Eye-opening account of all thatʼs bad about most food you buy in a supermarket. If it has one ingredient you wouldnʼt find in a kitchen, it is probably an industrially-manufactured digestible material with no nutritional value. It is actually harmful: it thins the mucus layer that lines most of your insides causing stomach ulcers, and leads to obesity, for examples.
The book also explains how your body regulates its intake of many substances, including oxygen and water, fats, sugars, potassium and all those vitamins. In general, you canʼt actually over-eat as your body just passes whatever it does not need for its balancing. But ultraprocessed foods contain flavourings whose taste tricks your body into believing that some nutrition is coming, only to have the coloured, flavoured industrial slime delivered.
The stuff is basically unpalatable, hence loaded with salt, sugar, flavourings and colourings. It is calorie-dense and soft: very easy to eat without much chewing.
The writing is mostly first-person, relating conversations with experts and experiences travelling around the world and attending at conferences. The style is chatty, and treats academic information with reverence, but presents it at an everyman level. All arguments are backed by formal references, and are completely convincing.
An extra chapter in this 2024 edition talks about the repercussions of publishing the original edition, including underhanded attempts by the food industry to silence the author, and points out how far behind the rest of the world Britain is, both in recognizing the problem and doing anything about it.
It is simply a book which must be read at least once, and carries a high re-read factor as there is much to take in, and, I think, at some point in the near future when I will need to boost my impetus to keep eating good food going.