'Have a Very Merry, Processed Christmas', Says Dr Chris van Tulleken
Dr Chris Van Tulleken is best known as the doctor who scared the world about their intake of ultra-processed foods. His book, Ultra-Processed People, became a number-one bestseller.
So you might think his Christmas Day plate involves little more than lean turkey meat and boiled veg. There surely wouldn't be room for any sugary mincemeat wrapped in pastry, either.
However, talking to The Times, Tulleken recommended a more traditional feast. 'Go to the supermarket of your choice, get everything in foil, take it out of the foil and put it in the oven. Have a very merry, processed Christmas,' he said.
'It’s the one day of the year when you can spend a bit of meaningful time with the people you love. You don’t want to spend it in the kitchen.'
He elaborated on his Instagram account, saying: 'I’m not going to kill myself doing everything from scratch on Christmas Day. One of the advantages of the industrial food system is that I can get everything pre-prepped in foil from the supermarket, warm it up in the oven and lie to my family that I made it myself.'
Societal Problem
This attitude might surprise you, but it shouldn't. Although Dr van Tulleken is known for raising awareness about what we eat, he is vocal about the fact that avoiding UPF (the now infamous shorthand for ultra-processed foods) shouldn't be an individual's responsibility.
'More than a million families in the UK don’t have either a fridge or a stovetop cooker. So if you can only cook in a microwave, your options are limited. And many people, if they don’t own a car, cannot get somewhere easily where they can buy something that isn’t ultra-processed. They can’t buy real food because they’re shopping from a shop at the bottom of their block of flats,' he told The Times.
Even the most privileged, who can easily get around and cook homemade food, will struggle to avoid UPF, he adds. 'My research group at University College London has just done some modelling with the World Health Organisation and we can show that, using just calories, fat, salt and sugar, 99% of UK food is excessive by the UK’s own guidelines.
'When the British Nutrition Foundation says baked beans or fishfingers on wholegrain toast is a healthy meal — it just isn’t. It’s still very high in salt, very high in sugar and extremely energy dense. The problem is that, for many people, it’s the best food they can afford.'
Malicious Marketing
Dr van Tulleken delved further into how the food landscape is designed for us to rely on UPF in his recent documentary, Irresistible, which looked at whether a lack of willpower really is to blame for overeating.
He discovered that brands have designed UPF with dark psychological tricks to keep us coming back for more. For instance, the Pringles tube was specifically designed to be slightly too small for your hands to mimic the feeling of 'foraging', triggering an evolutionarily wired part of our brain to keep digging for more.
'In the mid-1970s, obesity started going up in all the groups, simultaneously. If you're saying willpower is responsible, what you're saying is that all these groups of people simultaneously lost moral responsibility,' Dr van Tulleken explained in the programme.
'And that's not plausible. Something else happened to our food in the mid-1970s that made it irresistible.
'Food companies started to realise that if they used proper scientific development processes, they could sell us a lot more food.'
What's On His Plate This Christmas?
But back to Christmas. Not a fan of Turkey, Dr van Tulleken will be feasting on chicken, alongside his foil-wrapped delicacies. And his message is if you happen to spend the day eating Pringles and processed meats, don't sweat it.
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