by Dr. Joseph Mercola, Mercola:
STORY AT-A-GLANCE
- In a lecture at The Royal Institute, Chris van Tulleken shared details of how ultraprocessed foods impact human health, tracing a timeline from the mid-1970s when childhood obesity was a mere 2% to the present day, just 50 years later, when it now hovers at 20%
- Van Tulleken notes that processed foods are not the same as ultraprocessed foods because processing is ancient and people have been grinding, salting, smoking, curing and fermenting food for hundreds of thousands of years. As he says, humans are the “only obligate processivores”
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- Food products are not just a sum of the nutrient parts, as has been demonstrated in multiple studies, including a case study by van Tulleken in which he discovered that after just four weeks of eating 80% ultraprocessed food, he experienced heartburn, anxiety, 15.4-pound weight gain and poor sleep
- Based on research, van Tulleken proposes the brain is a prediction engine, and taste is an early warning system that your body uses to warn of toxins and predict the nutrients that are on the way to the stomach. When the tongue signals sugar, fat, or protein that doesn’t arrive, it may trigger a stress response that causes you to eat more
- Ultraprocessed food manufacturers propose that obesity is caused by not getting enough exercise or not having enough willpower. Yet, the evidence suggests these theories are invalid and that obesity and other diseases are linked to consuming ultraprocessed foods that may be slowly killing us
Consumption of ultraprocessed foods in the U.S. grew from 53.5% of the total calories consumed between 2001 to 2002 to 57% of the total calories consumed between 2017 to 2018.1
During a lecture at the Royal Institution in October 2023,2 Dr. Chris van Tulleken from the University College London cited 60% of the total calories in Great Britain are consumed from ultraprocessed foods and 1-in-5 people consume 80% of their calories from ultraprocessed food.
A 2024 systematic review of the literature3 confirmed what multiple past studies have also shown — the higher your intake of ultraprocessed food, the higher your risk of adverse health outcomes. Many of these adverse health events are closely linked to obesity and van Tulleken finds strong associations between consuming ultraprocessed food and obesity.
During his lecture,4 he presented a slide illustrating the meteoric rise in obesity that began in the mid-1970s, calling the situation “pandemic obesity.” At the time, childhood obesity was a mere 2% but now it’s more than 20%.
Data Confirms Ultraprocessed Food Is Killing Us
To fully understand how ultraprocessed food is altering human health, it is crucial to understand what it is. The concept of ultraprocessed food didn’t become part of nutritional conversations until the NOVA system was first proposed in 2009 by Carlos Monteiro. Researchers now use this system to classify types of foods used in interventional studies.
Van Tulleken notes that the category definitions are long and involved, so he simplified ultraprocessed food as: “Wrapped in plastic with at least one ingredient you wouldn’t normally find in a standard home kitchen.”5 However, while van Tulleken notes that ultraprocessed food does drive excess consumption and weight gain, it doesn’t just cause obesity.6
There is also a strong association with a long list of other diseases such as cardiovascular disease, certain cancers, Type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, fatty liver disease, inflammatory bowel disease, mood disorders, frailty and other “complaints that we all just think are part of growing old.”
The 2024 analysis7 included 45 unique pooled analyses and 9,888,373 participants. There was a direct association between 32 health parameters and exposure to ultraprocessed food. These health outcomes included metabolic, cancer, mental, respiratory, heart, gastrointestinal and all-cause mortality.
According to this study and others, this increasing exposure is contributing to rising rates of chronic disease and illness in the population. In other words, eating ultraprocessed foods is slowly killing us and, we really are what we eat.
Humans Have Always Processed Food
Van Tulleken notes that processed foods are not the same as ultraprocessed foods because processing is ancient.8 He calls humans the “only obligate processivores,” or mammals that must process their food before eating. Compared to other mammals of similar size and weight, humans have much smaller jaws and teeth with shorter digestive tracts.
The kitchen became our extended gastrointestinal system where knives and grinders are used to cut and chop food and cooking is used to process, mash and extract to make food more easily digestible.
“For hundreds of thousands of years, we’ve been grinding it and mashing it and extracting it and salting it and curing it and fermenting it and smoking it and doing all of these wonderful things that make diets edible and delicious,” van Tulleken said.
A 2022 paper9 noted that a food product is not simply the sum of the nutrients and that “Human diets are progressively incorporating larger quantities of industrially processed foods.” Throughout his lecture, van Tulleken agreed. In the early 2000s when Carlos Montero proposed the NOVA system, he also proposed that food is more than the sum of its parts and that how we process food matters to how our body processes food.10
What We Do to Food Matters
As an example of why processing is important, van Tulleken recounted an experiment done in the 1970s by a group of scientists in Bristol. The group used apples. They left some unprocessed, some chopped into chunks, some pureed and some were squashed with the fiber out. The processing was done immediately before the participants consumed them and what they found was revealing.11
“If you eat a whole apple, it leaves you feeling fuller for longer, it doesn’t spike your blood sugar, and you don’t get a sort of rebound hypoglycemia. If you drink the apple juice, you get a big spike of blood sugar, you don’t feel full at all. Now, when you back-add the fiber, so it’s whole pureed apple, you still get that sugar spike, and you still don’t feel satisfied.
So even when we have a pureed whole apple, it’s very, very different to eating the whole apple, to dismantling the apple with your teeth. Eating, the act of chewing, of manipulating food with your tongue, causes all sorts of internal physiological changes that are really, really important. So we do need to process food with our mouths.”
In 2016, Kevin Hall, a scientist and nutrition researcher with the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, was at a conference with a representative from PepsiCo.12 They discussed the recent NOVA classifications and Brazil’s food guidelines to avoid ultraprocessed foods. Hall believed it was a silly rule because obesity had nothing to do with food processing.
He was attracted to the idea that food is the sum of its nutrient parts. Yet, there was damning evidence in the scientific literature that appeared to be correlative rather than causative. He believed that ultraprocessed foods were being wrongly blamed and so at the end of 2018 he and his colleagues were the first to test whether diet could cause overeating and weight gain.
In a randomized controlled, crossover study,13 participants ate either an unlimited amount of ultraprocessed food or an unprocessed diet matched for equal amounts of salt, fat, sugar and fiber for two weeks. The researchers found that while on the ultraprocessed food, the participants gained roughly 1 kilogram (2.2 pounds) and lost the same amount on the unprocessed diet.
Van Tulleken was also curious about how ultraprocessed foods affect the body. So, over one month, the 42-year-old increased his daily intake from 30% of ultraprocessed products to 80%, which mimicked how 20% of the U.K. population eats. By the end of four weeks, van Tulleken experienced a myriad of changes, including:14
