The Junk Food Doctor: "This Food Is Worse Than Smoking!" & "This Diet Prevents 60% Of Disease!" - Chris Van Tulleken (Ultra-Processed People Author)

**Chris van Tulleken** (0:00)
I ate a diet that's very normal for a British person. I gained so much weight, got in this vicious cycle of overeating, anxiety, sleeplessness, scanned my brain, and if I continued for a year, I would have fucked Dr. Chris van Tulleken.

**Steven Bartlett** (0:14)
Doctor, researcher, and a BAFTA award-winning broadcaster.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:17)
Chris forensically examines the effects ultra-processed food have on us all.

**Chris van Tulleken** (0:21)
Seventy-five percent of the calories that are consumed globally come from six companies.

**Steven Bartlett** (0:25)
The Food Mafia.

**Chris van Tulleken** (0:27)
They are controlling our food and what we eat.
Engineered to be consumed to excess. Whether it's a burger from the fast food chain or supermarket bread, everything is adjusted so that things become irresistible. A pandemic of diet-related diseases has taken over the world.
One in five people in this country get 80 percent of their calories from ultra-processed food. Poor diet has overtaken tobacco as the leading cause of early death on planet Earth. By the age of five, kids in this country will be that much shorter, nine centimeters compared to other countries. This is all diet. Now, you can't stunt a body by nine centimeters and not also stunt them intellectually.

**Steven Bartlett** (1:03)
Why don't we just all make better choices?

**Chris van Tulleken** (1:05)
I have almost no interest in personal responsibility. This is about social justice. People without money, they're forced to eat bad food.
If you got rid of poverty, you would get rid of around 60 percent of the problem of diet-related disease.

**Steven Bartlett** (1:16)
What about the people that say this is just about calories in, calories out?

**Chris van Tulleken** (1:19)
There are two very big problems with that. And this is very good, robust science. The first is that...
And if people are listening and they want to lose weight, the evidence says that.

**Steven Bartlett** (1:31)
I just want to start this episode with a message of thanks. I thank you to everybody that tunes in to listen to this podcast. By doing so, you've enabled me to live out my dream, but also for many members of our team to live out their dreams too. It's one of the greatest privileges I could never have dreamed of or imagined in my life to get to do this, to get to learn from these people, to get to have these conversations, to get to interrogate them from a very selfish perspective, trying to solve problems I have in my life. So I feel like I owe you a huge thank you for being here and for listening to these episodes and for making this platform what it is. Can I ask you a favour? I can't tell you how much you can change the course of this podcast, the course of the guests we're able to invite to the show and to the course of everything that we do here just by doing one simple thing. And that simple thing is hitting that subscribe button. It helps this channel more than I could ever explain. The guests on this platform are incredible because so many of you have hit that button. And I know when we think about what we want to do together over the next year on this show, a lot of it is going to be fuelled by the amount of you that are subscribed and that tune into this show every week. So thank you. Let's keep doing this. And I can't wait to see what this year brings for this show, for us as a community and for this platform.
Dr. Chris van Tulleken, you wrote a book Ultra-Processed People.
I know from first-hand experience that writing books is a painful experience. It takes a long, long time to do it. And you have an extensive experience across medicine, across different sort of scientific disciplines. Why does this book and this subject matter?
Matter to society? And maybe even more importantly, why did it matter enough to you?

**Chris van Tulleken** (3:18)
It matters to all of us because for a very long time, we've been incredibly confused about what to eat.
And we've called the foods that harm us junk food and processed food and high-fat salt sugar food. We've not had a way of labeling foods, even as a pandemic of diet-related disease has taken over the world, really. And this is particularly true now in low-income countries and particularly true with low-income people living in the UK. So, poor diet, which means a diet high in ultra-processed food, has overtaken tobacco as the leading cause of early death on planet Earth. For humans, the animals we farm, and for wild animals, of course, because ultra-processed food is produced by a food system that is the leading cause of loss of biodiversity, the second leading cause of carbon emissions and the leading cause of plastic pollution.