"Ultra-Processed People" by Chris van Tulleken

 This is a popular science book which attacks ultra-processed foods (UPF or UPFs) as being bad for human health, in particular being responsible for the increase in obesity and obesity-related diseases.

The crux of the thesis seems to be that UPFs are tastier than non-UPFs, that they are softer (and therefore easier to eat), that they are higher in calories, and that they are aggressively marketed; these four factors mean that people eat more and become fat. 

In addition, some of the additives may be implicated in health problems, including inflammatory bowel diseases.

As someone who has been struggling to lose weight recently (according to my BMI, I was 'obese' and am now 'overweight'), I have some sympathy for some of the claims. There are some foodstuffs that do seem to be addictive (for me, digestive biscuits and Quorn cocktail sausages among others) and generally I find it difficult to stop eating once I have started (I also eat quickly, which is, according to this book, a genetic trait). I also have colitis which might have been caused by my diet.

However, I have major problems with this book. I trained as a scientist and the author is a respected scientist. Why then does this book exhibit so many of the features of pseudoscience?

• A lot of the evidence is anecdotal, including the author's own experience, that of his twin brother, and observations of his young daughter. He even includes one of his nightmares.
• He frequently attacks those involved in the production of UPFs, or those scientists who argue against him, often on the basis of their funding sources and sometimes because they work for companies who also produce non-food chemical products. Such attacks are 'ad hominem', a classic rhetorical trick widely recognised as a logical fallacy. 
• Conversely, he paints rosy pictures of those scientists with whom he agrees. What is the relevance of, for example, their art collections? This is another rhetorical trick, designed to make the reader like these people and therefore more ready to believe them. It also approaches the logical fallacy of 'arguing from authority'.
• Similarly, he uses adjectives to influence the reader, either 'boo words' such as when he describes a critic as a "contrarian", or 'wow words' such as when he talks of "proper" sourdough bread. Once again, this is rhetoric, not scientific evidence.
• He adopts the 'speck in your eye' approach of focusing on criticising the arguments of his opponents while not holding his own arguments to the same standards (such as when he adopts the NOVA definition of UPFs while attacking nutritional information panels and traffic light labels on UK foods as being too complex). 
• He attacks 'straw men' (another logical fallacy) such as when he attacks vitamin supplements: “There aren't any supplements that work for healthy people ... outside the context of possible deficiency vitamins supplements don't work.” (Ch 2). The whole point of supplements, as the word implies, is that they are for people who are deficient in a vitamin.
• He presents hypotheses and uses them as is they were facts, such as in "food produced for profit might be designed, deliberately or inadvertently, to make us consume it" (Ch 2) where the word 'might' means that the statement is not definitive, but it is swamped by the rest of the clause.
• Sometimes he uses the 'you never can tell' argument, such as in this passage commenting on the  dimethylpolysiloxane in KFC Hot Wings. "Extensive experiments in rats show that hardly any is absorbed when eaten and it passes out unchanged in the faeces. Dimethylpolysiloxane may very well be safe. Or it may be subtly harmful over a long period through some mechanism yet to be discovered.” Here he admits that the scientific evidence shows this additive is safe, but he then dismisses this through the 'yet to be discovered' argument, which can be used to cast doubt on every scientific (and even pseudoscientific) argument.

In the text, rhetoric swamps evidence though, to be fair, there are a lot of footnotes linked to scientific papers.

However, my major criticism is the way in which he defines UPFs. He uses the cumbersome NOVA definition: "Industrially manufactured food products made up of several ingredients (formulations) including sugar, oils, fats and salt (generally in combination and in higher amounts than in processed foods) and food substances of no or rare culinary use (such as high-fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated oils, modified starches and protein isolates). Group 1 foods are absent or represent a small proportion of the ingredients in the formulation. Processes enabling the manufacture of ultra-processed foods include industrial techniques such as extrusion, moulding and pre-frying; application of additives including those whose function is to make the final product palatable or hyperpalatable such as flavours, colourants, non-sugar sweeteners and emulsifiers; and sophisticated packaging, usually with synthetic materials. Processes and ingredients here are designed to create highly profitable (low-cost ingredients, long shelf-life, emphatic branding), convenient (ready-to-(h)eat or to drink), tasteful alternatives to all other Nova food groups and to freshly prepared dishes and meals. Ultra-processed foods are operationally distinguishable from processed foods by the presence of food substances of no culinary use (varieties of sugars such as fructose, high-fructose corn syrup, 'fruit juice concentrates', invert sugar, maltodextrin, dextrose and lactose; modified starches; modified oils such as hydrogenated or interesterified oils; and protein sources such as hydrolysed proteins, soya protein isolate, gluten, casein, whey protein and 'mechanically separated meat') or of additives with cosmetic functions (flavours, flavour enhancers, colours, emulsifiers, emulsifying salts, sweeteners, thickeners and anti-foaming, bulking, carbonating, foaming, gelling and glazing agents) in their list of ingredients."

This definition is catch-all in the extreme. It seems to suggest that foods that are tasty and convenient to prepare are, by virtue of these attributes, UPFs. He acknowledges the complexity of this definition so he provides 'rule of thumb' alternatives:

• “UPF has a long formal scientific definition, but it can be boiled down to this: if it’s wrapped in plastic and has at least one ingredient that you would usually find in a standard home kitchen, it’s UPF.” (Introduction)
• “Almost every food that comes with a health claim in the packet is a UPF.” (Introduction)
• “My personal rule of thumb is: if I’m struggling with whether to call a food UPF then it probably is UPF.” (Ch 10)
• “Are you reading an ingredient list? That’s probably UPF.” (Afterword, FAQs)

The effect of these rules of thumb is to make the definition of UPF even more catch-all. And this is a major problem with the field. Because some food processing is good for us. The human gut has evolved since the invention of cooking; cooking allows us to extract more calories from our food (van Tulleken seems to suggest this is a bad thing because too many calories make us obese) and this might have been what drove the prehistorical increase in our brain size. The iodisation of cooking salt has not only prevented iodine deficiency diseases but there is evidence that it has increased the IQ of the global human population by an average of 4 IQ points. The flour used for most bread is supplemented, under UK law, with vitamins and, recently, folic acid in order to protect people from deficiency diseases (I recently read an article attacking the addition of folic acid and sneering that it was predicted to prevent 'only' between 100 and 150 cases of babies born with spina bifida). So a definition of UPF which can distinguish between what is 'good' processing and what is 'bad' seems to me essential. This is precisely what van Tulleken fails to provide. Instead, he seems to be encouraging us to eschew all processed food. 

He does recognise that one of the major problems facing the elimination of UPFs is that they are cheaper and more convenient than non-UPFs. He accepts that this may be a problem for poor people (he cites figures suggesting that In the UK, because of the relatively high cost of housing, fuel and transport, in order to have a diet that adhered to the national healthy guidelines the poorest 50% would need to spend 30% of their income on food and the poorest 10% would need to spend 75% of their income on food). He has two solutions: firstly that they use cookbooks which will teach them how to make nutritious meals from cheap ingredients, and secondly that the savings he claims will be made from governments needing to spend less on healthcare (because there will be mush reduced obesity) can be used to subsidise foods. I suspect he is looking forward to the time when the pizza he buys made from "proper sourdough" costs the same as the supermarket pizza rather than more than five times the price. This seems utopian. And one thing he doesn't seem to consider is convenience. In the old days (the 1950s?) a typical family might have a mother who stayed at home and was able to pop out to the shops to buy food every day. Nowadays, a typical family may well need both parents to be 'breadwinners' and don't have the spare time for daily shopping. Foods with long shelf-lifes are therefore essential.

I agree absolutely that there should be rigorous governmental regulation of anything added to our food; the self-regulation system he describes in the US seems fraught with danger. Additives proved dangerous should be banned. Those sitting on regulatory bodies should be independent of the food industry, though I can't accept his suggestion that scientists employed by the food industry "should be rigorously excluded from the policy space and public debate. They shouldn’t be quoted in articles or appear on the news.” This seems to be anti-freedom of speech and very definitely anti-science which relies on ideas being tested through sceptical debate. I would applaud his suggestion of 'black hexagon' labelling for any food high in fat or sugar or salt. But the exclusion of certain foodstuffs from our diets must be done on the basis of the evidence and, for me, this book foregrounded rhetoric over science.

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Where do camels belong?" by Ken Thompson

 This brilliant book by an ecologist is a polemic against the division of species in 'native' and 'alien'. He shows that the idea of 'naturalness' is wrong-minded by asking where camels belong: in the middle east or in North America (where they evolved and then went extinct) or in South America (where llamas and alpacas etc represent the greatest species diversity from the camel root) or in Australia (the only country where camels are feral).  He suggests that the myth of nativeness assumes something special about this moment in time, the writer of a key text, “Elton believed firmly that species belong to wherever they happen to be right now, irrespective of length of tenure or of where they had evolved or migrated from. More than that, he believed that belonging confers rights of occupancy, that these rights extend indefinitely into the future, and that natives are morally superior to aliens.” (Ch 2)

He goes on to suggest that the talk of 'invasive' aliens is based on a very few cases where an introduction (normally by humans) caused damage to an ecosystem and that normally the arrival of aliens increases biodiversity, or would do except that “Invasion biologists worry a lot about biodiversity, but only native biodiversity; introduced species are not allowed to contribute to biodiversity. alien species can never add to biodiversity.” (Ch 12). He suggests that most examples of harm are caused because human agency alters ecosystems and this provides an opportunity for new (alien) species to thrive where the established species can't (because their environment has been changed which means that “Blaming an alien for filling the gap left by declining natives looks like shooting the messenger.” (Ch 4)

He provides oodles of evidence and gives a short (and easy-to-read) course in biogeography and ecology. He demonstrates that the evidence for alien harm is often based on dubious science: “I was going to say that ... I debunk the myth that alien species constitute the second largest global threat to biodiversity (after habitat destruction). But on reflection I think that assertion has been debunked so often ... that it no longer deserves the status of a myth, and is best described merely as a straightforward lie.” Ch 2)

He lambastes the ridiculous ideas built upon the idea of nativeness as enshrined in laws which don't take account of the fact that most 'invasions' are done without (conscious) human agency: “Nowadays, for plants with the right kind of seeds, socks are a major dispersal pathway.” (Ch 1)

It's very convincing ... and made even better by an author who can really write well and is often very funny

And, of course, it has huge implications for humanity. Who is 'entitled' to the United States: the post-Columbian immigrants or the Native Americans? And the perjorative language used again 'invasive alien' plants and animals resonate quite strongly with the way some right-wing politicians talk about human immigrants. 

Selected quotes:

• “Conservation is a value-laden activity ... ‘Nativeness’ appears to offer the prospect of unambiguous attributes that make something worth conserving; or, in the case of its absence, worth exterminating, or at least controlling. To question this approach is close to heresy.” (Introduction)
• “Species are born, and then they die. That is, is they evolve by natural selection from earlier species, and eventually they go extinct.” (Ch 1)
• “By definition species evolved in one particular spot, but later they may spread to occupy a much wider range.” (Ch 1)
• “Brown tree ... snakes climb pylons and frequently short out power lines, causing power cuts. In fact somewhere on Guam experiences a snake-related power cut about every other day.” (Ch 3)
• “The modern world is essentially a mosaic of new ‘anthropogenic biomes’” (121) This is why “in the last few thousand years, and especially in recent centuries and decades ... being a rat or a weed has turned out to be the golden ticket in life.” (Ch 7)
• “The Wildlife and Countryside Act Schedule 9 ... lists the species that cannot legally be introduced into the wild ... it now includes several species of Cotoneaster ... spread far and wide by birds, none of which can be persuaded to read Schedule 9.” (Ch 8)
• “The difficulty here is the inevitable collision between the law, which deals in black and white absolutes, and ecology, where a grey fog predominates.” (Ch 8)
• “Assisted migration of endangered species is a small step in the direction of allowing them to compete on a playing field that still slopes uphill, but slightly less steeply than before.” (Ch 10)
• “Sometimes it seems many conservationists would prefer a species to go extinct than to survive somewhere it doesn't ‘belong’.” (Ch 10)

Great fun to read ... and eye-opening.

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God January 2022; 223 pages

"Sync" by Steven Strogatz

Fireflies synchronize their flashes for miles and miles along a river bank. Applauding humans synchronize their claps. The Millennium Bridge in London was almost overwhelmed as hundreds of people developed synchronized staggering. Electrons synchronize their waves to enable superconductivity.

This book is about how oscillating systems can spontaneously synchronize. That sounds abstruse, difficult and rather boring. Strogatz makes it exciting. He writes about a wide range of topics, explaining any necessary maths carefully and without equations, and spices his stories up by writing about the often eccentric mathematicians and scientists with whom he has worked, from the father of Cybernetics who became so obsessed with a particular graph that he promoted it even after he had discovered that the evidence for it had been mistaken to the Nobel-prize winning physicist who now studies telepathy. I loved the story about when he was having a meal with Alan Alda, the instantly recognizable MASH star, in the MIT canteen and a young student came up and asked them whether he was Professor Strogatz because he just had to say how much he loved his book. They were talking about fads and tipping points and Strogatz mentions that the latest fads in science are all c-words: cybernetics, catastrophe theory, chaos and complexity. He thinks sync is behind them all!

This book is so well written that I understood about Bose-Einstein condensates, quantum tunnelling and strange attractors. That is impressive.

But I also learned about sleep and insomnia and phase changes and tipping points and fads and raster plots and incoherence and small world networks and cascades and brain waves and epilepsy and pendulums and power grids and Zhabotinsky soup and the Josephson Effect and SQUIDs and rioting and foot and mouth.

Wow!

Other great books in this area include:

• Six degrees about small world networks by Duncan Watts who worked with Steven Strogatz
• At Home in the Universe by Stuart Kauffman about fitness landscapes
• How Nature Works by Per Bak about sandpiles and self organized criticality; an excellent explanation of complexity science
• Deep Simplicity by John Gribbin which is a brilliant introduction to this whole field
• Smart swarm by Peter Miller
• The Information by James Gleick although his Chaos (not reviewed on this blog) is perhaps better

Other books not reviewed on this blog on this topic include:

• The Wisdom of Crowds 
• Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell about fads
• Ubiquity which is brilliant about fractals and power laws
• Critical mass by Philip Ball which is a brilliant explanation about phase changes

Very readable and very important. September 2015; 289 pages

"At Home in the Universe" by Stuart Kauffman

Kauffman is a pioneering complexity scientist and this book endeavours to show how life could have emerged from a sufficiently large and diverse collection of molecules with autocatalysis. Despite being unable to point to an example where some scientist has successfully replicated the necessary reactions, his arguments are compelling. Complex networks of individual agents can give rise to emergent phenomena: life, consciousness and more. There is no need for a designer or an intelligence or indeed any external influence; you don't even need the agents to be purposeful or (in economic terms) rational. Given the right conditions of complexity (and in Kauffman's models, rather more than in those of Per Bak, there is a degree of tuning required to ensure that the parameters give rise to critical sustainability rather than subcritical inert stability or supercritical chaos), emergence will, er, emerge.

The phenomenon of self-organization means that systems not in thermodynamic equilibrium will create what Kauffman calls "order for free". The second law of thermodynamics continues, of course, to apply to systems in equilibrium, systems that are closed to inputs and outputs of matter and energy, in which entropy or disorder inevitably increases but Kauffman's systems are ones through which matter and energy flow.

Kauffman clearly finds these exciting. He keeps repeating his discovery that we are not the random products of chance, rather we are the inevitable results of the way the universe works. He is right, of course: this is a revolutionary thesis as important as the Copernican paradigm shift or Darwin's Natural Selection. But this is where I began to find the work a little muddled. His lyrical descriptions of the desert in bloom are presumably meant for the general reader but at the same time there is a lot of technical details about his theoretical models. On the other hand, when I try to understand more deeply these same models I am frustrated by gaps in the explanations. For example, he states a formula S = lnG and I think I know what he means by G but I am not certain; he is not clear. He tells us on page 163 that pleuromona has between 500 to 800 genes but on page 42 it is between "a few hundred to about a thousand". He explains that some systems can jump beyond the 'correlation length' of a fitness landscape but he never tells us how to measure this length. Perhaps this is just me not being clever enough or picking too many nits but a few minor changes could have really helped me understand this work.

This is an important and ground-breaking book. It would benefit from slightly better editing. August 2015; 304 pages.

Other works on this exciting topic:

• Deep Simplicity by John Gribbin which is an immensely readable and interesting overview of this area and similar non-equilibrium systems and 100% recommended
• Emergence: from chaos to order and Complexity: a very short introduction, both by John Holland, one of the leading experts in the field
• Ubiquity by Mark Buchanan
• How Nature Works by Per Bak, another expert who can really write
• Six degrees about small world networks by Duncan Watts who worked with Steven Strogatz
• Smart swarm by Peter Miller
• The Information by James Gleick although his Chaos (not reviewed on this blog) is perhaps better
• sync by Steven Strogatz

Other books not reviewed on this blog on this topic include:

• The Wisdom of Crowds 
• Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell about fads
• Ubiquity which is brilliant about fractals and power laws
• Critical mass by Philip Ball which is a brilliant explanation about phase changes

"How nature works" by Per Bak

This book is subtitled The Science of Self-Organized Criticality and explains the new discipline of Complexity Theory, the the process making it distinct from Chaos Theory.

Per Bak is a critical (pun not intended) researcher in this field, having been one of the first to devise the famous sandpile experiments in which grains of sand are dropped one by one onto a pile of sand and the size of the subsequent avalanches recorded. From here to theoretical models of ridiculous simplicity modelled on desk top computers which provide results which closely match phenomena as diverse as:

• The distribution of earthquake size
• The distributions of extinctions within the fossil record
• Learning
• Economics
• Traffic jams

The suggestion is that many systems evolve into a position of 'Self Organized Criticality'. At this point small external events will trigger adjustments of the system, some of which will be unnoticeably small and some of which will be enormous. Key insights are:

• That you do not need to postulate an external trigger for a catastrophe, systems such as the world's ecosystem or a the world's stock markets are always on the edge of catastrophe anyway so that a very small trigger can create a massive landslide (but normally doesn't, of course)
• That these systems are very large so that you need to consider the entire ecosystem of the world (which might include the atmosphere - life creates oxygen - and the oceans and the landscape) or the entire geological system of the world (earthquakes and plate tectonics etc) or the economics systems of the world or an entire brain etc
• That these systems may be hierarchical such that complex astrophysical systems give rise to complex geological systems which give rise to complex biological systems (eg life) which give rise to complex ecological systems etc etc.

This was a fascinating book, mostly very readable, which gives insight into this fascinating new science. A slight criticism is that the bibliography appears quite selective and some of the researchers mentioned in the text do not appear, making it difficult to access their original work.

July 2015; 198 pages

Other books covering this interesting topic include:

• Deep Simplicity by John Gribbin which is an immensely readable and interesting overview of this area and similar non-equilibrium systems and 100% recommended
• Emergence: from chaos to order and Complexity: a very short introduction, both by John Holland, one of the leading experts in the field
• Ubiquity by Mark Buchanan
• At Home in the Universe by Stuart Kauffman, the inventor of the NK landscape model
• Six degrees about small world networks by Duncan Watts
• sync by Steven Strogatz
• Smart swarm by Peter Miller
• The Information by James Gleick although his Chaos (not reviewed on this blog) is perhaps better

Other books not reviewed on this blog on this topic include:

• The Wisdom of Crowds 
• Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell about fads
• Ubiquity which is brilliant about fractals and power laws
• Critical mass by Philip Ball which is a brilliant explanation about phase changes

"The naked scientist" by Chris Smith

This is a compilation, or a miscellany, of scientific news and facts. Many of the individual items are very interesting, many of them reflect the latest advances in gene technology. But there are too many of these little bite-sized bits and the arrangement of them holds no pattern that I could discern. As a result the book appears to be cluttered, the scientific equivalent of noise. The nuggets are lost in the flood of new information. This book desperately needed some structure.

May 2015; 309 pages

"Big Bang" by Simon Singh

This is a delightful and fascinating history of cosmology up to and slightly after the near-universal (pun not intended) acceptance of the Big Bang theory of the creation of the Universe. Having taught Physics for 33 years I knew most of the Science and understood the arguments but there were still aspects I had not fully appreciated. These were carefully explained and I am confident that this book would be accessible to the general reader. Singh also explained the philosophical issues and weighed up the various arguments carefully so that their merits and demerits could be easily compared. But the icing on the cake was his affectionate portrayal of the very human astronomers and cosmologists who contributed to (or fought against) our present understanding.

There were so many characters. Here are just a few:

• Fritz Zwicky, for example, was famously rude. His favourite insult was to call you a 'spherical bastard' because,just like a sphere, he thought you were a bastard whichever way he looked at you. 
• Lord Rosse owned an estate in Ireland and gave up astronomy to look after his tenants during the Irish Potato Famine; he built a huge telescope on his lands but was rather foiled by the fact that there are two sorts of weather in Ireland: raining and about to rain. 
• Walter Baade, a German emigre in USA during the Second World War experienced similar frustrations when the authorities decided that, as an enemy alien, he should be confined to his house between sunset and sunrise despite working on the Mount Wilson optical telescope. 
• George Gamow, a practical joker, who had to defect from the USSR; his first attempt involved trying to canoe across the Black Sea which he had to give up after two days. 
• Fred Hoyle, the proponent of the Steady State Theory, who shot himself in the foot not once but twice: first when he developed the theory for nucleosynthesis which removed a significant problem for the Big Bang theory and secondly during a radio broadcast when he scornfully referred to what was then called the dynamic evolving model as a Big Bang, thus creating a catchy name to popularise the idea.

The book ends with a short epilogue in which the continuing issues facing cosmology are outlined. Why is the expansion of the Universe apparently accelerating? What is the mysterious dark energy that might explain this? Why are the six numbers that govern the Universe so perfectly aligned that humans can exist? Does this mean that we are just one bubble in a multiverse? And most of all, of course: What happened before the Big Bang?

A thought-porvoking book that takes you for a ride through the mysteries of the Universe and yet explains them so well that you understand some reallt difficult science.

April 2015; 493 pages

Other books by this author:

• Fermat's Last Theorem: I have not yet read this
• The Code Book: I very much enjoyed this history of cryptography
• The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets: a fun book about Maths which I have reviewed in this blog

"Herd" by Mark Earls

his is a UK take on a US-style marketing management through popular psychology book. Mark Earls works in marketing, worships Rugby and sings in a ska group. He writes well (which kept me going because I soon discovered that I wasn't really interested in marketing) but I suspect the shallowness of his research (despite lots of references he is prone to relying too much on a few academic authors and bulking this out with websites and newspapers). He is well described in the blurb as Malcolm Gladwell on speed.

His essential thesis is that we are 'super-social' animals and that therefore classical economics, marketing and management with their attempts to understand the group as the aggregate of the individuals are wrong. Rather, you need to understand the interactions in the complex organism-ations.

Most market people seek to develop one way channels of communication in an attempt to persuade people to buy their products. They fail to realise that the best marketing is done by peer-to-peer networks of word of mouth. The only way to market in the future is through developing trust by having sincere beliefs and being truly interested in other people.

On the way I learned that the Broken Windows approach to fighting crime in NY was to always mend broken windows and clean up graffiti because by taking care of the details we can persuade people that they want to live better lives and so they will start to behave in line with our aspirations. Or maybe just copy us (super-social apes imitate one another a lot) by mending their own windows and cleaning up their own graffiti. Perhaps this would also work when trying to persuade pupils to do homework.

Interesting but not overwhelmingly so. April 2012; 370 pages