We live in a toxic food environment, and Big Food has extremely clever marketers and food scientists. That all of us eat a lot of Big Food’s produce means those people are very good at their jobs. It doesn’t mean we have failed if we eat what the industry makes.
In the UK, about 50% of the average adult’s diet, and 65% of a child’s, is ultra-processed. As Dr Chris Van Tulleken’s latest book, Ultra-Processed People: Why Do We All Eat Stuff That Isn’t Food... and Why Can’t We Stop?, points out, that means much of what we eat includes newly invented substances that humans haven’t eaten before and we know very little about how they interact with us, or each other.
