Dr. Chris van Tulleken
Appearances
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
We now have these for ultra processed food and negative health outcomes.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
I can't think of anything other than maybe asbestos that has that same hazard ratio or odds ratio, however you want to calculate it in epidemiological terms, in terms of the magnitude of harm it causes. What we see with UPF, depending on the outcome you look at, is we see increases of times 1.5, times 2, times 3. So big increases in absolute risk. Exactly the kind of risks that we accept
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
for many, many other links between, you know, let's say poor sleep quality and early mortality, for example. So cigarettes, we see enormous deltas, but we, you know, ultra processed food, it's smaller because diet related disease has many, it's very causally dense. And there are lots of different ways that dietary patterns affect you.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
So one of the really important things to say is when we look at those hazard ratios and different studies report this in different ways, Almost all of the epidemiological evidence has made adjustments for dietary pattern and for nutrient profile. So if we look at this was a study, a really well reported study done by one of my PhD students, Sam Dickin. He's now not a PhD student.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
He's now leading this update trial that I was telling you about. So Sam did a review of the evidence, this is in 2021, and looked across at whether or not the epidemiological studies controlled for dietary pattern. And they almost all do. Going back to your question about how much ultra processed food increases your risk of a particular health outcome.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
One of the things is that in those epidemiological studies, adjustments are made for salt, fat, sugar, fiber, and dietary pattern. Now, the logic of doing that is you're trying to go, is processing itself playing a role? And we have lots and lots of evidence that factors other than those nutrients now are playing a role.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
It's not simply a deficiency of fruit and vegetables or an excess of salt, but of course, one of the ways that ultra-processed food harms you is because it is incredibly high in salt, saturated fat, sugar, energy density. It has a high glycemic index. And so all of those things, when you adjust for them, they dilute essentially the effect.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
But the overall effect of the food on your body will have all of those different factors coming to bear on your health. So the questions you're asking are really... complex epidemiological questions.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
You do, but it's really worth saying, Mark, if someone said to me, ultra processed food is only harmful because of its salt, sugar, and fat content and its energy density, I would go, you know what? I would buy that as maybe 80% of the harms. If you want to say a hundred, we can still do business. No problem. So long as you're enthusiastic
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
about improving justice in the food system, improve, improving the equity of access to food, improving life for disadvantaged populations about regulating corporate power. If you want to do it, like the thing is what, what you notice is the regulations of corporate power.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
But it's, It's the people who say, oh, it's all sugar, salt, and fat. When you say, well, okay, let's talk about progressive sugar taxation, you don't hear those same voices calling for that. You don't hear those voices calling for strong marketing restrictions on foods that are high in sugar, salt, and fat. To some extent, the ultra-processed
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
What it tells us is that food processing is important. I mean, we know that processing affects human physiology. Are we saying that the only way that ultra-processed food harms you is not through sugar, salt and fat? I mean, that would be absurd. What I would say, the simplest way of understanding it,
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
is that the ultra processing, which includes the marketing, the coloring, the texture effects, the physical processing, thermal chemical processing, that is the stuff that enables and allows you to eat so much of the sugar, salt, and fat. Because no one eats sugar, salt, and fat from the bowl on the table. It's the processing. So it's a different matrix. Yeah, it's a different matrix.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
There is no definition in law in a lot of places that's widely agreed of what food is, but I think the idea that it's- Well, there's a Webster's Dictionary definition I'm going by.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
Right. And should nourish us. Exactly. And the purpose of food should be to support health and growth. And that's not what UPF does. So the definition, you can look it up. It's housed, I've got it in front of me. It's housed on the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization website. So this is not... a definition agreed on by a single academic group promoting their work.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
This is a definition that UNICEF use, the World Health Organization in some context use, the UN use, many governments around the world use, and then research groups at Cambridge, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Oxford, UCL, and so on. So the NOVA classification divides food into four groups. Group one is these minimally processed foods, things like an oyster or an apple.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
Obviously you haven't processed at all, you eat them raw. But minimally processed foods includes things like, you know, rice. You've husked it or grains. You know, it's gone through a degree of processing. Pastas are minimally processed food. But they're usually single ingredient and you can eat them whole or you can boil them. Frozen vegetables.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
Exactly. So that's minimally processed. Then we have processed foods, which would be canned or bottled things, tins of fish. They're processed, but these are processed using traditional methods and there's not a lot of financial growth in processed foods. So we have number one, minimally processed. Nova two is kitchen ingredients. So things like vinegar, salt, oil, spices, things like this.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
And then group four. And then so processed foods is mixtures of one and two. That's how it's defined. So you take some broccoli, you pour olive oil all over it and you fry it, you add some salt. Now you've got a group three processed food. So you can make Nova group three foods at home when you bake a cake. That's a Nova group three food. You've combined groups one and two.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
Nova Group 4 is ultra-processed foods. When you say the term ultra-processed foods, that is what you mean, and you mean a particular definition. So you hear the whole time, oh, the definition isn't agreed on. The definition is agreed on. You may not like it, but it is agreed on. People may not agree about its utility, but it exists.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
And it's long, but it describes products that are formulations of ingredients that have at least some ingredients that are purely of industrial use, and they contain cosmetic additives. So when you cook at home, you don't use artificial sweeteners, colours, humectants, foaming agents, bulking agents, anti-bulking agents. You just cook with groups one and two.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
So UPF can only be made by an industry. And importantly, its purpose is profit. And it is marketed. So even if you go and buy food coloring at home, you're still not making UPF because your purpose isn't to make profit.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
The definition was invented to test the hypothesis that industrially processed foods affected human health in ways beyond the ways that domestic cooking does. And it's done that robustly. What the hypothesis doesn't say is that that ammonium phosphate or the soy lecithin is harmful. Those things are proxies for ultra processed food.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
They're a sign that your food has been designed in a system that is about profit, not health. We can argue there are certain classes of additives, and I think you've had some very sophisticated thoughts on this and have spoken a lot about this. There are some classes of additives I think have quite good evidence for health harms.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
There are others where, who knows, a bit of potassium sorbate probably doesn't do you any harm. There's lots of things like acetate or propionate your body makes anyway. A lot of the colouring probably doesn't do much harm. There's natural flavouring. These are signs that food is industrially processed. So taking that definition...
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
The question is then to go, if due for whatever reason, does that definition of food, do products that meet that definition cause negative health outcomes? And so we then have a set of criteria, as you very well know, to evaluate evidence where we go, are we just mistaking products Food that's eaten by people who live in disadvantage, people with low incomes, people who also smoke and drink.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
Are we mistaking food that's signifying a poor lifestyle for food that's actually causing harm? And of course, we now have across, I mean, we can go through this in detail, the Bradford Hill criteria. I would say ultra processed food has more than met the threshold for causality where we can say with confidence it causes negative health outcomes.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
And we have experimental evidence, we have epidemiological evidence and so on.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
I wondered if you were going to... I have them in front of me, actually. I spend a lot of my academic life and my broadcasting life critiquing people who don't declare and who do declare significant conflicts of interest. The interesting thing about that debate is there was very little scientific merit to what Astrup was saying in terms of the arguments he was making were not good faith.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
So he would set up propositions that no one else was setting up in order that they would be easy to knock down. So he was setting up straw men saying it's not a useful policy instrument.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
No one is saying we should take the evidence around ultra processed food and just directly apply it to policy any more than we should say, you know, we have good evidence that alcohol is harmful, so we should ban alcohol. We should go back to prohibition. I mean, no, that's not how you use scientific evidence. You use it with nuance. It's a strange debate and it did not feel good faith.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
He also misunderstood some basic epidemiology, which I think was embarrassing for him.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
The ultra processing, which includes the marketing, the coloring, the texture effects, the physical processing, thermal chemical processing, that is the stuff that allows you to eat so much of the sugar, salt, and fat.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
Let me try and break this down as I see it. A huge amount of the harm of ultra processed food comes from the very high levels of salt, sugar and fat and just calories. But here's the thing, when you cook at home you also cook with salt, sugar and fat. If you make a chocolate brownie. I mean, you just gave me your, your recipe for chocolate, your, you know, the Mark Hyman chocolate cookies.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
Now let's say we match them. You, let's say you really let your hand slip with the salt because you, you understand how food processing works. So you make salty, sugary, fatty cookies because that's what we all love. In fact, they're exactly as salty and sugary and fatty as the big brand you also mentioned. What you aren't able to do is to engineer your cookies, so I'll have three of them.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
Even if you cook with as much salt, sugar, and fat, because you haven't put people in MRI scanners in order to develop your cookies, and we know that the big food companies use brain scanners to do product development, you haven't employed 100 PhD nutritionists to optimize every product through 1,000 focus groups over three decades. We also know you won't use as much salt, sugar, and fat.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
So it's per bite of the industrial cookie, I get more salt, sugar, and fat. But because of the processing, the marketing, the coloring, the texture effects, the glycemic index, I eat more of it food. So I get more salt, sugar, fat per mouthful, and I take more mouthfuls. And that's what the...
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
those who resist the definition can't seem to grasp is the salt, sugar, and fat are part of the ultra-processing. They are their part and parcel. So in terms of what it teaches us, look, it tells us the products regulate.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
It tells us that what we see with diet-related disease, and we see this in natural experiments all over the world, when populations start eating an ultra-processed diet, that's when their risk of obesity, metabolic disease, kidney disease, dementia, anxiety, depression, cancers, it all starts to go up at the same time. So
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
So it tells us the focus of policy needs to be on an industrially processed product. The difficulty is not that it would be wrong to put warning labels on UPF. It has a loophole and it would be legally hard to do. The loophole is this. The companies are getting more and more sophisticated.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
at selling us very high salt, fat, sugar foods that are very delicious, they're very soft, they're high glycemic index, but they don't contain the additives or they use natural additives. And so it functions like ultra processed food, but it doesn't quite meet the threshold. So it's not that the definition is too broad, it's the definition is now too narrow.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
So we can give people, all dietary guidance should say avoid ultra processed food and there should be a simple working definition of that. That's what France, Belgium, Israel, Canada, as I said, that's what they all do.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
In order to label a package, my research where I am at UCL and we've partnered with the Pan American Health Organization with WHO to do this, we can show that more than 99% of ultra processed food has excessive calories, saturated fat, salt, and sugar. In order to regulate the food, you can actually just- It's like a proxy. Yeah, you can, it's fine. Like we're going to miss 1%.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
But it's very hard to make addictive food that isn't either very energy dense or fatty or salty or sugary. And most of the time, it's all of them. Now, the front of package label you talk about, the problem is that I'm in the weeds of this, okay, Mark? So I can be boring. We could do like a four-hour special on nutrient profile models and how to best capture unhealthy food.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
There's no perfect way of doing it, but you use tight levels for salt, fat, and sugar, and then you put a proper warning label on. So at the moment on your US proposal, there's going to be high, medium, low for saturated fat, salt, and sugar. It's not a bad way of doing it, but the low, you get low for added, well, for added sugars, and it should be free sugars, but that's a separate thing.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
But you get low if it's 5% sugar. Now, WHO say... And UK governments say you shouldn't eat more than 5% of your calories from free sugar at all. You'll get health benefits all the way down to 5% if you can get it down. So saying that 5% is low when that's at the upper edge of what WHO recommend for a daily intake, it feels lax.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
I think you know what I think about this. So what you then end up with is products that, and we have these in the, so we have the traffic lights in the UK, and you have a product with a red, green, and an amber. Now, what do you do at that traffic light? Is it good? Is it bad? In South America, Central America, they've got a really good system where they just use black octagonal warning labels.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
Like a stop sign. It's a stop sign. Once you're over the recommended daily maximum, you get a black octagon. But the most important thing, right, is the warning labels don't do much. For every policy problem, you need five policies to solve it. And every policy should be solving five solutions. This is the sort of public health maxim. So you can't just stick octagons on.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
If a product has an octagon, the monkey has to come off the box. If it's got three octagons, it's got to have progressive taxation. You just cited some of the economic data around how much this is costing. So we don't want to make food more expensive for people who are disadvantaged, but you have to tax the worst products. If a product has an octagon, it cannot be marketed to children.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
It can't have an online or TV ad. The warning label does nothing. What you have to do is find a really tight way of defining unhealthy food. The food you are trying to label is ultra-processed. You use your fats, sugar, salt, energy thresholds to label the UPS.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
Chris Van Tulleken wants to ban food for poor people is the way the headline gets written. If you put me in charge of the FDA, I'll tell you what, the most important thing So I'm very careful how I use my voice. I am ostentatiously a man with privilege of a particular age. You know, I'm educated. I'm insulated from the problem insofar as anyone is.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
The most important thing is the goal of policy is not to reduce people's consumption of a particular product or food. The goal is to improve justice and to improve affordability and choice in the food system. If people want to eat ultra-precious food, to some extent, I don't care what people do. I'm a big believer in freedom and choice. I like freedom of expression.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
I do think that corporate free speech, when it's misleading, is better characterized as propaganda and corruption. So in terms of how you do it... So free speech is good, propaganda, no. Lying, no. This is not rocket science. So the most important is you want to make things. So leave the taxation on the table for a bit. The first thing is warning labels.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
I think for the most part, we actually have a lot of data and the traction that this is getting in the States is, and we're seeing the same thing in the UK. I mean, my book has been peculiarly popular for a kind of almost like quite a detailed science and food policy book, I think because people are at a point of maximum fury So this is all about communication.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
If I was running the FDA, I'd say, look, I don't think you want to be predated on by transnational corporations. Many of them aren't even American. It's not like they're all paying loads of tax in America to clean up the plastic and the obesity crisis.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
Nestle's a Swiss company and... Well, many of them aren't even, they're housed in other places if, you know, they're not even paying tax in those places. So framing this as protecting people from predatory corporations as improving democracy and increasing choice and taxation, yeah, I mean, you've got to be really careful you don't tax the bread and you don't tax ingredients. You know, that's...
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
completely sensible. You also need to make sure if you do have to, I mean, food is already taxed. You just need to shift, slightly change the proportions and change the tax on the healthy stuff.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
It's like saying, you know, just if you have one line of cocaine and one cigarette once a month, once a week, it's not going to do you any harm. But, you know, the great difficulty about cocaine, cigarettes, alcohol, heroin, they're a little bit more-ish. You know, you tend to want that second one.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
You know, you've alluded, and I think you and I, There's a community of scientists who have very aggressively opposed what I'm saying. I want to say, I sit on two World Health Organization expert working groups. I work at a big university as an associate professor in the UK. I'm not a sort of fringe lunatic. I work with UNICEF.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
But there's a community of industry-funded academics who violently oppose this concept of UPF. What they don't want to come up with, what they never propose, is what is causing the public health crisis? Because we have had salt, sugar, and fat in our diet for a very long time. We've been processing food, as they frequently say, for hundreds of thousands of years. What happened in the mid-1970s?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
I went and spoke to Howard Moskowitz. in the 70s designing tomato sauce. And they start making lots of different recipes and putting them through focus groups. And this is adopted. Now, I've seen this in big food companies. I've spoken to, I spent a huge amount of my time writing my book, Ultra Processed People, talking to food industry insiders.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
Because the industry-funded academics critique the concept. But the people on the inside are like, oh, yeah, no, we design the food to be addictive. How else do you think – if the people at Danone are making the food that way, what are the guys at Nestle supposed to do? I mean, this is an arms race for customers. That's right. Stomach share. They call it stomach share. So they know – we know –
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
Two of the most important things they measure are how much food people eat and how fast do they eat it. And we interviewed Francis McGlone, who's head of neuroscience at Unilever, one of the world's biggest ice cream companies. And he talked about putting people in brain scanners and looking at them eating ice cream.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
And he said the orbitofrontal cortex, and I'm going to quote him directly, lit up like a furnace. So when you find, if someone listening to this is... eating ice cream out of the tub or, you know, they do this later this evening. And, you know, you get the tub out and you make yourself a little bowl and then you put the tub back in the freezer.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
And then as if drawn by some gravitational force, you find yourself back at the freezer, opening the tub again and eventually the whole tub. That's because the ice cream was invented by scientists using brain scanners. Like it's not your fault. You can't stop eating it.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
So some of the ultra processing is like how you mix together the flavors. Some of it is the focus group, some of it is the brain scanners. But part of ultra processing is suing the lawmakers who would seek to regulate you, is funding the patient group. So if we look in the UK,
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
The commercial determinants of health kind of academic framework is just asking how do profit-making entities affect our health in good ways and in bad ways? You know, we try and have a neutral perspective. In the case of food, one of the things they do is they control the entire narrative. So our government scientific advisory committee on nutrition
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
65% of members have financial relationships with companies like and including Coke and Nestle. The biggest food companies run breakfast programs and education food programs in schools. They fund our biggest food charity, the British Nutrition Foundation. Their healthy eating week last year, two years ago, was funded, was sponsored by Coca-Cola. Okay, that's the British Nutrition Foundation.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
I just, you know, you can't credibly claim to have an interest in nutrition and do these kinds of things in my strong opinion. We have our science media center who do the briefings to the press. We have patient advocacy groups. We have social media influencers. You know, there's a tight, and then from my perspective,
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
After I published the book, the first email that arrived from the food industry was not a lawsuit. It was an invitation from McDonald's to see if I'd become an ambassador for them. Here's a million dollars, Chris. Would you become an ambassador? And shut up. Well, I should say I'm proud to speak to you today, Mark, in my capacity as global menu innovation ambassador for McDonald's. Amazing.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
No, I said... I just took a position with Coca-Cola as chief science officer. Should I have disclosed that before I came on the podcast? I wanted to ask them how much money, but I couldn't risk. I can send you the email.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
A million dollars. It's so much money to me. But anyway, I did say no. I didn't want them to have an email from me going, how much are we talking here? So we used to think that cigarettes was an exceptional industry. The tobacco industry made things they know kill people and are addictive, and they do it anyway.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
Then in the mid-1980s, the cigarette industry bought the food industry, so the biggest food companies in the world, and it was Michael Moss, again, I think, who did some of the work exposing this. Philip Morris, R.J. Reynolds bought General Foods, Cross, Nabisco. They used their molecules and their product development techniques and the supply chain, to make the addictive foods.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
And now we see the same is true in automotive. We see it in fossil fuels, a perversion of academic interest, corruption of science, manipulation of policy. So exposing all this is important because it helps you re-see that Super Bowl ad where you're like, oh, it's some f... I don't know what some farmer in his kitchen stirring a pot of, you know, vegetable oil with hand chopping the potatoes.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
It's it's not like that. And I I think the public I feel the US public are. I mean, look, why are you popular? You know, you're not you're saying all this and people are up for this, that you have an asymmetry of power. You aren't as powerful as Nestle, Mondelez, and Kraft Heinz, but I think truth gives you enormous power.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
The way your body interacts with 1,000 calories of almonds is somewhat different to the way your body interacts with 1,000 calories of Coke in terms of appetite. Humans don't just choose to eat the 2,500 calories per day. We're guided to it in the same way our internal physiology guides us to breathe a certain amount and to drink a certain amount of fluid. It's the same with food intake.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
It's very odd, this idea that humans can eat to numbers.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
We used to do that for drugs. And then we realized none of the drugs worked. And so we started regulating the drugs. But this is the system of food additive regulation. So I put a chapter in the book on the US system because- Someone said to me, food additives are not really regulated. Someone I trusted. And I was like, well, that's not true. Of course they're regulated. You've got an FDA.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
So I call up Emily Broadlieb, who's at Harvard. She runs the Food Law Policy Center there. And she's like, yeah, no, there's not any real, you know, you have this self-determination system where the companies can decide for themselves. It's astounding. Yeah. So you do have, no one knows how many additives you have because they're also not all formally registered. So yeah, it is, it's a mess.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
It's a mess.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
In terms of what the industry responds to all that is, they say, well, you can't prove harm. The data on emulsifiers, okay, you've got some animal experiments, you've got a bit of human data, you've got some epidemics. There's actually quite a lot of data on some of these emulsifiers now, but you haven't really proven it.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
But the burden of proof should not fall to independent academics to say that adding synthetic molecules to food is harmful. The burden of proof should be the other way around and that the molecules should have to go through a proper stringent regulatory process. We do have a much more stringent process in Europe and the UK, but it's still not very strict.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
So we don't assess molecules in combination. We don't often assess the right dosage. And when it comes to food additives, we don't look at long-term effects. We don't have any assays for effects on the microbiome or obesity, for example. So I think one of the things we know is that we can make very good, safe, cheap food without all these additives.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
And their primary function is to save the company's money. We did a paper last year on financialization of the food industry. So instead of working with nutritionists, I worked with a lot of economists. And we just used the food industry's own financial data and compared it to their claims.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
Because all the big companies will say that they're mainly interested in reducing carbon emissions, cleaning up plastic, improving public health, improving the nutritional profile of the product portfolio and so on, you know, improving women and children's labor rights. And so you just say, OK, well, we've got all these claims. How does this stack up when they make money? What do they spend it on?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
They spend it on share buybacks and dividend payouts. So even as Coca-Cola claim, for example, to be trying to create a world without waste, that was their kind of strapline for a while. They had been the world's largest plastic polluter for several years in a row. The companies are very, very good at positioning themselves as being the solution to the problems that they've caused.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
And for me, the one thing, if you give me this control of the FDA, the one thing is to go, you need to be regulated and regulatory relationships are at arm's length. You know, you cannot be taking money from the people you regulate.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
That's kind of step one, if there's any progress to be made, is to stop the flow of, I would describe it as dirty money between the companies that need regulation, whether they're tobacco, alcohol or food, and those that would regulate them, whether they're formal regulators like the FDA or they're informal regulators like charities and activists and people like you.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
In my book, I do not advise anyone to stop eating ultra-precious food. In fact, at the beginning, there's an invitation to the reader that they should eat UPF while they read the book. I'd say, you know, eat more of it almost. Oh boy, I never did that. I read the book. I didn't expect... I suspect you read it at a different level to many other readers.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
But what had happened to me on this four-week diet is around week three, I had a chat with a colleague in Brazil. We were designing this study. And she kept saying a thing that I've heard you say before. It's not food, Chris. It's an industrially processed edible substance. She said this kind of again and again. It was like it was an annoying tick.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
I sat down that evening to eat my favorite fried chicken brand. I got a little bucket of it. I was so looking forward to it and I couldn't finish it. She had made it disgusting. And this is the gift I want to give the reader is the food will be your greatest teacher. Eat the food, lay it out on a china plate.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
You know, if you think you really love this, put it on a china plate, get a knife and fork. This is not food that stands up to scrutiny. By the end of the book, I don't promise this. I'm not selling anyone a...
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
a solution, but if you're addicted to something, we have pretty good evidence that this works with cigarettes, that first of all, engaging with the substance, not forbidding it is helpful, but understanding the incentives of those who are selling you the substance is important.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
Understanding the tobacco industry massively helps smokers and understanding the food industry really helps people who are addicted to UPF. Mark, you've written some stuff on UPF where I was like, has he copied me? And then I realized you'd written it first. So then I was like, man, he's going to think I've copied him. It's okay.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
So you can read anything that either of us have written or there's other great stuff out there if you can't afford to buy a book. You know, read about the food and eat it. And you can do little experiments. One of my favorite things is get your tube of, you know, saddle shaped chip. I can never mention brands in the UK. Pringles, Pringles, Pringles. Pringles. Pringles. I'll mention it.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
Pringles or similar. So you get your Pringles or similar.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
Get in touch with Mark's lawyers. I also get, I'm getting legal attacks constantly from the food industry. It takes up a huge amount of my time. And you think it'll be fun. And actually, I want to talk about- Oh, they come after you.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
It's how you know. It's one of the ways I think you know you're saying the right thing. But get your Pringles, get them out of the tube or other brands, crunch them up into a powder, put the powder in a bowl and eat it with a spoon. And that way you will discover if you really love Pringles. Because part of that ultra processing is the hyperbolic paraboloid shape.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
Part of the ultra processing is the mythology, the branding on the tube. And once you've reduced them to a powder, it's a really good experiment to do.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
It is all like that. I've gone back. My wife and I were on a long, long car journey a couple of years ago and we just stopped at a McDonald's kind of, you know, as, as many of us are in the habit of doing, I mean, I know I'm embarrassed saying this, I'm a physician, whatever we did.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
And not, we were like, Oh, now we know about, we just couldn't, I'm embarrassed that we just threw it all away and stopped and got some groceries. But yeah,
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
it's not food that stands up to scrutiny it's not complex food it is all almost equally salty and sweet so the other thing to remember is your breakfast cereal is as salty as your microwave lasagna and your pizza is as sugary as your pudding it's all like there's quite a straightforward formula of like acid salt sweet fat plus the additives and drip out all the real food keep it cheap
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
It's weird stuff. So I'm very conscious as well. I don't like telling people what to do. I'm quite a weak, fallible person myself. So I also don't want to put myself on some pedestal where if I am snapped going into McDonald's, anyone's going to see me. But what I can say, at the end of my diet, I genuinely do not want any of it anymore. I eat it to be polite.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
Are you ever in this position where you're at some thing? You have probably never had this, but I'll be at a friend's house and, you know, some parents at my kid's school and I just don't want to be that guy. So I'm like, yeah, sure. I'll have some chips and dip. Yeah, absolutely. I'm...
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
It's exactly my experience. And there were two, part of it was Fernanda going, it's not food, it's industrially produced edible substance. And part of it was, it was Nicola Vina, who you may have spoken to. She's a food addiction scientist. And she said, it's not that the food would be beige. It's that a lot of this food, if it wasn't dyed, would be gray. And I thought that was amazing.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
I'm like, oh, it would be, wouldn't it? Once you start looking at the pastes and powders. So that was very powerful. But no, I went cold. I went completely, I just stopped wanting it. Oh, turkey, what happened? So there are all these things that people don't report on. The food is so salty that you get very, you know, you eat it in the evening and then you have to drink all this fluid.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
So then if you're a man in your 40s, you're kind of up all night peeing as well. And then you're exhausted and you get constipated. I mean, you get your salt and your lifestyle and you're angry and tired and stressed. And so you get up in the middle of the night and then you're eating more because you're tired and your cortisol level goes up. Within 48 hours of stopping, I felt massively better.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
Losing the weight took me two years. And in the end, I just fasted it down. I mean, it was grim. But if people, I mean, many of your listeners will be struggling with weight, I'm sure. I just want to say, I want to reach out and hug all of you losing. I had to lose six kilos and I have every possible advantage doing it. And it was really, really, really hard.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
So the injustice of this is it is really not people's fault. It is this food that is engineered to get around your fullness system.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
You're putting this so powerfully. And one of the things, people who object to the UPF evidence, I'm left going, just what do you think it is? We are living not just in a crisis, this is an emergency in the sense of something that needs immediate action. We can't wait to deal with this. You know, we always like, oh, this will end up costing.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
I think for a start, anyone who's watching the video, firstly, thank you for your wonderful kind words. That's a lovely introduction. I'm going to find it hard to live up to it, but I'll do my best.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
It's like, no, in the UK, it already costs the economy a hundred billion a year. And we have a tiny economy compared to the US economy. It's already, it's unaffordable in terms of its effects on the planet, plastic pollution, carbon, all the rest of it. So it's an emergency, but we've been living in the emergency for well over a decade.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
The sort of, oh, well, we need to fiddle around the edges of policy and kind of make a, you know, put a salt, fat, sugar warning on foods. It's like, no, there has to be a spectacular kind of revolutionary thinking and really imaginative policy proposals. I have to say, lawsuits are going to be the way forward. So we've seen, and I think you've helped with this, there's been a complaint...
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
A 16-year-old boy, he was 16 at the time, now he's 19. It's not a class action yet against some of the biggest, all the major food companies you can name, brought by a small group of lawyers who I've been speaking with. I think you've spoken maybe with them too.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
Lawsuits are going to force discovery and that's going to expose documentation that whatever all the conflicted academics say about the evidence around UPF, it's just going to be the company documents that are like, yeah, no, we invented all this stuff so that people couldn't stop eating it. It's all going to be there, black and white.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
Anyone who has any doubt about the effects of ultra-precious food need only look at the video feed for the podcast right now and sort of put Mark and my heads next to each other and go, that's four weeks of ultra-precious. I used to look like you.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
I mean, the complaint you can download, I'll send you a link that your listeners can download because it's a great, great, great summary of the evidence. You know, lawyers are incredible at assimilating evidence. I was surprised they decided to pick ultra processed food.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
To me, the easy case to start with would be sugar, that it is an obscenity that a can of high sugar cola doesn't have a warning about tooth decay on it. So I'd keep it to that straightforward. No one disputes that sugary drinks rot teeth.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
It's like these kids, none of these kids have teeth. And it's a- And we think, oh, it's only teeth, but it's like this is a major course of sickness and suffering in low-income communities and across the United Kingdom. My country famously struggles with its teeth and has for a long time because of our sugar intake. So that to me would be the...
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
the easier avenue, but the complaint as they've made it is very persuasive. Whether it will win, I don't know. I mean, the first cigarette lawsuits didn't win either, but eventually, you know, there's a drip, drip, drip. And I think there's more and more attorneys general that are focusing on this.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
I did it because my clinical work is I treat patients with complex infections at the Hospital for Tropical Disease in London, part of University College London Hospital. But my academic work is food systems and nutrition.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
You've been a doctor for 40 years. I've been a doctor for over 20 years and it looks more like 40 years. But it's almost kind of in the UK, it's almost within my time. I mean, you asked this great question.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
But you asked this great question, is it the boogeyman? And you kind of threw that question away. But it's such an important question because it's like, I sometimes, I duck and dive on this because I don't want to be a UPF purist. I don't think anyone's saying like it's the only thing. But when you ask it that starkly, it's like, yes. Yes, ultra processed food is the boogeyman.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
And anyone who says, now some people say, oh, the mechanisms of harm are disputed. Here's the difficulty with the way in which ultra processed food harms you. The barrel is so full of fish, it's hard to hit the right one. Is it the softness? Well, it's all soft. Is it the energy density, the salt, the fat, the sugar? Is it the emulsifier content? Is it the marketing?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
We know marketing drives excessive consumption. Is it the trans fats? Is it some other property of the RBD oils? Is it, and on and on and on. It's every aspect of every product has been optimized so you can't stop eating it. So I want to be clear, it is the boogeyman and it's the thing that needs to be tackled.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
And the two are linked because many of my patients are from very low-income countries where we see that nutrient deficiencies and poor nutrition drives a huge number of poor health outcomes in the global north and in the global south. So there's an overlap. In fact, I did this experiment.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
The framing, you know, my sister-in-law, Dolly, is an academic in the UK at Cambridge, and she's all about, she's a food systems academic, she's about how you frame the problem. So she's aligned in the UK, she has been with the political right, unusually for a public health academic.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
And she's all about, look, if you frame this stuff as justice, as freedom, as choice, and also as creating business opportunities for small and media-sized businesses, so that the political economic right hates monopolies, monopolies are terrible. They're terrible for the economy. They're terrible for everyone. And at the moment, you've got oligopolies of food producers.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
You've got really a huge amount of global grain being traded by a tiny handful of companies. This very small number of crops traded by a very small number of companies.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
So, and this is something, this comes up a lot in the discussion is going, well, a lot of vegan food is ultra processed. Do you want to ban that too? And it's like, whoa, no one, no one's saying we're going to ban all ultra processed food. No one's saying it's all... That's another really important thing. It's not all equally bad, but it is all... almost without exception, bad.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
And the vegan stuff is often made by the same companies that are producing enormous quantities of meat, often in quite inhumane, unethical, unsustainable ways. Like Tyson has just bought huge amounts of these alternative meat company stocks and shares. Yeah.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
The experiment was, we filmed it for a BBC documentary, but the reason we did it, we got ethics approval because I was the first participant. I was the kind of pilot patient, if you like, in a big clinical trial that I think it's the largest randomized controlled trial of ultra-processed food versus minimally processed food in free-living subjects. And this is in process right now.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
If you're kind of really concerned about the ethics and you want to eat a good vegan diet, eating an ultra processed food that's made by Cargill or Tyson, even if it's vegan, it will probably be made, can only exist because it's made from the byproducts of the animal feed industry. So it's not, I feel those arguments don't have heft. There's a way of eating ethically and sustainably.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
If you want to be vegan, if you want to eat meat, none of it requires nutrition. ultra-processed food. Amazing. Wow.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
Yeah. If you want a strong military and a good football team, you've got to fix the food system. You know, it doesn't matter where you're, but if you care about social justice, you've got to fix it. It all points that everyone's on the same team here. We all live on the same planet. It's such a joy speaking to you, Mark. I feel so full of energy after we communicate on email or anything.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
Instagram at Dr. Chris, Dr. D-O-C-T-O-R, like spelled out Chris VT, I guess. Or I'm on Twitter, this O-X on the same handle, at Dr. Chris VT. Okay, great. We'll put it on the show notes.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
This is not published. This is in process. So I can't, we, I... Now, where are we? One of my students is leading it, and I think I can't talk about any of the data, but it will be the largest randomized controlled trial of UPF ever done so far in the world in free living individuals, and I think at all, because it will be the third published randomized controlled trial of UPF.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
um because on top of the one you referenced earlier there was a study that replicated kevin hall's work in japan and now we will be the the third but it's a slightly different trial design so i was the first participant to go what changes in chris what can we measure how should we kind of design the rest of the experiment and i'll be honest kind of like kevin hall um who's the the
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
by my now very well-known investigator at the NIH who did the first randomized control trial, I was maybe not skeptical, but it seemed to me that eating what is a normal diet for four weeks would not have any big effects on my health. You know, this is, I ate 80% of my calories from ultra-processed food for four weeks. This is a diet very typical for an American teenager. This is not a weird diet.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
Right. So there were kind of three big things that happened. I gained weight, a huge amount of weight, six and a half kilos, more than six and a half kilos in four weeks. That's like 15 pounds, right? In American pounds, yeah. I would have doubled my body weight in a year if I'd kept doing it. And you referenced supersize me. I was not force feeding myself.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
So I was just eating to appetite as long as 80% of my calories came from UPF. So I was, the experience of doing it was incredibly educational. I was never full. I was never hungry. I was just sort of eating all day because that's what the food allows you to do. So weight gain is very well evidenced.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
We then did brain, we did functional MRI scans and looked at connectivity between different parts of the brain. This was sort of The most terrifying bit is we saw a massive increase in connection between the automatic behavior bits at the back of the brain in the cerebellum, the habit forming bits, and the reward addiction bits in the middle of the brain.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
And these changes were very surprising to all of us. They were very robust and they persisted for eight weeks after. And what were the changes in your brain? So we just saw huge amounts of increased connectivity between the habit bits and the reward bits. and the findings are best described as if I had developed a new addiction.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
All of the fMRI data that you generate from any experiment is hard to be really sure of what's causing what, but we saw very significant changes and it's notable they were between those two regions. And bear in mind, I was 43 when I was – it was a few years ago. I was in my mid-40s doing it.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
You know, what is – it raises the question of these kind of brain changes to children who are eating much more UPF over a more prolonged period of time. And then the other – in a way, the change I was most fascinated by – well, there were two others, but the physical change – was that we measured my satiety, my hormone response to a normal meal. So this isn't something you can fake.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
We would, at the beginning of the experiment, I went and I ate a standardized meal and we measured changes in the hormones you see, you have fullness hormones and hunger hormones, they go up, down.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
And what we see is that after eating the same standard meal at the end of the UPF diet, my fullness hormones went up much less and my hunger hormones stayed much higher. So at the end of the same meal... So the diet... is modifying your body's ability to feel full after any food. And that to me was the most kind of significant thing.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
It's not just that the food doesn't fill you up, but we think it may be having changes about the whole way you handle food and feel full at the end of meals. Really important to say, I know I'm one participant. That's why we've turned it into a big registered clinical trial funded by our research council and an independent research trust.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
And that's why we're doing it robustly with ethics permission as a registered trial. Kevin Hall is one. How many people are in that trial? There are two arms and we're doing, how many have we registered? Somewhere over 30, I think. So it's not a huge trial. It's a bit bigger than Kevin's.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
Well, of course, so the way the trial is designed is we're actually feeding, we're trying to feed people the healthiest ultra processed food versus a minimally processed diet. So our We didn't feel it was ethical for them to just eat any old ultra processed food. I think the jury is in on that evidence.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
So instead, we fed people a diet of ultra processed food that is in line with our national dietary guidance versus a minimally processed diet of the same thing. So we're trying to investigate the claim that if we make the ultra processed food as healthy as we can, does it still cause negative health outcomes? And especially, does it do that in comparison to a minimally processed diet?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
It's asking the same question in a different and hopefully more ethical way.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
you'd have the same problem. I think that there are two questions. First of all, and this has been very kind of hotly contested between people funded by the food industry and more independent scientists, is the definition of ultra processed food useful or is it just describing food that we already think is unhealthy? And there are a number of ways to answer that question.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
I think the way we currently define unhealthy food isn't working in policy terms. So whatever definition you're using, in the US you have very weak definitions of unhealthy food. It's not entirely easy to say how you define unhealthy food in the United States. You have dietary guidance, which is fairly good, and bits of it are aligned with international guidance.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
But there's nothing I can see where you go, these are a set of thresholds and criteria by which we will declare a product to be unhealthy. So for a start, when we say, is the definition useful? You have to say, well, is it useful in comparison to what? There's no question it's been incredibly powerful as a research tool. And that's what it was designed for. So the definition is set in stone.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
It went through a revision, but it's been in stone since 2018.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
France, Israel, Belgium, most South and Central American countries, Canada, give advice using the NOVA classification. And it's a nine-paragraph definition. But the definition, and it broadly describes modern, pre-packaged, pre-prepared American industrial food. And I'm sorry, I know this is an American audience here.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
And in fact, you know, many, many transnational corporations make these products. But we're talking about food wrapped in plastic made using additives. Now, the definition was never designed to be used in law to ban something or tax something. So when commentators say, oh, the definition has, it's too vague. You can't use it to define a product. Absolutely.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
And no one, I don't think anyone sensible is saying we should use this as the way of labeling food or taxing it or banning it. But the definition has had research power because it was testing a hypothesis. It was saying, is there something more to harmful food than simple levels of salt, sugar and fat?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Ultra-Processed People: How Big Food Is Rewiring Our Brains | Chris Van Tulleken
And is industrially produced food different to the food you cook at home even when you adjust for that? And so across now hundreds of research studies, I mean... Just a few years ago, for any one health outcome, there were maybe 10 to 15 longitudinal studies. We now have really more than 100 of the kind of prospective studies that we use to link cigarettes to lung cancer.