Goes deep on the history of eating, the biology of nutrition and addiction and the laboratory science that produced foods like maltodextrin and xanthan gum. Despite the technical material, the book is highly readable and van Tulleken — physician, scientist and popular BBC personality — writes with the confidence of a doctor who has a reassuring bedside manner ... Van Tulleken weaves in charming anecdotes about eating breakfast with his young daughters, one of whom gorges on five bowls of Cocoa Puffs, and recounts his own struggle to complete the 30-day diet. Without giving away the ending, let's just say he discovers that the diet has corrupted almost every organ of his body ... Read his book and you'll never read a food label quite the same way again
The 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.
A persuasive mix of analysis and commentary ... Though broadly gauged, Dr. van Tulleken’s analysis includes one vivid episode of first-person reporting ... Given such harm, what are we to do? Dr. van Tulleken’s proposals are modest.
Chris van Tulleken bravely turns himself into a guinea pig to explore the ins and outs of ultra-processed food ... The book isn’t just a chronicle of his diet-induced damage; page after exhausting page is given over to the foundations of nutritional science—beginning with bacteria and slime munching on rocks—along with thickets of pieties so dense that they seem ultra-processed themselves ... Van Tulleken slowly sickens from his food, and the reader sickens with him ... It is not always easy to separate prudence from puritanism ... The questions that van Tulleken raises about 'addiction' are more profound ... The merely aesthetic argument against bad food may be the strongest argument of all: as van Tulleken rightly insists, there is simply something creepy about eating things whose composition we can’t comprehend.
Unsettling and deeply important ... One does feel that Tulleken is not completely resolved on the 'what to do' piece ... A tremendously important book that will help readers choose less processed, better food.
He presents a compelling case ... This is an unsettling examination of the food we eat and the industrial system that makes it. I’d promise it will change the way you eat, but I’m already rootling in the cupboard for another packet of Pringles.
An intensely personal story about eating ultra-processed food (UPF) with the authority of a scientist, all couched in a billion-year roller-coaster journey of human eating ... [An] extraordinary book ... Full of humour.
