PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewThe reveal that eating a lot of junk food can, among other things, cause obesity may seem underwhelming. But because several decades of scientific research and government policy emphasized vitamins, nutrients and calories as markers of healthy food, we had a somewhat inadequate vocabulary for objecting to, say, highly processed frozen pizza ... Do people eat more when food is cheap, or do they eat more cheap food because the processing that makes it cheap tricks us into eating more? The answer to that question is murky and confounded in van Tulleken’s account ... This book is a tour of how the science of processing has allowed companies to produce goods that are no longer even faint echoes of the real food of which they are copies, and of what the evidence shows about the biology and psychology of eating in today’s world. Van Tulleken is at his best when using his own scientific expertise to help readers through otherwise unnavigable science, data and history, explaining with precision what we are actually eating.
