Most Replayed Moment: The Truth Behind "Healthy" Food Labels - Dr. Chris Van Tulleken

Speaker 1 This Black Friday, get six months free when you move your WordPress sites to Kinsta. Enjoy faster load times, no stress when traffic spikes, and hosting you can actually count on.

Speaker 1 We're G2's number one rated host for WordPress for a reason. Visit kinsta.com/slash BF.
That's k-i-n-st-t-a.com/slash bf. Don't miss out.
Offer ends December 2nd.

Speaker 2 Rich people don't eat bad food because they don't want to eat bad food. And people without money eat bad food because they're forced to eat bad food.

Speaker 2 And the cognitive dissonance that you and I were talking about, quite often we will find people with low incomes making quite cogent arguments about the food that they eat, appearing to side with the companies that are predating on them.

Speaker 2 Because otherwise, how could you live with this dissonance in your life? Otherwise, you're just a powerless victim of transnational food corporations. So

Speaker 2 I have almost no interest in personal responsibility.

Speaker 2 I think if you give people technical knowledge and you give people people income and opportunity, most people want to be healthy and live good lives.

Speaker 3 1970, the food environment changes.

Speaker 3 Can you tell me exactly how the food environment changed that caused multiple demographics to

Speaker 3 gain weight?

Speaker 2 There are two answers to that. One,

Speaker 2 the sort of proximate reason is the invention of ultra-processed food. So the industrialization of food supply.
And you can talk about why that happened in a lot of different ways.

Speaker 2 Part of it was to, you know, a booming population post-war.

Speaker 2 And these products were extremely convenient. They allowed women to continue to be in the workplace.
Of course, women had entered the war, entered the workplace in the war.

Speaker 2 So there were a lot of things that were immediately appealing about these products. TV dinners, Swanson TV dinners appear in the...
in the 50s.

Speaker 2 And by the time of the 70s, these products had become very widespread. So the same thing, we were a decade behind in the UK, but this stuff is now our national diet.

Speaker 2 Why exactly it took over is the subject of a lot of the research I'm doing at the moment. So now I work much more with economists than nutritionists.

Speaker 2 And what we see is the financialization of the food industry. So the primary

Speaker 2 determinants of almost every action that happens in almost every food company that supplies, say, 90% of our calories, all the indicators are financial.

Speaker 2 And so part of it is the takeover of the food system from being a system where people would grow a lot of their own food, make food at home, they buy ingredients from local shops to a small number of companies supplying food.

Speaker 2 So, now

Speaker 2 75% of the calories that are consumed globally come from six companies.

Speaker 3 It kind of like sounds like a mafia of sorts, like a food mafia.

Speaker 2 I'm going to let you say that.

Speaker 3 Yeah, well, no, don't let me say it. I'm not one of them coming for me.
I brought some food along with me today. I was looking at it because I wanted to get your opinion.
You got distracted.

Speaker 3 i wanted to get your opinion on it so i brought um a group of food products on the left here now these are things that i i think growing up i thought were good yeah so

Speaker 2 you're very bold with these brands i mean you're really limiting sponsorship opportunities well you know

Speaker 3 You know, I do think about that sometimes, but I also don't really care.

Speaker 3 I think, like, I'm in the pursuit of truth here. So much of why I do this is to educate myself.
And I think if I educate myself, then I'll help educate other people.

Speaker 3 That's why I'm also okay being a total idiot on this subject matter because that is the truth. So, here I've got four products that are

Speaker 3 typically seen as being quite healthy: breakfast cereal, Cheerios. I grew up thinking, good for me.

Speaker 3 Actomol, good for me. Diet Coke,

Speaker 3 great because there's no sugar in there. And then this is

Speaker 2 whole grain.

Speaker 3 Whole grain bread, 50% of your daily whole grain in just two slices.

Speaker 3 Perfect.

Speaker 2 So for a start, I have a slight unease. I am going to talk about these products.
I have a slight unease to talk about any one product because the evidence applies to the category of food.

Speaker 2 And this kind of stuff, in a sense, I think these are such brilliant choices

Speaker 2 because this is the foundation of our diet. And one of the things that's happening at the moment is the food industry are exploring painting me as a snob

Speaker 2 because I'm critiquing these sort of core things you know tins of beans with flavoring or supermarket bread fish fingers

Speaker 2 I think this stuff is at the shallow end of the pool in a way it's not by any means the worst stuff but in a way it presents the biggest moral hazard because we think it's so healthy I have the Diet Coke yep so Diet Coke is my It's my favorite example because this is the ultimate health food according to the way we label food at the moment.

Speaker 3 It has four...

Speaker 2 Where's the camera?

Speaker 3 It's all green on the

Speaker 2 four green traffic lights, right?

Speaker 3 What does that, what do they call that, that traffic light system on the market?

Speaker 2 So, this is the way we describe healthy whether food is healthy or not in this country at the moment. And this system is quite influenced by the food industry, and it breaks all foods down into fat,

Speaker 2 saturated fat, sugars, and salt. And says that, you know, if those are the bad things, and if a food is high in them,

Speaker 2 it'll have oranges and greens. So if you look at the Cheerios,

Speaker 2 they're mostly on the front. It's on the front.
It's optional, by the way. So, it's not always on every packet, but the Cheerios are oranges and greens.
Yeah. Now,

Speaker 2 there is a baked-in confusion to this because what do you do at a traffic light that's orange and green, or red, orange, and green? Do you go? Do you stop? Is it on the Actem L?

Speaker 3 Is it on? It's not on there. No, I couldn't see it on there.

Speaker 2 So, maybe on the bottom,

Speaker 2 it's optional. So, who knows if you know,

Speaker 2 we don't have any way in this country of describing either healthy food or unhealthy food other than these traffic lights. Anyway, this is a healthy food.

Speaker 2 Now, if we look at the ingredients on the Diet Coke, carbonated water, fine. Now, there's a colour called caramel E150D.
Caramel makes you think of traditional,

Speaker 2 it's a French 19th-century invention, burned sugar, creme brulee. It's like it's a bit naughty, but it's fine.
Caramel E150D has nothing to do with caramel.

Speaker 2 It is carbohydrate treated with a mixture of acids and and uh and heat to produce uh things that contain ammonium and sulfite so it's it's it's a food additive color um with no no benefits nothing to do with caramel um artificial sweeteners aspatame and asosulfame k now sweeteners are tricky because we know sugar is harmful because it rots teeth and it promotes weight gain because it makes you eat more the weird thing about sweeteners is they don't seem to help with weight loss at all they may some of them seem to be more metabolically harmful than sugar itself.

Speaker 2 Humans are quite good at eating sugar. When we eat lollipops

Speaker 2 continuously as kids or have sugary drinks, it's not good for us. But human societies have for millennia existed with a huge amount of honey and refined carbs.

Speaker 2 So sugar we can handle, although we should reduce our intake. Sweeteners are quite weird because they're a nutritional lie.
You put sweet taste on the tongue, which says to your body, sugar is coming.

Speaker 2 So maybe put up some insulin maybe um

Speaker 2 start preparing in other ways physiologically to receive refined carbohydrates and when that refined carbohydrate when the sugar never arrives it seems to be physiologically confusing so the world health organization now says sweeteners aren't better than sugar when it comes to weight loss and there is there is an anxiety about aspartame and cancer that i'm i'm personally not not in a big sweat about there's some there's some evidence but not not at normal dosage then we've got natural flavorings we've got caffeine flavoring an addictive drug and phosphoric acid and and citric acid.

Speaker 3 Natural, it said.

Speaker 2 Natural flavorings. I mean,

Speaker 2 well, flavorings are flavorings. Flavorings should signal nutritional content.

Speaker 2 When you eat a tomato, it has flavor, not for fun, it has flavor because it signals the nutritional content of the tomato.

Speaker 2 When you put flavorings out of context, even if you extract them from the tomato or the strawberry or the peach, it's very confusing for you physiologically.

Speaker 2 You have a very sophisticated internal system to link flavor molecules, which are broadly smell, and taste molecules, salt, sweet, bitter, sour, and some savory ones.

Speaker 2 Your body has a way of linking all that information with nutritional information that you get from your gut subconsciously. When you muddle it all up in a product like this, it's very confusing.

Speaker 2 The phosphoric acid will dissolve the minerals out of your bones as well as dissolving your teeth.

Speaker 2 So what we have here is a solution of flavorings, an addictive drug, an acid that will leach stuff out of your bones, and sweeteners that seem to be metabolically confusing and certainly aren't better than sugar.

Speaker 2 And yet we think of this as a health product. So that for me is the archetypal, confused way of thinking about food.

Speaker 2 And what we also know is that when it comes to kids the age of my youngest, so the age of three, they are drinking on average one can of artificially sweetened drinks every single day.

Speaker 2 So we've taxed sugar. Sugar has come out of our diet.
We've seen no weight loss, no indication that it's helping health.

Speaker 2 And what we are doing is consuming huge numbers now of these artificial sweeteners, which we also know affect our microbiome.

Speaker 3 What is a better alternative that's popular on the market than

Speaker 3 because it appears to me that all of the drinks in the bloody supermarket have artificial sweeteners and flavorings?

Speaker 2 They do because of the sugar tax. So it's almost impossible now to buy fizzy tax without sweeteners to buy fizzy drinks without sweeteners.

Speaker 2 So for kids, I try and not give any advice to anyone ever,

Speaker 2 but my kids,

Speaker 2 my kids eat a lot of UPF, but they don't have fizzy drinks. I think fizzy drinks are really quite harmful across the board.
So kids should just drink milk and water, milk if they can have it.

Speaker 2 And grown-ups

Speaker 2 can do pretty well on milk and water if you drink milk.

Speaker 3 What about breakfast cereals and Cheerios and things like that?

Speaker 2 So breakfast cereals are really convenient. I mean, let me see the Cheerios.
So I think these.

Speaker 2 So these probably do meet the def yeah, these do meet the definition. Oh, they are.
Yeah. So we've got things like

Speaker 2 palm oil, caramelized sugar syrup, colours, anatonorbixin, and an antioxidant. So this is ultra-processed.

Speaker 2 It'll have some fibre. You'll have it with whole milk.
I don't want to demonize breakfast cereals.

Speaker 2 My kids eat breakfast cereals for breakfast, but it's not like eating porridge, which is just whole grains or real bread.

Speaker 2 And what you will find is if you give this to a kid compared to porridge, they will be able to eat much, much more of this.

Speaker 2 And there's a lot of marketing that this is a really, really healthy product.

Speaker 2 And I would say the evidence says that this falls into a category of foods that we actually know are associated with negative health outcomes.

Speaker 3 It says on the side there, doesn't it, the list of all the health

Speaker 2 A really good way of telling if a food is ultra-processed is if there is any health claim on the packet, it's almost certainly ultra-processed.

Speaker 2 And part of that is to do with this intellectual property thing: that the only food you can make lots of money out of is a branded product. So there's no money in broccoli, milk, steak, eggs.

Speaker 2 Supermarkets quite often make losses on all those things. There's no health claim on broccoli.
or on plums or on milk. There's no health claim on

Speaker 2 steak. It's only the ultra-processed things that you get marketed to you in this way because there's enough money to do it.
The Actomel's interesting as well, the immune support.

Speaker 3 Well, it says immune support and it says vitamin

Speaker 3 D and B6.

Speaker 3 So that, rich in vitamin D, immune support, that is definitely healthy.

Speaker 2 I mean, this is, this is a...

Speaker 2 This is where we need we should have done the maths and shown how much sugar there was in each pot. These are very high-calorie shots of sugary liquid that will harm teeth.

Speaker 2 And I don't know why you'd have this if you could just have real yogurt and

Speaker 2 or milk.

Speaker 2 And the reason they back add the vitamins is to be able to make health claims. So generally, foods with added vitamins, real food doesn't need added vitamins.
And we're, again, we're pretty sure that.

Speaker 2 And I'm conscious who I'm talking to here. I've got to,

Speaker 2 I'm,

Speaker 2 I probably have to tread a bit carefully.

Speaker 2 Supplementing vitamins into food doesn't seem to have many health benefits for healthy people.

Speaker 2 So we've got quite a lot of very big data on this.

Speaker 2 And there are lots of studies that show benefits that are funded by people who make vitamins. But broadly, the independent evidence shows that

Speaker 2 when you get vitamins and minerals in the context of food, they're really good for you. And when you take them in pill or supplement form, they don't seem to have many benefits if you are healthy.

Speaker 3 And this food here, this bottle of Coke, I've got a can of Pringles and Coco Pops Kellogg cereal. This is the stuff that I typically think of as like bad, processed, ultra-processed.
Stay away from.

Speaker 2 You would, but give me the Cocoa Pops. So the Cocoa Pops.

Speaker 2 If we look at these traffic lights, okay, green, green, orange, orange, pretty healthy. I mean, there is a monkey on the pack selling it to my to my kids.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it says high in vitamin D

Speaker 3 iron.

Speaker 2 Yeah irons. Supporting your family's health, rice, added goodness.
I mean everything about this tells you that this is a product not just safe for kids, but intended for kids.

Speaker 2 And we all know you're like, you can't sell things if they're not healthy. There must be some regulator dealing with that.
And this is the thing that my six-year-old will eat five adult portions of.

Speaker 2 So when you eat five adult portions,

Speaker 2 the traffic lights only apply to a 30 gram serving for you. Now, a 30 gram serving is a handful like that.

Speaker 2 It's one big spoonful. Okay.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 this is the product that

Speaker 2 I recognize addictive behavior in my kids. And frankly, myself, I mean, I could eat, you know, 300 grams of it.

Speaker 3 And the other thing that I went and got from the supermarket, because I was thinking about what I typically think as ultra-processed and good for me. I went and got this frozen pizza here

Speaker 3 and then I went and got a

Speaker 3 Tesco's finer. So this is high-end, you know, much more expensive, not frozen pizza.
And I thought, surely this pizza here is better for a lot better for me than this one here.

Speaker 2 So again, there's a complexity talking about is one better than the other because we've never done a trial testing them against each other.

Speaker 2 They're both ultra-processed, I know because I've looked at the ingredients, they both contain ingredients that you don't have in a domestic kitchen, like palm fat or dextrose.

Speaker 2 And they're both made really, in a sense, by the same companies. So both of they're both made by PLCs who will be owned by institutional investors with requirements for growth.

Speaker 2 So they come from the same food system with the same incentives about production.

Speaker 2 And my bet is that you or I would be able to eat the entire pizza at a single sitting and we'd be still licking the pack of both of them.

Speaker 2 So this is food that, in a sense, is engineered to be consumed to excess.

Speaker 3 You know, the pizzas, I've got the Cocoa Pops, I've got the Coca-Cola here.

Speaker 3 Is this food?

Speaker 2 I don't think it meets. So food is very poorly defined.

Speaker 2 We don't have a working definition of food sort of in law but i think food is substance that you eat for nourishment and it should be about nourishment culturally socially personally psychologically as well as physically and these products are developed to generate financialized growth for institutional investors they're not made by people who love you who want to nourish you and so i don't think it meets what I think is a useful cultural definition of food.

Speaker 2 I think it's very useful to not think of them as food. And I don't think a mixture of colouring addictive drugs and phosphoric acid could be called food in any sense of the word.

Speaker 2 It doesn't have nutrition. It only has things that will...

Speaker 2 We're pretty sure that almost every ingredient does you harm in some way. So I don't see how that could be called food.

Speaker 2 It's a way of commodifying your ill health for the benefit of a very small number of people.

Speaker 3 Two things I wanted to say. The first thing is a huge thank you for listening and tuning into the show week after week.

Speaker 3 It means the world to all of us and this really is a dream that we absolutely never had and couldn't have imagined getting to this place.

Speaker 3 But secondly, it's a dream where we feel like we're only just getting started.

Speaker 3 And if you enjoy what we do here, please join the 24% of people that listen to this podcast regularly and follow us on this app. Here's a promise I'm going to make to you.

Speaker 3 I'm going to do everything in my power to make this show as good as I can now and into the future.

Speaker 3 We're going to deliver the guests that you want me to speak to and we're going to continue to keep keep doing all of the things you love about this show.

Speaker 2 Thank you.

Speaker 4 Shopify is a global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business and sell more with less effort thanks to the Shopify magic, your AI-powered all-star.

Speaker 4 Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com/slash red circle, all lowercase. Go to shopify.com/slash red circle now to grow your business no matter what stage you're in.

Speaker 4 Shopify dot com slash Red Circle.