The Atlantic

Beware of the Food That Isn’t Food

The podcaster Chris van Tulleken has strong opinions about soft bread and candy that never decays.
Source: Getty

Chris van Tulleken refuses to tell me what to have for breakfast. “Everyone thinks that I have a strong opinion about what they should eat,” he tells me, as I hesitate between the eggs Benedict and the full English. “And I have almost no opinion.”

Now, this isn’t quite true. When I tell him later that I’ve decided that the occasional full-sugar cola is probably better than multiple diet sodas every day, he replies: “Enjoy the phosphoric acid leaching the minerals out of your bones.” Which sounds a judgmental, if I’m honest. (Soft drinks have been , but their manufacturers that there is a causal relationship.) There’s a very good reason that van Tulleken refuses to dictate my breakfast order: He has just published a identifying , 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 , he ate a UPF-heavy diet for a month—a stunt reminiscent of Morgan Spurlock’s , 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. “In just a few weeks, I felt like I’d aged ten years. I was aching, exhausted, miserable and angry.”

You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

More from The Atlantic

The Atlantic7 min readAmerican Government
Could South Carolina Change Everything?
For more than four decades, South Carolina has been the decisive contest in the Republican presidential primaries—the state most likely to anoint the GOP’s eventual nominee. On Saturday, South Carolina seems poised to play that role again. Since the
The Atlantic4 min read
Hayao Miyazaki’s Anti-war Fantasia
Once, in a windowless conference room, I got into an argument with a minor Japanese-government official about Hayao Miyazaki. This was in 2017, three years after the director had announced his latest retirement from filmmaking. His final project was
The Atlantic5 min readAmerican Government
What Nikki Haley Is Trying to Prove
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Nikki Haley faces terrible odds in her home state of

Related Books & Audiobooks