My infuriating month avoiding ultra-processed foods (UPFs)

Yum! Emulsifiers and xanthan gum with a side of colour (plain caramel)

June is drawing to a close, which marks almost 30 days since I embarked on a very interesting food experiment. I recently read Ultra Processed People by Chris van Tulleken, which is one of those rare books that causes a tectonic shift in your brain. It’s a book about the food industry and the ever-increasing numbers of ultra processed foods (UPFs).

UPF free 🥰 watermelon and kiwi is an elite combination!

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Interlude: What are UPFs and what’s the issue?

UPFs are substances which are literally not food. They are either mass produced industrial chemicals like emulsifiers and stabilisers, or foods that have been so intensely processed that they no longer resemble something remotely food-like, such as palm and vegetable oils. Ultra-processing is not to be confused with regular processing: actions like cooking, grinding, blending or fermenting food, which in most cases is totally harmless. Chris van Tulleken’s book does a fantastic job of explaining the history of UPFs and how they are made.

Here is an example of a food, a processed food and an ultra-processed food, so you can build a mental image:

• Food: Peanuts. Ingredients: peanuts.

• Processed food: Peanut butter. Ingredients: Ground peanuts, salt (if you buy a decent one)

• Ultra-processed food: Peanut butter protein bar. Ingredients: Gluten free oats (24%), Rice syrup, Peanut butter flavour coating (sugar, vegetable oils (palm kernel oil, palm oil*, shea), rice powder (dried rice syrup, rice starch, rice flour), caramelised sucrose, colouring: safflower extract. sea salt, emulsifier: sunflower lecithin, natural flavouring) (14%), Soya protein crunchies (soya protein, tapioca starch, salt), (13%). Vegetable oils (palm, sunflower, rapeseed), Peanut butter (7%), Sugar, Peanuts (3%), Soya flour, Sea salt, Natural flavouring. (source)

All of this matters because there is a growing body of evidence proving that UPFs are linked to the plethora of health conditions, including mental illnesses. The mass production and sale of UPFs also throws gasoline into the fire of social inequality and environmental destruction. 

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Why are UPFs such a blind spot?

I have spent a large amount of my life thinking about what I eat, both to my benefit and determent. I went vegetarian at twelve, then vegan in my early twenties, then reverted back to eating everything after my health crashed (more on that here). I try to eat with the seasons and source what I eat from as close to Berlin as possible, where possible. I also just love food. I relish cooking for friends, fine dining, reading cook books, trying new recipes, following food blogs and baking.

For this reason, I find it absolutely bizarre that not once in 30 years did I ever research what an emulsifier is. I was consuming stabilisers, xanthan gum, ascorbic acid and lists of other unpronounceable things without having a inkling of what they really are. I always assumed that these UPF ingredients were just innocuous additions that helped with shelf life or texture. I knew that E-numbers and high-fructose corn syrup were the bad guys of the food world, but I thought these things were easily avoided by simply not consuming things like slush puppies and blue heat Takis. I also never heard my friends, even the very health conscious ones, talk about UPFs much either. It’s like a collective culinary blind spot.

You don’t need to read a book to know that things like Mars bars and Pringles are not health foods, but I always associated this with the high amounts of sugar or saturated fat in these products. What shocked me is the pervasiveness of UPFs in everything. Once you start paying attention, you’ll notice too. “Healthy” cereals, almost any store-bought breads, ketchup, hummus, yoghurts, “healthy” vegan snacks, popcorn. Despite the EU having much more stringent food regulations compared to the US, UPFs still seem to be used in almost all packaged foods here.

A cheese and cucumber sandwich from Air France. If I made this at home, it would have just five ingredients: flour, water, salt, cheese, cucumber.

This is discomforting because UPFs are basically a global science experiment and we are the lab rats. UPF usage in commercial products only really began in the 1950s. Fast forward to the 2020s, where many now consume diets made of up to 80% UPFs as a standard. After hundreds of thousands of years of slow and careful evolution, humans are now eating and drinking unprecedented amounts of industrially produced substances and chemicals - daily. Biologically, this is a big problem. The chemicals in UPFs rewire receptors in our brains (watch this video and pay attention to the 7:00 mark), destroy our gut-microbiome and trigger inflammation throughout the body. The growing use of these substances worldwide neatly matches rapidly rising rates of obesity, heart disease, cancers, dental problems, depression, anxiety, diabetes and other conditions. 

Make food chewy again

These baguettes I ate in Paris made my jaw ache. This is a good thing. 

The part of van Tulleken’s book that stayed with me the most was when he discusses texture. He explains how most UPF has the same softness. Nonsense, I thought initially - Doritos aren’t soft, they’re crunchy! But he goes on to explain the mush - once a UPF is in your mouth, it quickly turns into a soft paste that is both sweet and salty at the same time. This softness means that you can eat more of it, faster, which is a key element factor in driving overconsumption (aka more profit). There is evidence to suggest that the softness of what we are eating is causing increasingly severe dental issues, overbites and even irregularities in jaw size. Yikes.

Lab rat no more

After doing a thorough review of my cupboards, these are the UPF-laced foods which I used to regularly purchase. As much as possible, I’m now avoiding these:

• Oat milk: This is my UPF end boss. I have been a hardcore oat milk drinker for the last decade. Recently, I have made the difficult switch back to regular cows milk because Oatly Barista contains dipotassium phosphate, a major UPF red flag, amongst other unnecessary ingredients: Water, Oats 10%, Rapeseed Oil, Acidity Regulator (Dipotassium Phosphate), Minerals (Calcium Carbonate, Potassium Iodide), Salt, Vitamins (D2, Riboflavin and B12).

• Protein powder and protein bars: In 2023 I became a CrossFit gal, and so I blindly descended into the world of protein powder and protein bars. We used to order from foodspring, a Berlin-based brand which has a strong reputation in the CrossFit community for being one of the “healthier” protein powders. These are the ingredients of foodspring’s chocolate protein powder: Whey protein concentrate (whey protein concentrate (from milk) (56%), emulsifier (lecithins)), whey protein isolate (whey protein isolate (from milk) (27%), emulsifier (lecithins)), fat-reduced cocoa powder (11%), natural flavouring, thickener (xanthan gum), salt, sweeteners (steviol glycosides from stevia, sucralose).

• Alpro ‘no added sugars’ yoghurt: I was obviously dazzled by the no-added sugar on the label of these yoghurts, and I became weirdly addicted to these. The ingredients list is shocking, because regular yoghurt should have two ingredients: Soy base (water, dehulled soybeans (9.5%)), red fruit mix (cherry juice from fruit juice concentrate (4.2%), strawberry (3.2%), strawberry juice from fruit juice concentrate (3.1%), cherry (2%)), date mix (juice from fruit juice concentrate (4.1%), fruit (2.1%)) (6.2%), acidity regulators: citric acid, sodium citrates; stabilizer: pectins; calcium (tricalcium phosphate), carrot extract, sea salt, antioxidants: extracts containing strong tocopherols, fatty acid esters of ascorbic acid; flavourings, vitamins (B2, B12, D2), yoghurt cultures (S. therophilus, L. bulgaricus). 

• Store-bought mayonnaise, hummus and ketchup: This is the really irritating one. Most supermarket sauces and pastes are full of UPF, sugars and salt. Here’s a list of the ingredients in King Cuisine’s plain hummus, which is sold in Rewe supermarkets all over Germany: Chickpeas (47%), rapeseed oil, water, ground seasame, garlic, salt, acidifier (citric acid), preservative (E200), white pepper.

• Store bought breads: I have been making sourdough for a while so this wasn’t that hard to switch, but I used to sometimes pick some up bread in the supermarket if I didn’t have time to bake. Here’s the ingredients to Edeka’s spelt bread rolls: spelt flour, water, sourdough (wholegrain rye ground, water), sunflower seeds, yeast, potato flakes, sea salt, baking powder (dextrose, emulsifier E472e; wheat flour, rapeseed oil), barley malt extract, skimmed milk powder, sweet whey powder, skimmed milk yoghurt powder, acidity regulator: sodium acetates.

Have I cut out all UPFs from my diet? Absolutely not. I don’t even think it is possible, unless you were to live off grid on a self-sustaining homestead. Adapting at home hasn’t been so challenging, especially as avoiding UPFs just means cooking more from scratch, which is also much more delicious. The real difficulty comes when you are out in the wild.

Trying to find non-UPF food in London Stansted airport: a tragedy 🎭

As an ex-vegan, I consider myself a heavyweight at reading ingredient lists and figuring out what is in something. This week when returning home from a work trip to London, I challenged myself to find a non-UPF meal in Stansted. 

I started in my usual go-to, Pret a Manger, and got the shock of my life. Pret place ingredients lists on the package of everything, not that it helps because literally everything aside from the fruit pot is laced with sugar, salt and UPFs. Disappointed by Pret, I headed to Joe and the Juice.

Plain caramel food colouring in a salmon roll???

Joe and the Juice make sandwiches, smoothies and juices. I avoided sandwiches because bread is almost certainly UPF, but I noticed they have a new açai bowl on the menu. As a side note, I noted that many of their juices and smoothies also contain UPFs like protein powders and collagen supplements. I asked the lady at the till if I could read the ingredients of the açai bowl somewhere. She said no, and asked what I was allergic to. I said I wasn’t allergic to anything, I just wanted to read the ingredients. This was, understandably, the least of her concerns. She sent me over to a QR code on the wall. I scanned it, but the link only showed me information about allergens, not the full ingredients list. I went on the Joe and the Juice website and looked up the açai bowl there, but there is no information to be found. I found it strange that as the consumer, I was now in a situation where it is not possible to access information about what I am about to consume. I literally have to jump through hoops to find out whether the almond butter on the açai bowl is made of almonds and salt, or whether it also contains sugar, palm oil and flavour enhancers. I’m sure a strongly worded email to Joe and the Juice’s legal team may unlock access to the actual ingredients, but I was about to board a flight, so I had to move faster.

I tried Itsu and it was a disaster. Like Pret, they have the ingredients listed on their packaging. The sushi rice alone has sugar in it. Sugar is not a UPF, but it is a driver of overconsumption - and sorry for this hot take, but sushi rice doesn’t need sugar in it. Leon was no better. Just look at how long the ingredient list of their vegan burger is:

I’ll pass

I changed tactics and tried WHSmith, looking for something small but filling like a KIND or Nakd bar. Nakd bars used to be my kryptonite: I ate one nearly every day over the five years I lived in London. I read the ingredients list of the blueberry muffin Nakd bar: dates, cashews, raisins, almonds… It’s looking good so far! But then, right at the end: “natural flavourings”. That’s cryptic. Which flavourings? What does “natural” mean? That’s like listing “oils” as an ingredient without saying what the oils are. I referred to the trusty UPF subreddit to see if anyone had discovered this before. They have. Chris van Tulleken advises that any food pushing loud health claims all over the packaging is usually a sign that something isn’t quite right. I decide Nakd bars definitely fall into that category and leave WHSmith empty handed. I go to the second Pret next to Wetherspoons (which any fellow Stansted pros will know is the lesser of the two Prets) and bought a banana and a water. Tragic. 

Woe is me.

Is this an eating disorder?

Not going to lie, wandering around the airport reading ingredients lists and fretting about everything definitely felt like one. During my 30 day challenge, I had many moments of feeling very frustrated and overwhelmed. However, this slowly morphed into a different realisation. If profit is always the ultimate goal, the nourishment of people will continually be cast aside. All most people want is to eat healthy and tasty food, but we live in a society where this is borderline impossible to either achieve or afford - and it will never be possible as long as we have a broken system that calibrates itself for corporate greed. It’s a system that allows dozens of harmful and unnatural processing steps to take place, resulting in harmful UPFs that are somehow cheaper and more widely available than organic whole foods. I am not disordered; our food system is disordered.

Thanks for ruining food for me…

…is probably what you’ll think if you’ve made it this far. These days, I try to avoid overanalysing food after years of binary thought patterns (e.g. vegan = healthy, non-vegan = unhealthy), but now I find myself obsessively thinking about UPFs. Is food ruined now? Can I not enjoy an occasional treat without worrying about stabilisers? Why does a salmon roll need to contain caramel food colouring? The questions are dizzying. I have zero idea where this journey will lead me, but I really mean it when I say that the book totally changed my worldview. I am seriously considering engaging in different forms of activism to reform our food system. I will continue to write more on this topic in future as I educate myself further.

I ate pizza on June 28th, most likely filled with UPFs. If you want to socialise normally with friends, avoiding UPFs is almost impossible.

The gym bros were right: food is fuel.

This phrase always made me cringe because we all know that food is much more than that. Food can be so many things: a thrilling experience, a way of expressing love, something that bonds us socially and culturally. Food is inextricably linked to memory: the smell of fresh parsley, for example, always reminds me of my Mum. But at it’s very core, once all the layers of emotional and spiritual associations are stripped away, food is fuel; we cannot survive without it.

Like all the damaging impacts of capitalism, pervasive UPFs impact vulnerable people the most. Single parents working two or even three jobs don’t have the time or energy to bake sourdough for their children. And so, worsening economic conditions force families living below the poverty line or in food deserts to rely solely on UPFs for their main source of calories, which has a detrimental effect on their lives, as well as causing enormous strain on the healthcare system as a result. Children in poverty are now being targeted, on purpose, by the companies who produce these products. And as van Tulleken puts it, if you are a child suffering from tooth decay in rural Brazil, there is no dentist you can visit to alleviate your pain. Ultra-processed oils like palm oil destroy the planet and have been directly linked to endangerment of several animal species. 

This is why it’s scary that massive corporations like Nestle and Coca Cola can so readily influence the food system. It’s late-stage capitalism’s version of the church meddling with the state: these huge conglomerates are continually funding biased studies, all engineered to convince the public that UPFs aren’t actually as harmful as they seem. This example from van Tulleken’s book sums it up: “The British Nutrition Foundation is funded by almost every food company you can think of, including Coca-Cola, Nestlé, Mondelēz, PepsiCo, Mars, Danone, Kerry and Cargill.38” This isn’t right. For-profit food manufacturers should have no place in influencing the science or policy surrounding food. Already, the ability to own a home has become a fever dream for many working people. I really think having a blasé attitude to the food we consume will lead us towards a similar fate: our plates will be filled with more and more UPFs (which, a reminder, are literally not food!!!), and we will become powerless to stop it. If food is our fuel, we should all pay closer attention to who is serving it to us - and what their true motivations are.