Harmful industrially processed foodstuffs are now so utterly engrained in the daily diets of tens of millions of Britons that the Government should urgently consider regulating the food industry, in the same way it took on the tobacco giants.
That’s one of the conclusions of Dr Chris van Tulleken, the expert on ultra-processed food and bestselling author whose work has exposed the disturbing molecular science behind many of our most popular meals.
The danger posed by such chemically enhanced additives, salt and sugar to our national welfare – and the scale of the resulting obesity epidemic – is now so great that nothing short of full-blown intervention can ultimately save us. Not that Van Tulleken is especially optimistic about it happening, for several decades at least.
“The logic is simply that the food industry’s tactics are drawn from the tobacco industry in a very literal sense that the biggest tobacco companies in the world in the mid-1980s were also the biggest food companies in the world,” he explains.
“They used the same molecules and marketing tactics. Obviously we don’t want to ban food, but our food system is terribly harmful and we need to think of it as a problem of unregulated industrial power rather than junk food and weak willpower making people fat.”
Van Tulleken’s forensically researched book, Ultra-Processed People, investigating how our daily diets have been insidiously appropriated by additives, soared to the top of bestseller lists around the world.
It revealed in gory, fascinating detail how difficult it is to avoid unhealthy diets without an obsessional interest in the food on our plates, supermarket shelves and takeaway boxes. He also devastatingly outlined why exercise and willpower alone cannot save us from food science gone Frankenstein.
Now the amiable 46-year-old is gearing up for three blockbuster Christmas lectures at the global home of science, the Royal Institution in London, aimed at teenagers and broadcast on BBC4 from December 29.
Having studied medicine at the University of Oxford, he trained as an infectious diseases expert at the Hospital for Tropical Diseases in London and became an associate professor at UCL. But much of his recent academic work has been on food systems.
Van Tulleken’s interest was piqued while making a documentary about childhood obesity for the BBC. He approached the subject assuming obesity in children was the result of a mix of genetics, personal responsibility and urban planning – by which he means the alarming prevalence in modern towns and cities of fast-food shops. By the end of the process, he reveals, his preconceptions had been blown away.
“Exercise is a separate problem, it has nothing to do with weight gain,” he says today. “Childhood obesity is a problem entirely of industrially prepared, pre-packed foods. So the documentary turned my understanding on its head.”
More recently, he filmed Irresistible: Why We Can’t Stop Eating, currently streaming on BBC iPlayer, and found himself astonished all over again at how invasive additives have become. “Every single contributor we filmed completely blew my mind,” he sighs. “I had no idea big companies were paying neuroscientists to put people in brain scanners to optimise the reward from food.”
It sounds like science fiction, but in fact experts working for some of the world’s largest and most profitable businesses have been putting human guinea pigs into scanners to monitor how some combinations of foods and additives light up the reward centres of our brains “like a furnace”. “So that’s why I go back to the freezer to get the tub of ice cream back out,” continues Van Tulleken.
Such addictive behaviour, encouraged by the food industry, is why 12% of British children aged two to ten are now obese.
“It’s incredibly sophisticated science and it’s very good science – it’s just done with the purpose of making money,” he tells me.
Despite this, Van Tulleken, father to three young daughters, is reluctant to point the finger of blame at individuals or firms. Do any of them feel guilty, I wonder, about taking such a fundamental human need and, essentially, weaponising it?
“I have many dear friends who work in the food and alcohol industries who helped me understand how the companies work,” he says. “Of more than 100 interviews I’ve done with insiders, I think I’ve met two cynics who were doing harm and knew they were doing harm.
“So, no, I don’t think they do feel guilty and I don’t think they should feel guilty. If there’s a baddie in my book, it’s not the food industry, they’re just doing what all companies do, trying to make money, it’s the politicians who failed to regulate the system and have taken money from the food industry.”
All the push-back against Ultra-Processed People, he tells me, has come from those with conflicts of interest; scientists, academics and charities with food industry funding. “The food industry has been incredibly friendly. They’ve showered me with money – I haven’t taken any of it – McDonald’s invited me to become an ambassador [he also declined].
“But if you’re doing research on human nutrition, taking money from a soft drinks company or a chocolate company… those are the people that are the problem.”
But what about the growing world population – now more than eight billion? Hasn’t the food industry prevented catastrophe by keeping calories affordable enough to prevent hunger?
Not so much, apparently.
“The food industry says, ‘We’re solving hunger and creating food security for millions or billions of people’. But when it comes to hunger, what we see is that obesity, hunger and malnutrition are found not just in the same communities, but in the same households and often even in the same body,” explains Van Tulleken. “The foods that drive weight gain also create hunger. So they’re not solving hunger. Hunger is a very complex phenomenon and you solve it by feeding people real, nutritious food.
“For a long time, we’ve had an excess of calories. But the calories aren’t the sole issue – they’re marketed in ways that it’s very hard to stop eating them.
“We have a growing number of hungry people in this country, especially children, and yet the highest levels of childhood obesity in history.”
As for global food security, he is equally dismissive of industry claims.
Cutting down rainforests to grow soy to feed to animals we then eat is fantastically inefficient, he says. Plus, as we know, without the rainforests, huge areas suffer drought and subsequent soil erosion.
“It erodes biodiversity, it’s the second leading cause of carbon emissions, it’s massively dependent on agrochemical inputs,” the scientist continues.
“One of the things that gets thrown at me is that I’m being anti-growth, I’m anti-capitalist, and I’m neither. The food industry costs the economy, at the lowest estimate, around £100billion. That’s in terms of lost wages and the bill for the NHS.”
In fact, no matter how cheap it might seem over the counter or at the checkout, we’ll be paying the true price many times over in the long term, he states.
“So food is unaffordably expensive. It’s really harmful to the planet and is demonstrably very harmful to the point where it’s overtaking cigarettes as the leading cause of addiction.” Food addiction and obesity are more likely to affect poorer people. “Millions of us are essentially forced to eat processed foods because it’s what we can afford, it’s all we have time to prepare, it’s around us in the petrol station or the school canteen,” Van Tulleken sighs.
“We’re a way off the sort of major class action lawsuits used against big tobacco, but they’re in the pipeline.
“Rotten teeth are the leading cause of elective admissions for kids to hospital in the UK, and anyone who’s had a toothache will understand the distress that goes with it.
“Tooth decay is caused by sugary sweets and soft drinks – not anything else. So that’s where we’re going to see the lawsuit.”
The Royal Institution’s famous Christmas Lectures were conceived by the physicist and chemist Michael Faraday in 1825 and have been an annual occurrence ever since. Since 1966, they have been broadcast on television, making them the world’s oldest science TV series, and have previously been delivered by the likes of Sir David Attenborough, Heinz Wolff and Baroness Susan Greenfield.
This year, they will be shown on December 29, 30 and 31 on BBC4 then repeated on BBC iPlayer.
Van Tulleken promises to “delve deep into our guts” to reveal the latest science around what happens inside our bodies when we eat, showing how it can have a massive impact on our bodies and our brains.
He’ll bring the science to life through a series of demos, guest appearances, festive food hacks and explosive surprises.
“We have this big team of scientists here trying to develop some experiments where we can reveal how the food works and how it’s engineered,” he adds.
“It’s really had us scratching our heads, it’s such a challenge showing the millions of pounds that goes into optimising every product. There are going to be explosions and we’re going to process some food and reveal the molecular chemistry.”
So what are the solutions to our current dilemma?
Regulators, government committees, academics, charities and researchers first need to be stripped of financial conflicts, he says. Then we need better food labelling.
“I’ve been very reluctant to talk about taxes because I don’t want to increase the price of food for people,” Van Tulleken adds. “But I do think the worst foods need progressive taxes that are ring-fenced and are used to make good food cheaper.
“I would start with marketing restrictions, get the cartoon characters off the packets, get warning labels on the packets, then stop food with the warning labels being sold in schools, and so on.
“Taxes are part of the picture, but you have to do it in a way that will not increase the food bill for low-income families.”
It’s still too early to say whether ultra-processed foods are a contributing factor to rising rates of gastrointestinal cancer, especially in young people, but since we’re all smoking less and food is what goes in your gastrointestinal tract, it’s not a “bad bet”.
“The stuff you put in the lungs causes lung cancer. It would not surprise me if the stuff we put in our gut is causing the increase in bowel cancer,” he says.
“There will be other things in the mix, but I think we should be precautionary because we also know what the diet looks like that doesn’t cause cancer – fresh fruit, veg, legumes.”
How optimistic is he of change?
“In the mid 1950s, we proved beyond all doubt that tobacco products caused lung cancer, no one doubted it. And effective regulation came in during the second decade of the 21st century, so I am an optimist in the long term,” Van Tulleken adds.
“The consumer-facing marketing budget of the biggest food company is somewhere between $10billion to $20billion per year. So things probably won’t change in my lifetime, but I’ve got to be an optimist, otherwise, why get out of bed in the morning?”
Ultra-Processed People by Chris van Tulleken (Cornerstone, £10.99) is out now. Visit expressbookshop.com or call Express Bookshop on 020 3176 3832. Free UK P&P on orders over £25. Watch Chris Van Tulleken’s Royal Institution Christmas Lectures on BBC4 at 9pm on December 29, 30 and 31 and also on BBC iPlayer
