Pod Insights The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett Most Replayed Moment: The Truth Behind "Healthy" Food Labels - Dr. Chris Van Tulleken About this episode In this Moments episode, Dr. Chris Van Tulleken (the Junk Food Doctor) delves into the complexities of foods labelled as "healthy." He explores how certain food products, from diet sodas to breakfast cereals, might not be as beneficial as they're marketed to be, suggesting that the food industry's labelling tactics could influence consumer choices. Tune in to gain insight into how you can be more mindful of your food choices, starting today.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 Rich people don't eat bad food because they don't want to eat bad food. And people without money eat bad food because they're forced to eat bad food. And the cognitive dissonance that you and I were talking about, quite often, we will find people with low incomes making quite cogent arguments about the food that they eat, appearing to side with the companies that are predating on them. Because otherwise, how could you live with this dissonance in your life? Otherwise, you're just a powerless victim of transnational food corporations. So I have almost no interest in personal responsibility. I think if you give people technical knowledge and you give people income and opportunity, most people want to be healthy and live good lives.
0:41 Steven Bartlett? 1970, the food environment changes. Can you tell me exactly how the food environment changed that caused multiple demographics to to gain weight?
0:52 Speaker 00 There are two answers to that. One, the approximate reason is the invention of ultra-processed food. So the industrialization of food supply. You can talk about why that happened in a lot of different ways. Part of it was to, you know, a booming population post-war. And these products were extremely convenient. They allowed women to continue to be in the workplace. Of course, women had entered the war, entered the workplace in the war. So there were a lot of things that were immediately appealing about these products. TV dinners, Swanson TV dinners appear in the 50s. And by the time of the 70s, these products had become very widespread. So the same thing, we were a decade behind in the UK. But this, this stuff is now our national diet.
1:35 Speaker 00 Why exactly it took over is the subject of a lot of the research I'm doing at the moment. So now I work much more with economists than nutritionists. And what we see is the financialization of the food industry. So the primary determinants of almost every action that happens in almost every food company that supplies, say, 90% of our calories, all the indicators are financial. And so part of it is the takeover of the food system from being a system where people would grow a lot of their own food, make food at home, they'd buy ingredients from local shops, to a small number of companies supplying food. So now 75% of the calories that are consumed globally come from six companies.
2:18 Steven Bartlett? It's kind of like, it sounds like a mafia of sorts, like a food mafia.
2:24 Speaker 00 I'm gonna let you say that.
2:25 Steven Bartlett? Yeah, no, don't let me say it. I don't want them coming for me. I brought some food along with me today.
2:32 Speaker 00 I'm looking at it.
2:33 Steven Bartlett? Because I wanted to get your.
2:34 Speaker 00 You're distracting.
2:36 Steven Bartlett? I wanted to get your opinion on it. So I brought a group of food products on the left here. Now, these are things that I, I think, growing up, I thought were good.
2:47 Speaker 00 Yeah.
2:47 Steven Bartlett? So.
2:51 Speaker 00 You're very bold with these brands. I mean, you're really limiting sponsorship opportunities.
2:54 Steven Bartlett? Well, you know, you know, I do think about that sometimes, but I also don't really care. I think, like, I'm in the pursuit of truth here. So much of why I do this is to educate myself. And I, I think if I educate myself, then I'll help educate other people. That's why I'm also okay being a total idiot on this subject matter, because that is the truth. So here I've got four products that are typically seen as being quite healthy. Breakfast cereal, Cheerios, I grew up thinking, good for me. Actimol, good for me. Diet Coke, great, because there's no sugar in there. And then this is.
3:33 Speaker 00 Whole grain.
3:33 Steven Bartlett? Whole grain bread, 50% of your daily whole grain in just two slices.
3:38 Speaker 00 Great.
3:39 Steven Bartlett? Perfect.
3:41 Speaker 00 So for a start, I have a slight unease. I'm going to talk about these products. I have a slight unease talking about any one product.
3:47 Steven Bartlett? Sure.
3:47 Speaker 00 The evidence applies to the category of food. And this kind of stuff, in a sense, I think you're, these are such brilliant choices, because this is the foundation of our diet. And one of the things that's happening at the moment is, is the food industry exploring painting me as a snob, because I'm, I'm critiquing these sort of core things, you know, tins of beans with flavouring or supermarket bread, fish fingers. I think this stuff is at the shallow end of the pool, in a way. It's not by any means the worst stuff. But in a way, it presents the biggest moral hazard, because we think it's so healthy. I have the Diet Coke.
4:25 Steven Bartlett? Yep.
4:26 Speaker 00 So Diet Coke is my, is my favourite example because this is the ultimate health food according to the way we label food at the moment. It has four, where's the camera?
4:37 Steven Bartlett? It's all green on the.
4:38 Speaker 00 It's four green traffic lights, right?
4:40 Steven Bartlett? What does, what do they call that, that traffic light system on the food?
4:43 Speaker 00 So this is the way we describe healthy, whether food is healthy or not in this country at the moment. And this system is quite influenced by the food industry and it breaks all foods down into fat, saturated fat, sugars and salt and says that, you know, if those are the bad things, if a food is high in them, it'll, it'll have oranges and greens. So if you look at the Cheerios, they're most, they're mostly on the front, it's on the front. It's optional by the way, so it's not always on every packet, but the Cheerios are oranges and greens.
5:13 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
5:13 Speaker 00 Now, there is a baked in confusion for this because what do you do at a traffic light that's orange and green or red, orange and green? Do you go? Do you stop? Is it on the act of mouth? Is it, is it on?
5:24 Steven Bartlett? It's not on there. No, I couldn't see it on there.
5:26 Speaker 00 So it may be on the bottom.
5:31 Speaker 00 It's optional. So who knows if, you know, we, we don't, we don't have any way in this country of describing either healthy food or unhealthy food other than these traffic lights. Anyway, this is a healthy food. Now, if we look at the ingredients on the Diet Coke, carbonated water, fine. Now, there's a colour called caramel E150D. Caramel makes you think of your traditional, it's, it's a French 19th century invention, burnt sugar, creme brulee. It's like, it's a bit naughty, but it's fine. Caramel E150D has nothing to do with caramel. It is carbohydrate treated with a mixture of acids and, and, and heat to produce things that contain ammonium and sulphite. So it's, it's, it's a food additive
6:13 Speaker 00 colour with no, no benefits, nothing to do with caramel. Artificial sweetness, aspartame and aspartame K. Now, sweeteners are tricky because we know sugar is harmful because it rots teeth and it promotes weight gain because it makes you eat more. The weird thing about sweetness is they don't seem to help with weight loss at all. They may, some of them seem to be more metabolic. Harmful than sugar itself. Humans are quite good at eating sugar. When we eat lollipops continuously as kids or have sugary drinks, it's not good for us. But human societies have for millennia existed with a huge amount of honey and refined carbs. So sugar we can handle, although we should reduce our intake.
6:56 Speaker 00 Sweeteners are quite weird because they're a nutritional lie. You put sweet taste on the tongue, which says to your body, sugar is coming. So maybe put up some insulin, maybe start preparing in other ways physiologically to receive refined carbohydrates. And when that refined carbohydrate, when the sugar never arrives, it seems to be physiologically confusing. So the World Health Organisation now says sweetness aren't better than sugar when it comes to weight loss. And there is, there is an anxiety about aspartame and cancer that I'm, I'm personally not, not in a big sweat about. There's some, there's some evidence, but not, not at normal doses. Then we've got natural flavourings. We've got caffeine flavouring, an addictive drug and phosphoric acid and citric acid. Natural, it said. Natural flavourings. I mean. That's good.
7:40 Speaker 00 Well, flavourings are flavourings. Flavourings should signal nutritional content. When you eat a tomato, it has flavour, not for fun, it has flavour because it signals the nutritional content of the tomato. When you put flavourings out of context, even if you extract them from the tomato or the strawberry or the peach, it's very confusing for you physiologically. You've, you have a very sophisticated internal system to link flavour molecules, which are broadly smell, and taste molecules, salt, sweet, bitter, sour and some savoury ones. You, you, your body has a way of linking all that information with nutritional information that you get from your gut subconsciously. When you muddle it all up in a product like this, it's very confusing.
8:24 Speaker 00 The phosphoric acid will dissolve the minerals out of your bones as well as dissolving your teeth. So what we have here is a solution of flavourings, an addictive drug, an acid that will leach stuff out of your bones, and sweeteners that seem to be metabolically confusing and certainly aren't better than sugar. And yet we think of this as a health product. So that for me is the archetypal confused way of thinking about food. And what we also know is that when it comes to kids, the age of my youngest, so the age of three, they're drinking on average, one can of artificially sweetened drinks every single day. So we've taxed sugar. Sugar has come out of our diet. We've seen no weight loss, no indication that it's helping health. And what we are doing is
9:07 Speaker 00 consuming huge numbers now of these artificial sweeteners, which we also know affect our microbiome.
9:12 Steven Bartlett? What is a better alternative that's popular on the market than, because it appears to me that all of the drinks in the bloody supermarket have artificial sweeteners and flavourings and.
9:23 Speaker 00 They do because of the sugar tax. So it's almost impossible now to buy fizzy tax without sweetness, to buy fizzy drinks without sweetness.
9:30 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
9:31 Speaker 00 So for kids, I try and not give any advice to anyone ever, but my kids, my kids eat a lot of UPF, but they don't have fizzy drinks. I think fizzy drinks are really quite harmful across the board. So kids should just drink milk and water, milk if they can have it. And grownups can do pretty well on milk and water if you drink milk.
9:59 Steven Bartlett? What about breakfast cereals and Cheerios and things like that?
10:03 Speaker 00 So breakfast cereals are really convenient. I mean, let me see the Cheerios. So I think these, so these probably do meet the, yeah, these do meet the definition. Oh, they are. Yeah. So we've got things like palm oil, caramelized sugar syrup, colours, anatornorbixin, an antioxidant. And so this is ultra-processed. It'll have some fibre. You'll have it with whole milk. I don't want to demonize breakfast cereals. My kids eat breakfast cereals for breakfast, but it's not like eating porridge, which is just whole grains or real bread. This is, and what you will find is if you give this to a kid compared to porridge, is
10:47 Speaker 00 they will be able to eat much, much more of this. And there is that there's a lot of marketing that this is a really, really healthy product. And I would say the evidence says that this falls into a category of foods that we actually know are associated with negative health outcomes.
11:03 Steven Bartlett? It says on the side there, doesn't it, a list of all the health benefits?
11:07 Speaker 00 A really good way of telling if a food is ultra-processed is if there is any health claim on the packet, it's almost certainly ultra-processed. And part of that is to do with this intellectual property thing, that the only food you can make lots of money out of is a branded product. So there's no money in broccoli, milk, steak, eggs. Supermarkets quite often make losses on all those things. There's no health claim on broccoli, or on plums, or on milk. There's no health claim on steak. It's only the ultra-processed things that you get marketed to you in this way, because there's enough money to do it. The Actamel's interesting as well, the immune support.
11:44 Steven Bartlett? Well, it says immune support and it says vitamin D and B6. So that, rich in vitamin D, immune support, that is definitely healthy.
11:57 Speaker 00 I mean, this is, this is a, this is where we need, we should have done the maths and shown how much sugar there was in each pot. These are very high calorie shots of sugary liquid that will harm teeth. And I don't know why you'd have this if you could just have real yogurt and, or milk. And the reason they back add the vitamins is to be able to make health claims. So generally foods with added vitamins, real food doesn't need added vitamins. And we're, again, we're pretty sure that, and I'm conscious who I'm talking to here. I've got, I'm, I'm, I probably have to tread a bit carefully.
12:41 Speaker 00 Supplementing vitamins into food doesn't seem to have many health benefits for healthy people. So we've got quite a lot of very big data on this. And there are lots of studies that show benefits that are funded by people who make vitamins. But broadly, the independent evidence shows that when you get vitamins and minerals in the context of food, they're really good for you. And when you take them in pill or supplement form, they don't seem to have many benefits if you are healthy.
13:11 Steven Bartlett? And this food here, this bottle of Coke, I've got a can of Pringles and a Coco Pops Kellogg's cereal. This is the stuff that I would typically think of as like bad, processed, ultra-processed, stay away from.
13:24 Speaker 00 You would, but give me the Coco Pops. So the Coco Pops. We look at these traffic lights, okay? Green, green, orange, orange. Pretty healthy. I mean, there is a monkey on the pack selling it to my kids.
13:38 Steven Bartlett? Yeah, and it says high in vitamin.
13:39 Speaker 00 High in fibre.
13:40 Steven Bartlett? Vitamin D, iron.
13:41 Speaker 00 Yeah, iron, supporting your family's health, right? Sad of goodness. I mean, everything about this tells you that this is a product not just as safe for kids, but intended for kids. And we all know you're like, you can't sell things if they're not healthy. There must be some regulator dealing with that. And this is the thing that my six-year-old will eat five adult portions of. So when you eat five adult portions, the traffic lights only apply to a 30 gram serving for you. Now, a 30 gram serving is a handful like that. It's one big spoonful, okay? So this is the product that I recognise addictive behaviour in my kids and frankly,
14:25 Speaker 00 myself, I mean, I could eat, you know, 300 grams of it.
14:29 Steven Bartlett? And the other thing that I went and got from the supermarket, because I was thinking about what I typically think as ultra-processed and good for me. I went and got this frozen pizza here. And then I went and got a Tesco's finest. So this is high-end, you know, much more expensive, not frozen pizza. And I thought, surely this pizza here is better, a lot better for me than this one here.
14:58 Speaker 00 So again, there's a complexity talking about, is one better than the other? Because we've never done a trial, testing them against each other. They're both ultra-processed, I know, because I looked at the ingredients. They both contain ingredients that you don't have in a domestic kitchen, like palm fat or dextrose.
15:18 Speaker 00 And they're both made really, in a sense, by the same company. So they're both made by PLCs, who will be owned by institutional investors with the requirements for growth. So they come from the same food system with the same incentives about production. And my bet is that you or I would be able to eat the entire pizza at a single sitting and we'd be still licking the pack of both of them. So this is food that, in a sense, is engineered to be consumed to excess.
15:50 Steven Bartlett? You know, the pizzas, I've got the Cocoa Pops, I've got the Coca-Cola here.
15:57 Steven Bartlett? Is this food?
16:00 Speaker 00 I don't think it meets, so food is very poorly defined. We don't have a working definition of food sort of in law. But I think food is substance that you eat for nourishment. And it should be about nourishment culturally, socially, personally, psychologically, as well as physically. And these products are developed to generate financialized growth for institutional investors. They're not made by people who love you, who want to nourish you. And so I don't think it meets what I think is a useful cultural definition of food. I think it's very useful to not think of them as food. And I don't think a mixture of coloring addictive drugs and phosphoric acid could be called food in any sense of the word. It doesn't have nutrition.
16:45 Speaker 00 It only has things that will, we're pretty sure that almost every ingredient does you harm in some way. So I don't see how that could be called food. It's a way of commodifying your ill health for the benefit of a very small number of people.
17:01 Steven Bartlett? Two things I wanted to say. The first thing is a huge thank you for listening and tuning into the show week after week. It means the world to all of us. And this really is a dream that we absolutely never had and couldn't have imagined getting to this place. But secondly, it's a dream where we feel like we're only just getting started. And if you enjoy what we do here, please join the 24% of people that listen to this podcast regularly and follow us on this app. Here's a promise I'm going to make to you. I'm going to do everything in my power to make this show as good as I can now and into the future. We're going to deliver the guests that you want me to speak to and we're going to continue to keep doing all of the things you love about the show. Thank you.
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