The Atlantic has a profile of podcaster Chris van Tulleken, who is conducting an ongoing campaign against processed food.
An excerpt:
“He has just published a book identifying ultra-processed food, or UPF, as a great evil in our diets, and has therefore signed up for a lifetime of being portrayed as a joyless, middle-class puritan who wants us to live on mung beans and kombucha. As part of the research for Ultra-processed People, he ate a UPF-heavy diet for a month—a stunt reminiscent of Morgan Spurlock’s Super Size Me, and one open to the same criticism about replacing science with showmanship. ‘By the fourth week, it had started to have very noticeable physical effects, forcing me to loosen my belt by two notches,’ he writes. ‘In just a few weeks, I felt like I’d aged ten years. I was aching, exhausted, miserable and angry.’
“Public-health campaigns against ‘junk food’ – a shorthand for foods with high fat, sugar, and salt content – are well established and formed one of Michelle Obama’s priorities as first lady. Van Tulleken’s case against UPF is different. The problem isn’t the food’s nutritional profile, per se, but the industrial processes to which it has been subjected, and the artificial chemicals used to improve its flavor and shelf life. He argues that we should be more wary of a diet soda than a cookie baked from scratch at home, because UPF is stuffed full of chemicals that disrupt our body’s ability to regulate appetite and digestion.”
You can read the entire story here.
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