Ultra Processed Food (UPF) is a modern invention. It’s ‘food’ that has been (as the name suggests) heavily processed. Read an ingredient label in your pantry, refrigerator, freezer, and you’ll find them: stabilizers, emulsifiers, gums, lecithin, glucose, etc. The NOVA system classifies these foods exist along a spectrum according to the amount of processing:

• Class 1: foods found in nature like meat, fruit, vegetables, and grains
• Class 2: processed culinary ingredients like oils, lard, butter, sugar, salt, and vinegar
• lass 3: processed food that mixes class 1 and class 2 ingredients like salted nuts, smoked meat, and canned fruit
• Class 4: UPFs which are “formulations of ingredients, mostly of exclusive industrial use, made by a series of industrial processes, many requiring sophisticated equipment and technology” (33)

The world of UPF is equally fascinating and terrifying. Here’s an example. The Germans, desiring to ween themselves off of foreign oil smashed coal with steam and oxygen to turn it into carbon monoxide and hydrogen. Passing the gases over a catalyst recombined these ingredients into liquid fuel, but it left behind “slack wax” or “Gatsch,” now known as paraffin. In 1938, they figured out how to convert paraffin into fatty acids, which with the addition of glycerine, produced “Speisefett”—an edible fat. Coal oil fat. Add diacetyl, water, salt, and some beta-carotene for colour and you have coal-butter. Yummy!

Although coal-butter is now (thankfully) out of the market-place, few long-term health studies have been conducted on many of the class 4 UPFs that make up so much of our diet. Chris van Tulleken thinks it likely that UPFs are the reason for the obesity epidemic in the West. UPFs hijack the body’s natural ability to regulate caloric intake.

Once you begin to look for UPFs, you’ll find them everywhere. They’re soft, inexpensive, and ubiquitous. They give food a longer shelf-life and even prevent ice-cream from melting! They’re oh-so-tasty, that is, until you remove them from your diet. After a period of detox, UPF tastes odd and unappealing.

Ultra-Processed People is a page-turning, well researched read. The author has a medical degree from Oxford and a PhD in molecular virology. He knows what he’s talking about. If you care about what you’re putting into your body, Tulleken’s book is a must-read.

Tulleken, Chris van. Ultra-Processed People: Why We Can’t Stop Eating Food that Isn’t Food. Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 2023.