Van Tulleken's "Ultra-Processed People" covers these points, here are some examples, off the top of my head:
> * Fizzy drinks - Carbonation isn't a problem, it's the sugar.
When a drink is served cold and is carbonated - you are less sensitive to its sugar contents. In other words, you can smuggle a larger quantity of sugar into your body this way. If, in contrast, you let that fizzy drink reach room temperature and get rid of the fizz - it would taste too sweet.
This is an example of a deliberate design meant to make you want to buy more of the stuff. A company uses precise measurements and tests to find the optimal range for temperature and fizz.
> * There's nothing bad about fruit juice concentrates except when they use insufficient water to reconstitute the concentrate or if they remove too much pulp.
In the book he mentions an experiment, the setting was like this:
- group A eats an apple
- group B drinks the juice made from that apple, with the pulp
- group C is like B, but without the pulp
Blood sugar levels are measure before, during and after consumption. What they found is that for groups B and C there is a sudden spike, and then the level falls below what it used to be before consumption. With group A - the rise in sugar levels was very gradual, and then it also fell gradually.
This shows that the 3 categories are not the same, even though in each case you ate the same apple in different forms. The researchers hypothesized that the actual fruit has a property, they called it "matrix" - as I understood it, the "form factor" is very important, it is not just a matter of consuming "the same molecules".
As in the example of the fizzy drink, I think of it as "sugar per unit of time" - eating a real apple takes time, you have to chew it, the body's "digestive pipeline" gets enough time to handle the input. The juice is different, the time is short, there's no chewing, no effort.
I enjoyed the book very much, I think you'll like it too. The audiobook is narrated by the author himself.
