Did you watch ‘Irresistible, Why We Can’t Stop Eating‘ on BBC/iPlayer with Dr Chris van Tulleken (author of the book Ultra-Processed People)?
If not, you must! This programme is a must watch for everyone. I usually want to scream and hurl something at the telly when watching nutrition programmes on mainstream media (as they seem to focus on the wrong things in my opinion making me cringe) but this time I was glued and was actually taking notes while watching it!
Most of the things this programme covered wasn’t news to me but there were some revelations still. I loved learning about the terminology that food industry uses for their nasty tactics! The programme interviewed several former food industry insiders who revealed the strategies food manufacturers use to make their products irresistible to us. The lengths food companies go to, in order to make sure their products are the ones you will choose and come back to, over their competitors, are staggering.
It’s not just the taste they engineer to be so enticing that you can’t stop eating (‘Once you pop, you can’t stop!’), it’s also the carefully thought-through ratios of certain ingredients to create the textures that hit your brain’s pleasure spots, the design of the packaging and even the sound that opening the packaging makes! They go so far as to use brain scans to assess the impact of their products on the reward responses in our brains, along with the more traditional consumer taste testing.
Let’s take a look of some of the terminology and their meanings:
Ultra-processed foods (UPF)
Packaged food made using ingredients and processes you couldn’t replicate in your own kitchen. An ingredient in a food product that you would not normally find in a home kitchen will likely make that food ultra-processed
Hyperpalatable foods
Foods combining unnatural levels of fat, sugar or carbohydrates that can encourage overeating, the same as UPF. Hyperpalatable = incredibly palatable and hence very easy to eat and overeat. These foods are often full of (unhealthy) fats and sugar, which are two ingredients that converge on the same reward pathway. Hyperpalatable processed foods mimic the reward profile we see with addictive drugs. These are foods that don’t exist in nature!
Bliss point
Neither too much nor too little, but just the right amount of salt, sugar and fat to make food irresistible to you by eliciting a reward response in your brain.
Vanishing caloric density
Foods that melt in your mouth and signal to your brain that you are not eating as much as you are. Think of most ultra-processed foods… what kind of mouth-feel do you associate with them? Most of them are soft and very easy to eat, right? Not much chewing required! Even crunchy processed foods become soft as soon as you put them in your mouth so they need very little chewing as they melt in your mouth. Chewing helps you feel satiated!
Eating real home-cooked food usually requires chewing and that’s why you will feel full more quickly and satiated for longer. Eating soft processed food doesn’t involve much chewing, hence it short-circuits normal satiety mechanisms that would normally kick in if you had to chew well, by-passing this crucial mechanism that tells that you are full and stops you overeating.
The act of chewing is really important also for your digestive function; it’s one of the first parts of the digestive system and where your digestive processes start.
Shelf life
Cost is the major focus when developing food products; the only goal is to make profit, hence shelf-life, or how long the product can be kept on the shelf until it can’t be sold any longer, is of crucial importance. Some products have a shelf live of several months, while a home-made versions would only be edible for a few days, in this programme they took a lemon cake as an example – a shop-bought lemon cake has a shelf-like of several weeks, while a home-made one maybe 4 days.
This means, many industrial processes and cheap and synthetic ingredients are used to help delay spoiling of the product. Additives, preservatives, humectants, emulsifiers, stabilisers, antioxidants, synthetic vitamins and cheap padding ingredients to mimic the real stuff…. Some of these ingredients are bitter and bad tasting, and therefore flavourings have to be added to mask them.
These ingredients are hugely problematic to human health!
Sensory marketing and sonic branding
Food companies use sensory marketing and employ sensory consultants. Eating is a multisensory experience: all the senses are important – look, smell, feeling when touched, sound – not just taste. The packaging design and material are not just after thoughts, and even the sound opening the packaging makes have been carefully thought through.
Stomach share
The amount of digestive space a company can grab from the competition! How much of your stomach share are you giving to these companies?
Snackability and craveability
Food companies evaluate their products according to ‘craveability’ and ‘snackability’, i.e. how much/often people love to/can snack on their foods and how tantalising they can make them so you’ll keep craving more. Food companies want us to snack between our meals.
This is an ideal scenario for them:
You start your day with a breakfast shake or cereal, have an energy bar mid-morning for an energy boost, then mid-afternoon you’ll have some savoury crispy snacks as you are bored and need a break, followed by chocolates or sweets with your tea/coffee, and of course after a workout you will need a high-protein low-sugar bar and when watching TV after dinner you reach for your favourite TV snacks.
It’s never-ending! And you can find a myriad of snack options to fill your entire day and week! And your stomach – without even touching any real food!
These foods are often marketed as healthy but they are anything but! They are energy-dense and nutrient-poor, and what’s even worse is that they are often consumed on the go, messing up your digestion (no wonder we have an epidemic of acid reflux and acid blocking drugs are one of the most widely used drugs in the UK).
It gets worse…
Between 1960s and 1980s, tobacco companies started buying food companies. Two tobacco giants Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds acquired two major food companies Kraft and General Foods. Why would they be interested in food companies?
Well, tobacco companies were in the flavour business and had developed artificial flavourings to add to cigarettes. They realised that these flavours could be used in drinks and foods to extend the use and reach of their product. Clever, eh?
“For decades, tobacco companies hooked people on cigarettes by making their products more addictive. Now, a new study suggests that tobacco companies may have used a similar strategy to hook people on processed foods.”
Tobacco companies were masters of addiction, of course. A research paper in journal Addiction “found that in the decades when the tobacco giants owned the world’s leading food companies, the foods that they sold were far more likely to be hyper-palatable than similar foods not owned by tobacco companies“.
The authors of this paper suggest that tobacco companies engineered processed foods so that they would hit that “bliss point” and lead to cravings after we eat them.
Who do you believe?
It’s difficult to know who to believe when there are so many health claims and confusing reports in the media. The food industry is going to extreme lengths to protect their interests. The lobbying is very aggressive for less regulation on their products. They are fighting against the claims of UPFs being harmful to health by developing their own scientific studies (research studies funded by them) and “create a parallel world of publications” to prove the opposite.
Out of 38 papers questioning the science around UPF that were looked at by a researcher in this programmed, 33 had authors with connections to food industry. The presenter of this programme, Dr Chris, was offered £20k for a 2-hour meeting with one of the biggest food companies (he doesn’t disclose which). A pretty attractive payout, isn’t it! But there was a catch! He had to sign a contract. And by signing that contract, they would have bought his silence on anything that may harm the company or their products. This is one of most effective strategies of food industry – paying people who sound credible to create confusion and doubt among the consumers!
You are too busy and important for cooking/spending time in the kitchen!
That’s what they want you to believe! Brazilian researchers noticed a huge decline in the consumption of salt, sugar and cooking oil, which came as a surprise to them because these are considered unhealthy foods that cause weight gain, but obesity had increased in Brazil while the use of these unhealthy foods had declined.
What was going on? Their explanation was that people were doing less home cooking and eating more industrial foods. It’s the level of processing that is the significant factor here, not those ingredients that are normally used in home cooking. When you start cooking from scratch at home, it can solve a myriad of problems.
One of my favourite quotes is this from a talk by Michael Pollan; he’s quoting a food marketing expert:
“Eat anything you want, just cook it yourself.”
(Please watch his great talk on YouTube.)
And I truly belief that this is the foundation of good health! After that we can start talking about personalisation of the diet and adding supplements but first, this needs to happen!
Have you sorted this foundation of your health? If not, start ditch processed packaged foods gradually and start cooking from scratch. Maybe one meal and one day at a time and build it up from there.
If you need support with that, I’d love to help.
And now go and watch that programme.
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