Ultra-Processed People: Why Do We All Eat Stuff That Isn’t Food … and Why Can’t We Stop? – Chris van Tulleken
Written by Elisa Garbil – 21.11.2025
Chris van Tulleken’s Ultra-Processed People is not merely a book about nutrition. It is a sweeping indictment of the industrial food system, an investigation into human physiology, an exploration of global economics, and, perhaps most importantly, a warning about systemic risks accelerating beneath society’s feet. As an infectious diseases doctor and science communicator, van Tulleken combines medical expertise with a storyteller’s instinct, producing a work that is both unsettling and urgent.
What the Book Is About
Van Tulleken’s central argument is deceptively simple: modern manufactured foods are not just unhealthy, they are fundamentally incompatible with human biology, and their proliferation represents one of the most serious public health and environmental risks of the 21st century. In one of the book’s clearest definitions, he writes:
UPF has a long, formal scientific definition, but it can be boiled down to this: if it wrapped in plastic and has at least one ingredient that you wouldn’t usually find in a standard kitchen, it’s UPF.
Chris van Tulleken – Ultra-Processed People
This stark definition helps readers immediately recognise that ultra-processed food is not confined to fast food or snacks. It includes supermarket breads, cereals marketed as “healthy”, packaged meals, flavoured yogurts, energy bars, and plant-based meat analogs. And it is not because of their marketing, but because of the industrial processes that create them and that are found in these foods.
The tone of the book mixes accessible humor with existential alarm. Van Tulleken repeatedly demonstrates that the problem is not a single ingredient, it is not sugar, fat, salt, or preservatives, but rather the industrial processing itself. Everything in moderation is okay. However, ultra-processing generates molecular structures that humans have never encountered in evolutionary history. This point becomes strikingly clear in one of the book’s most vivid warnings:
The transformation of coal into butter reveals the unavoidable problems of creating synthetic foods. There are inherent dangers in consuming complex mixtures of novel molecules as source of calories – substances we have never encountered before may have unpredictable effects on our physiology.
Chris van Tulleken – Ultra-Processed People
This quote summarises the core risk theme of the book: modern industrial processes do not merely combine familiar ingredients; they create novel compounds and structural modifications the human body may not be equipped to handle.
What Happens When UPF Becomes the Default Diet
One of the strongest contributions of Ultra-Processed People is its synthesis of emerging scientific evidence about how UPF affects the gut, metabolism, brain, immune system, and long-term disease risk. Van Tulleken’s argument is not only observational but mechanistic: UPF changes physiology in ways that promote overeating, disrupt satiety, inflame tissues, and impair metabolism. This is especially evident in his discussion of additives:
Dietary emulsifiers may have contributed to the post-mid-twentieth-century increase on incidence of inflammatory bowel disease, metabolic, syndrome, and perhaps other inflammatory diseases.
Chris van Tulleken – Ultra-Processed People
Here the book enters risk-based territory. Emulsifiers are used in everything from ice cream to bread to plant-based milks. Have a look at the label of your favourite snack for example! How many of those ingredients would you be able to find at home in your cupboard? You’d be surprised at how many have names you never heard of…
In addition, these additives alter the texture and mouthfeel of foods, and they also disturb the gut microbiome, thicken mucus barriers, and trigger low-grade inflammation. These are not just trivial changes, as they represent systemic risks to entire populations when UPF becomes a dominant share of national diets.
Van Tulleken positions UPF not as an individual lifestyle issue but a public health crisis, comparable to tobacco, air pollution, and endocrine-disrupting chemicals. He documents how UPF increases calorie intake, disrupts hormonal regulation, and rewires reward circuitry in the brain. The book includes his own self-experiments, but the more compelling evidence lies in epidemiological data: when nations industrialise their food supply, obesity, diabetes, autoimmune illnesses, and non-communicable diseases rise dramatically.
How Industry Shapes Diets and Destabilises Food Systems
One of the book’s most incisive points concerns the relationship between UPF companies and traditional food cultures. Van Tulleken observes that:
The companies that make UPF either displace traditional diets, or absorb them and recreate them with new ingredients.
Chris van Tulleken – Ultra-Processed People
This is a central risk factor. Ultra-processed food companies do not simply compete in global markets, they transform them. They use marketing, subsidies, distribution networks, and convenience to make UPF cheaper and more accessible than whole foods. In low-income regions, this can destabilise traditional diets within a single generation.
The result is a global homogenisation of eating behaviour. Whether in Europe, Africa, Asia, or Latin America, consumers increasingly rely on the same processed ingredients derived from a handful of crops. Van Tulleken illustrates this with a shocking statistic:
Just twelve plants and five animals now make up 75 percent of all the food eaten or thrown away on earth.
Chris van Tulleken – Ultra-Processed People
This monoculture is a systemic risk on multiple fronts:
- Biological risk: reduced genetic diversity increases susceptibility to pests, disease, and crop failure.
- Economic risk: food prices become vulnerable to disruptions in a small number of global supply chains.
- Cultural risk: traditional diets, farming practices, and food knowledge erode globally.
- Health risk: nutrient diversity collapses when diets are built around a narrow set of plants and animals.
This concentration is not accidental as it is engineered. UPF companies use cheap, shelf-stable inputs like corn, soy, wheat, and palm oil, extracting profits from transformation and branding rather than agricultural diversity.
UPF as a Driver of Environmental Collapse
One of the strongest, and most unsettling, sections of the book highlights how the UPF system accelerates global ecological degradation. Van Tulleken does not hesitate to link food processing to climate change:
Humans have had significant effects on the earth’s climate for a long time, but our current food system, driven by the demand for UPF, is destroying ecological capital far faster than it generates.
Chris van Tulleken – Ultra-Processed People
Here he zooms out from human physiology to planetary systems. UPF is resource-intensive, waste-intensive, and dependent on fossil fuels at every stage of production. From fertilisers to packaging, from transport to processing. The environmental footprint is catastrophic: deforestation for palm oil, monocropping for cereals, methane emissions from industrial livestock, and plastic pollution. Van Tulleken makes a powerful analogy connecting ultra-processed food to fossil fuels themselves:
Oil is cheap for the same reason that UPF is cheap: because, according to the IMF and lots of other people, we all subsidise it by paying around $6 trillion (yes trillion) worth of external costs, like increases in healthcare costs due to air pollution and the costs of a changing climate.
Chris van Tulleken – Ultra-Processed People
This comparison reframes UPF as another element of the extractive economy, one that appears cheap only because the real costs are shifted to public budgets, ecosystems, and future generations.
Why UPF Remains Ubiquitous Despite the Risks
The book argues that economic incentives lock us into a UPF-dominated system. Farmers, consumers, governments, and corporations all respond rationally within a distorted market landscape shaped by subsidies, trade agreements, and political lobbying. Van Tulleken argues that reforming agriculture is crucial, as:
By fixing the agricultural system so that it becomes sustainable, the production costs of whole foods should fall and those of UPF would rise.
Chris van Tulleken – Ultra-Processed People
This simple statement reveals a profound truth:
the current economy artificially cheapens UPF while making whole foods expensive.
Correcting this imbalance would realign incentives, restore local food systems, and reduce disease burden. But such reform conflicts with the interests of powerful multinational corporations whose profits depend on inexpensive inputs and global distribution.
What Van Tulleken’s Work Warns Us About the Future
Taken together, the themes of Ultra-Processed People form a comprehensive risk map.
- Public Health Risk: UPF contributes to rising rates of chronic disease, inflammation, metabolic dysfunction, and mental health disorders. This creates a long-term healthcare burden for governments and insurers.
- Biological and Ecological Risk: Mono-cropping, biodiversity loss, and heavy reliance on synthetic fertilisers weaken ecological resilience. Climate change amplifies these vulnerabilities.
- Economic and Supply Chain Risk: Global food systems dependent on a narrow set of crops are vulnerable to shocks, think of pandemics, geopolitics, climate events, and market volatility.
- Cultural and Social Risk: The erosion of traditional diets and knowledge systems reduces community resilience and undermines food sovereignty.
- Political Risk: The influence of multinational food corporations distorts policy-making, weakens regulatory frameworks, and reduces governments’ ability to protect public health.
- Intergenerational Risk: Children raised on UPF may face lifelong health disadvantages, deepening inequality and perpetuating cycles of disease.
Van Tulleken positions UPF not only as a health hazard but as a structural threat woven into global capitalism. His book urges governments, institutions, and consumers to rethink food systems from the ground up.
Why Ultra-Processed People Matters
Ultra-Processed People succeeds because it integrates science, personal narrative, economics, and environmental analysis into a cohesive and readable argument. Van Tulleken avoids moralising and instead provides clear explanations of how industrial food systems manipulate biology, markets, and society. It is easy to recommend Ultra-Processed People for its clarity, rigour, and urgency. Moreover, the themes it explores reveal that UPF is not merely a nutritional concern but a multidimensional global threat.
The book’s greatest achievement is showing how the foods we take for granted, the cheap, convenient, and ubiquitous ones, are anything but benign. They are products of a system built on externalised costs, environmental exploitation, biological manipulation, and public health erosion. If there is one message readers should take away, it is this:
