Ultra-Processed People
A manifesto to change how you eat and how you think about the human body.It’s not you, it’s the food.We have entered a new age of eating. For the first time in human history, most of our calories come from an entirely novel set of substances called Ultra-Processed Food. There’s a long, formal scientific definition, but it can be boiled down to this: if it’s wrapped in plastic and has at least one ingredient that you wouldn’t find in your kitchen, it’s UPF.These products are specifically engineered to behave as addictive substances, driving excess consumption. They are now linked to the leading cause of early death globally and the number one cause of environmental destruction. Yet almost all our staple foods are ultra-processed. UPFisour food culture and for many people it is the only available and affordable food.In this book, Chris van Tulleken, father, scientist, doctor, and award-winning BBC broadcaster, marshals the latest evidence to show how governments, scientists, and doctors have allowed transnational food companies to create a pandemic of diet-related disease. The solutions don’t lie in willpower, personal responsibility, or exercise. You’ll find no diet plan in this book―but join Chris as he undertakes a powerful self-experiment that made headlines around the world: under the supervision of colleagues at University College London he spent a month eating a diet of 80 percent UPF, typical for many children and adults in the United States.
Stats for nerds
12recommend
25mentions
21people
2023–2026years
64% recommend36% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I refuse to eat Srirarcha due to its use of Xantan gum.
Using Xantan gum is a sign of ultra processing. It's used to change mouth-feel, which is basically lying to the body.
I always recommend people to read / listen to https://www.amazon.com/Ultra-Processed-People-Science-Behind... to understand these ingredients and what they do to our bodies.
- The reason we're conflating them is because there is a strong correlation between "highly processed food" and "designed recklessly". If you look at Carlos Monteiro (The pioneer in this domain) he operationalized it with the NOVA metric. NOVA 4 being the closest to what you're talking about:
"Industrially manufactured food products made up of several ingredients (formulations) including sugar, oils, fats and salt (generally in combination and in higher amounts than in processed foods) and food substances of no or rare culinary use (such as high-fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated oils, modified starches and protein isolates)..." [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova_classification
I highly recommend Chris van Tulleken's Ultra-processed people for a more indepth read on this fat correlation (excuse the pun :))
- I read/listened/sampled a lot this year but a few have reached out into my life and changed me at least a little bit.
- In Defense of Food - Michael Pollan. A brilliant "not diet" book about not eating crap and enjoying chocolate cake with your friends. I followed this up with Ultra Processed People to arm myself with the facts to defend not eating the junk people call food.
- The Dispossesed - Ursula Le Guin: recommended in previous year's HN what did you reads. An absolutely triumph for how it manages to portray a believable anarchist society.
- Adult Children of Alcoholics: useful to the multitude of us who grew up with an alcoholic parent(s). I used this to identify the common patterns I share with others who grew up like me. You are not alone!
- The Invention of Clouds (not finished): I really like the context of "dissenting science" which the author conveys brilliantly. Turns out Dark Academia and Bro Science are not new.
- The Art of Frugal Hedonism: Irreverant although it comes off a little pious. This book has helped me accept that I have enough stuff already.
- This was my gut response too, I reluctantly read "Ultra-Processed People" after it was mentioned by so many people, expecting to find it annoying for this exact reason.
I was actually massively surprised by how helpful a label ultra-processed can be, even if there are edge cases.
Hormel are probably adding a huge number of lab-based emulsifiers, flavour enhancers and colouring, that you definitely won't have at home. It's a pretty open and shut case about whether or not its ultra-processed.
There's of course edge cases were something we think of as healthy might be ultra-processed, and something obviously unhealthy might not be considered ultra-processed. But it's a really helpful category for identifying a whole bunch of foods that are linked with a range of negative health conditions.
- Lot of finger pointing at the author in this thread. I googled her and found this article from nine months earlier (I think), complaining that her husband does jack shit around the house: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/01/fair-play-...
Seems like the more boring but more real story here is that this mom is really struggling to hold her career together and give her kids the care she clearly wishes she could because her husband is being lazy. To the haters in the thread: I think this article can be read as "avoiding UPFs is completely unrealistic for authors trying to establish themselves while functionally raising a baby and a toddler by themselves". Which, even as a perpetual proponent of the anti-UPF book "Ultra-Processed People," I kind of understand.
I get a lot of pride and satisfaction from being an involved dad. I do almost all of the cleaning, a fair amount of cooking, and probably 2/3 of the missing-work-because-no-childcare (and I try to put in a good amount of solo weekend time, to let my spouse catch up on work). A valuable life lesson I learned in Boy Scouts: if you're not doing about twice as much work as you think is fair, you're probably not doing enough.
- The book Ultra-Processed People by Chris van Tulleken really opened my eyes about UPF. I highly recommend it. Here is a video of him delivering a lecture at the royal institution about the topic: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=j1oOoYnCfJs
I don't think adding kombu to dashi would count as UPF according to the book's definition.
