Chris Van Tulleken tells Chris Evans how ultra-processed food 'tells your body lies'

Virgin Radio

22 Sep 2023, 12:45

In his book, Chris Van Tulleken examines the impact of ultra-processed foods on our health and weight. He joined the Chris Evans Breakfast Show with cinch to talk about it. 

Ultra-Processed People: Why Do We All Eat Stuff That Isn’t Food… and Why Can’t We Stop? is out now, and in it the broadcaster and practising NHS doctor looks into the increased risk of serious health problems like cardiovascular disease and dementia, and the effects on children. 

Doctor Chris explained: “We've been growing in one direction, but we're also stunted. So, the most important people in this discussion are young people. UK children are the heaviest in any equivalent country. We’re as heavy as US children. But they're also, at the age of five, that much shorter. So 10 centimetres, more than two inches, shorter than our equivalents in Scandinavia, places like Holland. In Bulgaria, children at the age of five are two inches taller. So if you put a class of British five year olds next to a class of European five year olds, you could spot the British ones just by looking at them.”

He continued: “The soft drinks industry funded this idea that if you drink fizzy pop, you can run it off afterwards. And that's why all sporting events that you see are sponsored by the soft drinks industry. So the food industry has a stranglehold on the science and the way we understand it.”

Ultra-processed food makes up 60 percent of the average diet in the UK and USA. The doctor explained: “What we're pretty sure, is that if you live a very, very active lifestyle, you don't burn very many more calories than if you're very, very sedentary. And there's loads of data, we've got data going back to the 90s about that. So, inactivity is a huge health problem, exercise is extremely good for you, but it won't be associated with significant weight loss.”

He added; “The evidence that this food causes weight gain obesity, and this is the primary cause of weight gain and obesity, is now very strong.”

Speaking more about ultra-processed foods, he said: “It tells your body lies. So, non-nutritive sweeteners or artificial sweeteners, if you put sweet taste in the mouth and sugar never arrives, that's really stressful and confusing for your body. And we're starting to understand that maybe why the World Health Organisation is now saying that non-nutritive sweeteners are not better than sugar, metabolically, and they don't help with weight loss.” 

Chris - known for presenting Operation Ouch on CBBC with his identical twin brother, Dr Xand - added: “The problem is, we took the sugar out of our food, we did a sugar tax, and now children the age of my youngest, three-year-olds in this country drink on average a whole can of artificially sweetened drinks every single day. That's the average. So we've replaced the sugar with molecules that are certainly not any better.”

On what needs to be done, he said: “Individual change is much less important than structural change. We have to limit the influence of industry over policy. We have to get them out of the room. At the moment the industry virtually write our food policy. 

“And then we need to label the food. We need to interrupt the marketing, especially to children.”

During his chat with Chris, the doctor also spoke about how he experimented by eating an 80 percent ultra-processed food diet for a month. Read about the results here.

Ultra-Processed People is out now.

For more great interviews listen to  The Chris Evans Breakfast Show with cinch weekdays from 6:30am on Virgin Radio, or catch up on-demand here.