed foods that are making me feel addicted to them that I just it's just triggering my my brain in a in a way
01:06:55
that I can't seem to control either I go I want to be able to do something about it on an individual level I want to be
01:07:01
able to take back control without having to wait for bloody Downing Street or the White House to change things I love that
01:07:08
and what what I try and propose in the book is that you need to make that
01:07:13
Journey probably when you start reading the book you're you're in this sort of unconscious stage if you don't think of
01:07:19
yourself as either a victim or anything you're just eating your food and then Midway through the B book I think I do
01:07:25
propose to you that you are a victim and that's a hard thing for any of us to listen to most of us don't want to be victims and I think you have to make the
01:07:32
journey from victim to activist pretty quickly and you can be an activist in your own life for yourself and you can
01:07:40
if you have resources and money and skills you you can get rid of ultra processed food lots of people actually
01:07:47
can't I just I just got to be really blunt here like there is there is an anxiety I had write in this book that um
01:07:53
for the core audience of readers who can afford books most of them will be able to buy sourdough from a fancy Bakery
01:08:00
rather than you know the Loa of PR we just looked at but for the people who are most affected by the problem that it
01:08:06
simply won't be a choice for someone like you yes you you need to take that kind of emotional reaction and turn it
01:08:11
into um direct that rage rather than than directing it inwards it's directing
01:08:17
it out to a food system that controls you I mean one of the one of the political narratives we hear is is is
01:08:22
that any kind of Regulation is Nanny statism it's about government overreach at the moment we live in a nanny State
01:08:28
the nannying is done by transnational food corporations they don't pay any particular tax in this country they're
01:08:34
you know they do employ some people but these these are not companies that are part of our sort of culture and yet they
01:08:42
are controlling our our food and what we eat and I think we need to rest a little bit of control back off those of th of
01:08:48
those companies but that group of people that maybe weren't the majority of people you were speaking to with your book that
01:08:54
don't have the privilege that me and you have to make better choices as it relates to food or to um buy the pots
01:09:02
and pans and chopping boards or get a chef to cook it for us whatever what you say to them what do they do I mean this
01:09:08
is why I don't give advice because there is there we are at this moment where we
01:09:13
do have to politically treat the companies like the tobacco companies now
01:09:19
at the moment for many people trying to quit ultr processed food will be like trying to quit smoking in the 1960s is
01:09:25
it really addictive so the do you want me to do a bit on the the evidence for addiction so the the the the definition
01:09:31
of adct because people food addiction has been really scientifically complex for a long time because baked into the
01:09:36
notion of addiction is that the only strategy that ever works is abstinence you cannot be adct abstinent from food
01:09:43
and so food can't be addictive so for a long time we said well food is a behavioral addiction where it is the the
01:09:50
food Behavior not the food itself the definition of Ultra processed food allows you to describe the category of
01:09:57
substances that are addictive and when we go and speak to people who say I live
01:10:02
with addiction to food and you say what do what do you feel addicted to It's Always ultra processed product it'll be
01:10:08
very different some people it's going to be the diet colors some people it's Biscuits some people it's pizzas but it's always UPF um the definition of
01:10:15
addiction is continued use of a substance despite knowledge of harms physical or psychological and despite
01:10:21
repeated attempts to quit and you and I will both know people in our own lives who continue to uh eat this food I mean
01:10:29
I was definitely one of these people uh despite knowing it was harming me and wanting to stop eating it so that's why
01:10:36
I think I have two groups of readers some people are just going to want to cut down you you might be someone who's
01:10:41
maybe eating a little bit more than you want and you just want to go I'm going to maximize my health and I'm just going to I'm going to have it as a treat on a
01:10:47
Friday night and that's fine it's like it can be like booze or or the occasional cigarette for some people that one
01:10:54
cigarette that one glass of wine for for many probably 40% of people I don't know
01:10:59
about your audience but across the country 40% of people will have a troubled relationship with it and for
01:11:05
those people abstinence may be a an easier strategy so yeah I think it's addictive when we look at scans it's
01:11:12
addictive when we do surveys it's addictive when we um look at the profile
01:11:17
of genes and the other um surrounding factors that lead to addiction it's caused by the same things and there's
01:11:23
lots of basic science about um the the speed of consumption and addiction so
01:11:28
addictive things are normally very quickly consumed shots crystal meth um
01:11:34
tobacco products if you chew tobacco if you have slow release methylphenidate
01:11:39
it's a treatment for ADHD it's not addictive um if you have weak session beer it's not addictive like tequila
01:11:46
shots are so the speed of hit seems to be important and that may be partly to do with the softness of UPF you get a
01:11:53
you get a very quick hit of your nutrition is there a link between ultr processed foods and
01:11:58
neurodiversity you know ADHD those kinds of things because there's some emerging evidence about
01:12:04
ADHD I'm speaking to um there's a working group at the Royal College of psychiatrists who are really interested
01:12:10
in the links between uh binge eating disorders and other eating disorders and um and ultr processed food um I think we
01:12:18
we are only at the very beginning of discovering the health effects but remember from from very early on in
01:12:24
childhood a huge number of kids in this country are on a diet of ultra almost pure Ultra processed food but that's
01:12:30
often in a situation where there is also other sources of um trauma of um
01:12:37
there'll be other health factors there'll be poor housing um it will go hand inand with lots of other things so
01:12:42
as an adjunct to other other problems I would think there will be a link but
01:12:48
teasing it all out is going to be complicated a high UPF diet is linked to More Death glob than tobacco high blood
01:12:54
pressure or any other health risk 22% of all deaths that's a stat I got from your
01:13:00
book and also increased consumption of UPF Ultra processed foods is linked to the following diseases all cause
01:13:07
mortality cardiovascular disease cancers high blood presses fatty liver disease in inflammatory bowel disease depression
01:13:13
worse blood fat profile irritable bowel syndrome dementia and I can't even say
01:13:19
that other one F Frailty Frailty just fertility being weak and
01:13:29
old CH part five of your book is what am I supposed to do about it and I've kind of answered it I want to make sure I'm
01:13:36
really clear of my own life here I can because I have the privilege of doing so I can make better food choices the first
01:13:42
part of it is awareness knowing what Ultra processed foods are and I believe I've got that definition from you step
01:13:48
two is I really need to do an audit of the things that I'm consuming frequently to make sure that I'm at least
01:13:54
intentional about my consumption of ultra processed foods and then I can
01:13:59
make better choices to bring in more Whole Foods into my into my diet um because you're right there's so many
01:14:04
things that I'm consuming that I thought were good for me I mean I I drank bloody orange juice for [ __ ] Sunny D for 20
01:14:11
years because I just thought it was great for me vitamin D or something I can't remember so Sunny yeah exactly and it was it was marketed at me um
01:14:19
awareness is step one making making more informed choices I guess is step two for me
01:14:24
um and then there's a broader point which is about trying to change the system for others which I I can do by having these
01:14:31
kind of conversations I guess I love that th those steps are coming from you that I I don't have a I
01:14:40
I honestly don't care what people eat I I like freedom I don't like being told what to do and so I am not prescriptive
01:14:47
about what anyone should eat nowhere in the book do I say you should like as a normative statement you should eat less
01:14:52
up F so if you want to knowing what you know that's up to you I don't think anyone has a duty to be healthy to
01:15:01
generate economic growth I just think no one asked to be born you're born you should be able to live your life as you
01:15:08
want what I do think is what I want for for everyone is that they can they have
01:15:15
agency so that they are not subject to constant predatory marketing and they have true choice so all the policies
01:15:22
that proposing and I'm part of a big group working on this are about making
01:15:28
real food affordable and available so in terms of the the hierarchy of what needs
01:15:33
to be done for everyone the number one thing is tackle poverty poverty is a political Choice there is enormous
01:15:40
wealth in this country and uh and people born into disadvantage should not have a
01:15:47
different childhood than people who are born rich and and and it feels kind of almost revolutionary to say that but it's
01:15:53
really obvious to me like what why I mean I can talk about this all day but but Health outcomes are so different for
01:16:00
people born in poverty for people who live across the road from from from my kids so that's the number one thing the
01:16:06
second thing is um some very light regulation I don't want to tax things I don't want to ban things we need to
01:16:13
appropriately label unhealthy food and at the moment the labels are so confusing as to be unusable we need to
01:16:19
put in our national nutrition guidance that there is good evidence linking processed food as a category to all
01:16:25
these poor health outcomes and we should recommend uh the government should recommend that people do try and consume
01:16:31
less now there will be a real problem for the government doing that because the government creates a food environment and it's really hard for a
01:16:37
government to say look on the one hand don't eat all this and they go on the other hand that is all you can afford to eat so that's going to create a real
01:16:43
political problem and that's sort of what we're up against um the most important policy step is to get industry
01:16:51
out of the room when it comes to making policy so this is so the I just spoke at
01:16:58
the world of obesity Federation in New York um they're a un aligned who aligned group outside of the UK there is no
01:17:06
discussion about the role of ultra processed food that pandemic obesity is primarily due to this Western industrial
01:17:12
diet everyone agrees on this countries like Argentina a can of cola has three
01:17:18
big black hexagons on it bigger than the logo of the company that makes the cola same with most of the breakfast cereals
01:17:24
you know there are warnings in the National Garden so globally people are very very aware of this in the UK um
01:17:31
there is real control of the public health n narrative by the by the food and drink industry so as an example all
01:17:38
our major Charities that influence policy and a lot of policy comes from charity they're all paid by companies that make by UPF so if we look at the
01:17:45
British nutrition Foundation it is majority funded by all the major food companies you can name Coca-Cola Nestle
01:17:52
Cargill all of them um cancer research UK diabetes UK the British dietetic
01:17:58
Association all of them are funded by companies that make ultr processed food so we need we need to start treating the
01:18:05
companies like the tobacco industry and saying no no your money is is not good and we won't take it because it
01:18:10
influences food policy that's kind of the most important step and so part of being an activist in this area for me is
01:18:18
um not taking food industry money myself and so that that is a very painful
01:18:24
weekly process because if you write a book about food you get offered you know
01:18:30
I mean enormous amounts of money to go and to go and work for the food
01:18:35
industry how how did how did your food consumption change from the beginning of
01:18:41
this book Till the End of This Book what were there any particular choices that you have unmade or made because of what
01:18:49
you learned in the process of writing this book I think resist existing addictions if you live with addiction is
01:18:56
almost impossible that's the whole point about addiction MH and what you need to do is to make the journey from being
01:19:03
addicted to being disgusted and love and disgust are quite they're they're
01:19:08
anatomically close in the brain they're neurologically quite related and many of us have experienced this falling out of
01:19:15
love process where something you're in something or someone you're infatuated with that is irresistible you want to
01:19:21
spend all your time engaging with um suddenly becomes something you really don't want to do and smokers will
01:19:27
describe it some people have this experience in human relationships um it it can happen that switch can be flicked
01:19:33
quite quickly and I think if you're someone who lives with addiction you need to figure out how to flick that
01:19:38
switch that at the moment if you're addicted to this food and you constantly trying to resist it it it will be too
01:19:44
much so I I think that that is kind of the priority if you're living with the
01:19:50
addiction is to try and get to disgust and that's what happened to me is the food became you know this thing about
01:19:57
the uncanny valley where if if um there's a thing in animations where if animations are very cartoony they're
01:20:05
fine but if they become quite human they suddenly start looking weird there's some films where they get it a bit wrong
01:20:11
um uh where the where the cartoon characters are too realistic they they become almost zombie or corpse likee and
01:20:18
so this this uncanny valley that animation goes through where it becomes weird and then when Ultra human that
01:20:23
they're fine again the food for me was a bit like that it entered this sort of uncanny valley where it's it's similar
01:20:28
to food but it it isn't food and so so now I just don't want any of it but I
01:20:36
will eat it to be polite this stuff that I that I brought with me you know the the pizzas I got the
01:20:43
cocoa pops I've got the the Coca-Cola here is this
01:20:50
food I don't think it me so food is very poorly defined we don't have a working definition of food sort
01:20:56
of in law but I think food is substance that you eat for nourishment
01:21:02
and it should be about nourishment culturally socially personally psychologically as well as physically
01:21:08
and these products are uh developed to generate financialized growth for
01:21:13
institutional investors they're not made by people who love you who want to nourish you and so I don't think it
01:21:20
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
01:21:26
I don't think a mixture of um coloring addictive drugs and phosphoric acid
01:21:32
could be called food in any sense of the word it doesn't have nutrition it only has things that will we're we're pretty
01:21:40
sure that almost every ingredient does you harm in some way so I I don't see how that could be called food it's a way
01:21:45
of commodifying your ill health for the benefit of a very small number of people
01:21:52
are you optimistic sck oh that's such a great question like I live with and I want the real answer that's sort of
01:22:00
oh you could ask me you get a different answer each morning so at the moment uh
01:22:07
here are my sources of optimism there is another way of doing this I have a friend who runs a not for-profit Drug Company works as a normal drug company
01:22:13
has a huge quantity of Revenue only one person took a pay cut that was the CEO so he doesn't own it everyone else is
01:22:20
paid exactly as if they're at a normal pharmaceutical company the purpose of and he paid back investors it's a
01:22:26
really it would be cool for you to interview actually he's one of the the smartest people I know he came from Big
01:22:32
farmer and because he's not obliged to institutional investors he develops
01:22:37
drugs for low-income settings he also sells them in middle and high income settings and does really a great job but
01:22:43
the purpose of the company is to reduce Healthcare inequalities now there are lots of people who are working on a
01:22:49
similar model that will sit within you know a capital capitalist structure that will pay back investors but where food
01:22:56
needn't become so beholden to institutional investors so I think there are financial reasons for optimism there
01:23:02
are economic models we can we can propose corporate structures we can incorporate things in different ways
01:23:08
that will serve the community in different ways that's one source of optimism the second source of optimism is we sort of did it with tobacco and
01:23:15
the cool terrible thing about tobacco is we regulated the tobacco industry and
01:23:20
got smoking rates right down and the um growth of equity value of the
01:23:26
tobacco companies has continued more or less uninterrupted throughout now part
01:23:31
of that comes from selling cigarettes in other countries some of it comes from the rise of vaping but nonetheless we
01:23:36
did manage to get control of tobacco so as a public health activist I have a template I know how to do it I know how
01:23:42
to tackle marketing um and we we have a road map and we also know that people
01:23:47
are Furious I mean people are enraged for 40 years we've watched particularly
01:23:52
our children not just get bigger but get shorter so if you have kids if you have kids in this country by the age of five
01:23:59
they will be that much shorter than if you had kids in Scandinavia or Bulgaria
01:24:04
or the Netherlands okay that at the age of five that much 9 cm that is the
01:24:09
difference between a British 5-year-old and a Bulgarian 5-year-old and is his all diet so it's not just our kids live
01:24:16
with the beasty they are stunted now you can't stunt a body by 9 cm at the age of five and not also stunt them
01:24:21
intellectually so people are Furious we sort of know this is happening we know we can't stop
01:24:27
eating this food we obesity is all around us and so I I think there is real real uh
01:24:33
momentum for people to to reclaim their foods and we do we do have a lot of
01:24:38
amazing food cultures in this country that we can draw for kind of Rich phenomenal diets might explain why the
01:24:44
US is so poor from an education standpoint to some degree you know what I mean because they always rank at the
01:24:49
very bottom of the education tables it's the same in the it's about the same in the US the stunt the physical stunting
01:24:55
and physical stunting once we once you get rid of cigarette smoking during pregnancy which is still far too high
01:25:01
it's really it's really all due to diet so there's all those causes of optimism
01:25:06
and yet I also I'm up against the the power any one of these corporations has
01:25:11
revenues equivalent to the GDP of a of a pretty decent sized country like Venezuela or Croatia yeah so and that's
01:25:19
any one of the the companies do you know this is just such conspiracy theory that I just popped into my head about my own
01:25:24
childhood um I'm the youngest of four right and if we just look at the brothers so there's three of us Brothers
01:25:32
I'm the youngest brother and Kevin my oldest brother is a monster he's like 65
01:25:38
or something even Jason is like 63 and then I'm short and I'm like short in comparison to them I'm 61 but they're so
01:25:46
much there're so much taller than me and I did I was thinking about it as you're speaking my mother did make homecooked foods she was at home during
01:25:52
my my older brothers and sisters um as they were growing up so she was cooking in the house the whole time African food
01:25:58
lots of Whole Foods and chickens and vegetables and salads any traditional diet like any traditional diet yeah and
01:26:04
then she started businesses and stopped coming home so I was a scavenger and I
01:26:10
had like free reain to go to the Sweet Shop and eat not not so good things so I was just thinking about I've always wondered why I'm why I'm shorter than
01:26:17
them and I'm younger but maybe there's sted physically and intellectually maybe I think you're going to difficulty
01:26:22
selling people on this but I mean it is an intriguing point we know about youngest people in in the in in Europe
01:26:29
that youngest children are about I don't know I don't know that D they're about five IQ points uh less smart because IDI
01:26:38
of the family as well my brothers are absolute super they're like um they're like mathletes in the UK my brother was
01:26:45
rewriting the textbook he was on the front of the Plymouth Herald because of his bloody the grades that he got I think it was the Plymouth Herald it's
01:26:50
one of the newspapers he was in there and Kevin was even smarter he was a another Super Genius I got kicked out of
01:26:56
school I was it is really I mean that idea of eating a sort of traditional home-cooked whole food
01:27:02
diet versus your probably quite High UPF I I mean I it was the datas you know
01:27:09
you're you're one case but we build evidence out of case studies you know I love that idea I'm not sure I can really
01:27:14
accept you as kind of intellectually and physically stunted sitting across from you no but academically they were just
01:27:20
so much so they still are so far ahead of me in fact Jason now works in my company just to help me with everything
01:27:25
because he's so smart we there's there's a pair of twins I know who separated at Birth adopted in China separated at
01:27:31
Birth they're quite well known I've interviewed them for for a podcast and one grew up in Norway one grew up in the
01:27:36
states genetically identical and the Norwegian twin is is that much taller than the American twin so we we do see
01:27:42
these natural experiments too it's crazy how's your brother getting on so he
01:27:48
maybe the biggest effect of the book is he kind of I stopped a message in the book and I would say this because people people are
01:27:54
listening and listeners are selfish we like how do I lose the way how do I quit UPF well I've said that but the the
01:27:59
bigger thing is don't beat your loved ones over the head with this so many people like I'm going to buy your book
01:28:05
for my wife or husband or daughter or I'm going to tell my kids and and when we let people go and we stop owning
01:28:11
their problems it gives them agency it empowers them and and then it's up to
01:28:17
them to decide and they if they have the resources and the opportunities generally they will and so a big a kind
01:28:24
of core message of the book is stop nagging your loved ones about their food their food is controlled by forces that are far bigger than you they know what
01:28:31
to eat nagging people about their weight only stresses them out and makes it worse so when I it was when I Let Go
01:28:38
properly of what zand eats and stop really really stopped caring about him
01:28:43
and and started to kind of not see him as an extension of myself because when
01:28:50
he he would be big in public you know we work together as television presenters and I'd be like God you're embarrassing
01:28:56
me like we're trying to talk about health and medicine to kids and look at you and when I let all that go and saw
01:29:01
him as like you know he's such a wonderful person I love him so much who who cares about his weight that enabled
01:29:07
him to sort of engage with it then lots of other things happened he's just got married to a public health academic um
01:29:15
uh he's got resources he got a bit older I mean all kinds of things happen so much of life is is luck we can tell
01:29:22
these narratives of how someone got from A to B but he's very fortunate and I think celebrating weight loss is just
01:29:28
something I'm I'm so anxious about doing but he yeah he a big product of the book
01:29:34
was an improvement in my relationship with him because I stopped caring what he ate I find it so interesting why
01:29:42
people decide to make changes in their life and it's so different for everybody I've I've wondered and pondered
01:29:49
whether sometimes we need a little bit more pain you know I can't forget a conversation I had
01:29:56
with a manager of one of the top music artists in this country that was
01:30:02
struggling and this person was a friend of mine the person struggling and I kind of went to him and I was like listen how
01:30:08
can I help and he goes you can't he goes um I've managed a lot of music artists
01:30:13
that have struggled with addictions of various kinds and at some point they'll reach a rock bottom and they'll decide
01:30:19
themselves that they need to make a change and it's such a hard thing to accept just to kind of let someone in
01:30:24
your view go into freefall in an area of your life you want to catch them you want to hold them up and support them
01:30:30
that that Moment of clarity of decision that's when we've
01:30:36
all had it switch suddenly flick that can never arise as long as someone else is telling it and the the clearest
01:30:43
example of this is the washing up that my you know I you know we've got a family and everyone's and sometimes as
01:30:48
I'm about to heroically at the end of a meal get up and do all the wash washing up my wife will say to me could you
01:30:54
clear these plates and do the washing up and I've gone from being an empowered person with agency about to heroically
01:31:00
do my bit for the family to being someone doing the bidding of someone else and I it enrages me and we do it to
01:31:06
each other so just allowing other people to grasp their problems um and deal with
01:31:12
them or not is you know that's that's it's a really hard journey for a doctor because doctors are all about telling
01:31:18
you about yourself and I try and do it lesson it kind of reminds me a little bit of
01:31:23
what I was saying earlier about um I don't like it when it feels like I'm being controlled yeah yeah and that's
01:31:29
kind of what the food food environment we live in makes me feel like it makes me feel like I don't have a choice you
01:31:35
don't and I want to have a choice you don't really have a choice I mean if you have enough money and you're really
01:31:41
prepared to get up early in the morning you have some choices but our our food
01:31:46
food choices are severely curtailed and if you're on a Motorway if you're traveling around this country if you just if you try and go out on that High
01:31:52
Street out there and just buy yourself a quick lunch there aren't a lot of choices the pain thing's interesting we
01:32:00
need a little bit of pain in our diet we need foods that are bitter and real and chewy and crunchy and make us work for
01:32:06
them and take time to prepare and one of the big switches is trying to see food
01:32:12
preparation not as a chore but as something that connects you to your
01:32:17
ancestors I mean you know we've survived because we come from this long chain of people who just spent hours a day
01:32:23
grinding and pulverizing and salting and mashing and figuring out how to make food to nourish this and it's a thing we
01:32:30
should do with other people and it you know that trying to enjoy food prep is is is a big change for me second ago I
01:32:36
asked you if you're optimistic and you you gave me I dodged it you gave me the
01:32:41
RE you did a little bit but you gave me the reasons for being optimistic what are the reasons you're pessimistic I think because when it came
01:32:48
to Tobacco Control it took from from the certainty that tobacco caused not just
01:32:55
lung cancer but but Strokes heart attacks and a whole range of other health outcomes including early death
01:33:00
the same list of Health outcomes that Ultra processed food causes uh from that knowledge to proper
01:33:07
regulation took 50 60 years and because around uh a signific a significant
01:33:14
percentage of of women still smoke throughout pregnancy in this country you know which is a good Benchmark of of not
01:33:19
succeeding they're they're highly motivated to St anded and unable to and we see the rise of Vapes so it's an arms
01:33:26
race you know I'm I'm a virologist by training my PhD is in studying how
01:33:31
viruses compete with humans and in an arms race you never get ahead for very long it's like business business is a
01:33:37
great example of an arms race you understand arms RAC is better than anyone you can't just build your company and be like well that's that's done home
01:33:44
I go let's watch the money flow you someone's always always trying to overtake you and so we're we're as a as
01:33:50
a community of activists what we need to build is a is a sustainable form of activism that is you build regulation
01:33:57
you build on that you keep generating evidence and there are some we have more and more ways of doing it with these
01:34:03
sustainable non for-profit not for-profit food companies for example as a way of funding activism so are you
01:34:11
optimistic I have to be I mean nothing worth achieving will be achieved in our
01:34:16
lifetime so this will not be just the work of my lifetime and I'm I'm inheriting this work uh many of us are
01:34:22
inheriting this work from a generation of people who've been slaving at this since Nestle were indicted for uh
01:34:31
aggressively marketing infant formula in very very low-income settings and really harming children in in low-income
01:34:37
countries so you know that that was kind of the first engagement with big food
01:34:42
where people were were angry and we could really point to a problem and those activists now they're my they're
01:34:48
my they're 20 30 years older than me and they're they're sort of handing knowledge to me and a whole bunch of other people across around the around
01:34:54
the world people from the global South people from very diverse communities and so we're you know I'm going to hand this to my kids but you know there's a fight
01:35:02
and you can be on one side of it I guess Chris we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest
01:35:08
leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who they're going to leave it for and the question that's been left for you is what
01:35:15
will we also has a little brackets and says you reget in 10 years about how we
01:35:24
brought up our children today I can tell you because I already
01:35:32
regret it and it's it's not spending the kind of quality time that I've just
01:35:38
given you with them that you know to spend time with
01:35:44
you today I prepared I thought about it I've read your book I've you know I've been listening to the podcast for ages
01:35:50
and as a result we've had at least what feels to me like quite a meaningful engagement it's really nice I leave kind of enriched and my kids get this these
01:35:57
sort of snatches at time of time and you you talk about diarising lunch and I know this is this is a thing you you
01:36:03
talk about in lots of places it's not just giving the crumbs to your family but it's like giving the investing in
01:36:10
your family in the way you do in your work and I I don't do it because you know my wife's pregnant I've got two
01:36:16
kids six and three and and it's just a scramble so that's what I will regret
01:36:21
and and it's great actually being given the opportunity to articulate that and go okay if I'm going to regret it who do I want to be and you know I love that
01:36:28
question I'm going to go away and try and force time with them that that I'm present and often they don't want
01:36:35
they're not interested but it's just being there listening to them and and uh investing in them regularly in the way
01:36:41
that that I do with everything else in my life Chris thank you so much because you you um I feel like this book I think
01:36:47
it's been in the Sunday Times best seller chart for like 25 24 weeks was something mental um you you knocked me
01:36:54
off number one oh listen you're I'm just visiting you live there so I'll be there
01:36:59
for another 5 Seconds you I'm sure you'll be there for for many many uh many more weeks and you're starting a
01:37:06
really important Revolution and conversation around what we eat a really important one and books come along once
01:37:13
in a once in a while once every couple of years once in a generation that really meet culture at the exact moment
01:37:20
with the exact language with the exact appreciation of the reader the Nuance
01:37:25
the um inclusivity um not taking provocative
01:37:32
stances that are so far on the right or so far on the left that they alienate a certain group they kind of bring
01:37:37
everyone in and they appreciate both sides of that nuance and that
01:37:42
perspective and this is exactly what this book does perfectly timed written perfectly to appeal to both sides
01:37:52
of the most tricky narratives um and that is why it's such
01:37:58
a brilliant book and that's why everybody needs to read it because as you said I think before we started recording it's starting a conversation
01:38:04
that we really need to start and it's and it's these books that end up changing changing the world and changing
01:38:10
legislation so congratulations first and foremost but thank you secondly for
01:38:15
writing such an important book at such an important time I'm really blushing I mean this there there's very few people I'd hear that from the new it really
01:38:22
means a huge amount so thank you we've got an exciting new sponsor on
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