I thought this was a really interesting piece, written by Dr Chris Van Tulken on his BBC experiment. He spent 4 weeks on a diet made up of 80% ultra processed foods (UPFs), and tracked the effects on his body.
It didn't take long for this way of eating to take its toll on him, and the longer term effects were interesting:
He's just been on BBC News on the TV talking about it, very interesting and he's very passionate about it too.
Oh that must be worth a watch! I'll check it out 
Worrying about the changes in the brain not having reversed at the time of writing the article six weeks later.
I know. It would be interesting if he did a 6 month follow up too, I'd be curious if it can be remedied long term.
Hopefully he will, we need to know what the long term effects are.
Thanks so much for sharing this. It is so worrying that our western diet is so full of ultra processed foods
Really frightening results. I hope the government sits up and takes radical action (but won’t hold my breath). Thanks for sharing as I hadn’t seen this.
Interesting, but sadly not really radical. This sort of thing has been done before (eg, "That Sugar Film") and every time, a bunch of experts crawl out of the woodwork to discredit the findings.
I think there's very little the government can do here. Over my lifetime,it has been a cornerstone of policy to ensure that people have less time to cook, less inclination to do so, and less understanding of what constitutes "bad" food. Processed trash has been given a stamp of approval on the basis of being "low fat". The role of "housewife" has been deliberately and carefully pulled to pieces: people whose primary focus is (or was) on raising a healthy and happy family are pilloried and ridiculed, and are shamed into contributing to the tax coffers via drudge jobs instead of attending to their own wellbeing. General mental health has declined dramatically.
On the production side, farmers have been reduced to a position little better than serfs. It doesn't matter if they produce quality food or not, because the supermarkets and bulk-buyers just want it cheap. So that's what they do.
One might have thought that 'lockdowns' and 'furloughs' would have been an incentive for people to reclaim their lives. But precisely the opposite has happened, with people sinking into depression and marathon Netflix-and-chocolate sessions.
The scale of the problem is mindboggling, and I don't think it's going get fixed when neither the government nor the public has any real interest in fixing it. Besides, the national debt is now so unmanageable that I suspect the gov'ts primary concern will either be inflating it away or taxing people even more heavily, and both of those solutions will cause the national diet to remain firmly entrenched in cheap-and-comforting territory.
One possibility would be to simply announce that the NHS will no longer fund diet-related chronic disease. That would provide an extreme incentive for people to sort their lives out, and save the government about 30 billion a year (which could make a small dent in our 2.1 trillion public debt). Unfortunately, in order to do that, the government would have to admit that their policies have been the root cause of the obesity/diabetes/heart disease epidemic in the first place.
Yes, "that sugar film" came to my mind too, it was very similar on paper to this experiment.
I would be a little careful about suggesting that the decline of housewives is a bad thing. It's a far more nuanced subject than that. For example minimum wage was originally set as the minimum amount required to support a family of 4 on one income, now it's borderline not enough to support 1 person.
Lockdown definitely didn't help the situation, although I can sympathise with people for comfort eating or using food as entertainment in the last year. Hopefully the timing of this will help people to scale back as we emerge from the other end of this.
Everything is nuanced. I'm not suggesting that all women should be herded back into the kitchen forthwith, merely that the push to get everyone into "employment" and all children into "childcare" had little to do with the wellbeing of the individual and everything to do with the wellbeing of the State.
The fact that the government was even able to label some jobs as "nonessential" suggests to me that a lot of people have been wasting their lives away doing things that were ... well, nonessential, while neglecting things that actually were essential.
We're in for a rough ride, methinks. But people seem in no hurry to get back to work, so perhaps some will scale back their lives and focus on things that matter. We'll see.
I think in all of these discussions we are not really talking about the effect that ultra processed food / sugar has on the brain and its interaction with appetite and fat control hormones. For example there is evidence (according to research carried out by Professor Lustig) that fructose binds to letting receptors in the brain. Hence the brain does not get the hormonal signal that we are full. Also when the reward system is activated dopamine is released which drives us to seek out more of the substance that activated it . If this is sugar / ultra processed food our brain is signalling that we are hungry and need more food and this food is sugar. It isn't a case of simple personal choice.
No. Just no. You don't live in the UK and you clearly have no idea what lockdown was like here. And your regressive ideas about women in the work place are not only wrong, but patronising. If you want to pontificate about a society, maybe do it about the one you live in not one far away that you creating in your imagination.
I wasn't saying anything about "women in the workplace". Where did you get that idea? I was talking about governments, and their ever-increasing need to extract as much wealth as possible from as many as possible; and likewise to exert the maximum amount of control over what used to be personal choices.
I'm in the middle of a lockdown right now, and had a lot of fun with another one last year. So I'm having deja vu all over again.
People are people, and they all do daft things in exactly the same way, it seems.
The demise of the housewife is not the cause of our problems. I was raised by a working mum, and she prepared 3 meals a day for me, 2 once I was old enough to sort my own breakfast. The two obese kids in my class (back when there were only one or two obese kids) both had full time mums.
If women aren't cooking, it's about their choices. The choose ready meals and sitting down in front of the TV at 6, instead of making a dish from scratch, and sitting down in front of the TV at 8.
And Britain's lockdown was a frenzy of home cooking. My WhatsApp was a frenzy of people seeking flour and yeast as the shops were out, and clearing my pantry, I offered 3 grimy 1/2 bags of flour near their use-by dates, and I was overwhelmed with takers.
I agree with the AwfulToad, other comments that the problem is fuelled by the Govt (and greedy food companies that have Govt in their pockets). But we must all do what's best for ourselves/families and follow healthy diets. If you don't know how, use a naturopathic nutritionist.
Gosh that’s so scary that the brain re wiring hasn’t reversed. It’s SO available , cheap and irresistible when both parents work.
It really sounds like there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that UPF’s should be categorised as dangerous addictive substances. The fact that they are actively marketed to children is horrific. But while ever it is profitable and legal to make highly addictive substances from cheap ingredients, greedy and unethical manufacturing companies will do it.
Very happy with my new eating regime 🙂
Why people chose junk food. 🍔
Picnic foods 
