The Food Giants are making us fat, ill, and shrinking our children
A closer look at my outrageous claims about the effects on humans of inhuman food. And 2 fight-back recipes for lentils
Hello and welcome to this week’s Downsizing Diva.
This week brings the first part of Chapter 2 of My Bumper Book of Food-Giant-Slaying, which has some good reasons to never let a UPF (ultra-processed-food) darken you large intestine again, and a couple of really good lentil recipes. But before diving in, the Food, Farming and Countryside Commission has just published a report that our unhealthy eating habits are costing the country £268bn a year. So for the sake of the Exchequer, please don your Marigolds and get Giant-Slaying at your earliest convenience.
To read Chapter 1, please click here.
Chapter 2
The Food Giants are making us fat and ill.
A closer look at my outrageous claims about the effects on humans of inhuman food.
When that first creature crawled out of the mud in search of food a few billion years ago, it’s unlikely that its first thought was, ‘if I can just evolve long enough, eventually I’ll get to eat a Big Mac with an ice-cold coke’. And over the next few billion years, as it threw its all into evolving into other, much more exciting creatures (mud-crawler is a rubbish profile for getting likes on social media), at no point was it aiming to become its best self through eating stuff that only qualifies as food because it contains calories, and you can put it in your mouth and swallow it without immediate risk of death.
So I could save us all a lot of trouble and just say that our highly complex body was evolved over a million years or so to run on food, and trying to make it work on a bunch of chemicals, additives and basement-grade industrial foodstuffs is like running a Ferrari on chip fat.*
If you are not in the mood for reading, that is all you need to know to make a fully informed and science based decision to never let a UPF darken your large intestine again.
*If some clever dick has discovered that Ferraris run perfectly well on chip fat, this is not the moment to say so.
However, Food-Giant-Slaying involves wiping from the face of the earth – or at least your dinner plate – substances that genius wizards of taste and texture have ensured will be extraordinarily pleasurable – to say nothing of cheap and very convenient – and you may not want to do that without some very good reasons.
There are plenty of them, but I’ll start with the thing everyone talks about: they’re making us all fat.
And by all, I’m only just exaggerating – according to the WHO, overweight and obesity affects well over 2 billion people and kills roughly 2.8 million a year. That’s enough to fill nearly 30 countries the size of Britain entirely with overweight and obese people, and wipe out the population of Wales every year. Although not necessarily in Wales: obesity gets everywhere, even places where not long ago, people were hard put to get enough to eat – like Tonga and American Samoa, where following the introduction of UPF, over 80% of the population is obese. All over the world, the rise in obesity has been spectacular: for example, in 1960, before the Food Giants started waging their war on food, 10% of the American population were obese and 0.9% were very obese. By 2018, 45% were obese and 10% were very obese. It’s the kind of increase the makes you hope that gravity can cope.
And the question the Food Giants wants us to keep asking is, ‘is it really them that’s responsible’. And to help us keep asking it, they very helpfully fund research that says it isn’t. In particular, all that scientific proof that our obesity pandemic is down to our more sedentary lifestyles, was generously funded by Coca Cola. The weird reality that we don’t burn more calories if we exercise a lot needs a chapter of its own (it’s to do with evolving to cope with an erratic and unreliable food supply) but for the moment I’ll stick to saying that the world hasn’t developed a lardy bottom because we spend too much time sitting on it.
As to the particulars of the Food Giants’ spectacular talent for supersizing us, let me count the ways:
First, there’s the much talked about salt, fat, and sugar malarky – with lots more talk about how if the Giants could just bring the levels down a bit – if they wouldn’t mind – then all will be well.
And the Giants – who would mind very much – have a jolly good laugh, and tell their little helpers (known as lobbyists) to remind any governments who talk such nonsense that nobody likes a nanny state. And governments, who tend to be rather frightened of Giants, are quick to see the sense in all that. But to show that they’re taking the issue seriously, they usually come up with a voluntary agreement to remove a few grams of sugar – which the Giants don’t mind at all, because replacing food ingredients with chemical substitutes is what they do best. And if it turns out it doesn’t suit,* a well placed word in a ear about not hitting the poorest and most vulnerable in society, usually sees off unwelcome interference in less time than it takes to find the microwave.
*The Giants have to be very careful that things don’t go too far: by the time their processing robots have finished, the reshaped, tasteless sludge needs all the help it can get, otherwise we won’t hand over our gold.
But anyway, bad as too much sugar, fat and salt is, if that was all it took to make people fat, the Italians would barely be able to put their own socks on* by the time they were 40.
*For those not in the know, arms do not increase in length as girth expands. Something for evolution to get its teeth into, I think.
But the nail in a lot of coffins – and not only the large ones – is that the processing strips out all the fibre.
If you were feeding your cow on essence of grass, bulked up and made palatable by the addition of lots of sugar, fat, and salt, you’d be unlikely to think that things would be much improved if you took a few grams of sugar et al out of it:
‘the cow needs to eat the whole thing, you moron’, you’d shout at whatever moron was spouting such nonsense.
And you would be right: it is the structure and bulk of the grass as much as its nutrients that the cow needs.
As a matter of fact, some cows are fed a bovine version of a junk-food diet because it fattens them up in double-quick time. It also makes the meat less nutritious, and the cow has to be pumped full of antibiotics to keep it going. We don’t eat humans, so I can’t comment on their nutritional content, but the rest is bang on the mark.
Don’t get me wrong, too much sugar, fat and salt are definitely not good for our health, but they do far more damage if they are encased in food that has deconstructed molecule by molecule and had all nutrition, fibre and structure pulverised and bleached out of it. Otherwise the Italians would all be dead as well as fat at 40.
But in particular, lots of sugar + zero fibre is a combination that Beelzebub himself would have been pleased to come up with.
Firstly, there’s no bulk to slow down digestion, so the sugar enters the bloodstream at the speed of a galloping coca-cola.
The body has standards; in particular, it does not like the bloodstream to be inundated with sugar, and if it can’t do something about it very, very quickly, it shuts down and dies. Which is why insulin leaps in at the first sign of trouble and turns the sugar into fat cells before it has time to kill anyone. This is very good for staying alive, but equally good for making you fat. Which may kill you.
Every food that’s had all the fibre stripped out of it becomes coca-cola – or very nearly; even more so if it has added sugars. Even something healthy like a whole orange, if juiced it delivers a bigger sugar hit than coca-cola.*
So insulin working at full capacity is fantastically efficient at making us fat; if it stops working, we die.
It’s not the best of choices.
* Oh how my smug, middle-class parenting got its comeuppance when I found that out. Luckily the sugar content in cola is not the only problem, which will be useful if Offspring ever realises and reaches for the lawyers.
And insulin is no Mother Theresa: it gets fed up with the blatant exploitation of endless fibre-free food, laced with masses of extra sugar – and you can hardly blame it: constantly on call, no time off, and no thanks – and when it does start to go on strike you get diabetes. Which might kill you. And could send you blind first. And perhaps you might lose a leg or two.
N.b. You don’t have to be fat to get diabetes, it just ups your chances.
By now, you may be noticing that the things the Food Giants do that make billions of us fat, can also make any of us ill.
But staying on the subject of how the Food Giants are fattening up the planet, lack of fibre has another genius way to make you fat as a flea: it makes the food much more calorie-dense per square inch, and therefore simultaneously less filling and more fattening. Making it likely that a short while after you have finished a meal, you’ll be looking for something else to eat. And head for one of those tasty little snacks that are equally calorie-dense and incapable of filling you up. So a little while later you have some more crisps—peanuts-chocolate—with-a-bit-of-pizza-you-found-in-the-fridge. By the end of an evening you could have consumed your own bodyweight in calories, and still go to bed hungry.
The other problem with stripping out the fibre is that there’s nothing with which to feed the microbiome.
A quick word on the subject of the microbiome.
The microbiome is the Jonnie-come-lately of our biology, and very du jour. I don’t mean it’s suddenly tipped up in a previously unoccupied bit of our body, but we have started noticing that it’s there. It’s a teeming mass of trillions of different types of microbes which live in the bowel. That might not sound much to get excited about but scientists and medics have now realised they are crucial to reducing inflammation – which is at the root of many diseases including mental illness –and fighting infections. Like Covid-19.
I say teeming mass, but in order to teem, they need their human to consume shed-loads of fruit, vegetables, pulses, and whole grains to give them enough fibre to get their teeth into: nothing else can survive the digestive process in the stomach and arrive unscathed in the bowel. Given that 50% of calories eaten in this country are from fibreless ultra-processed food, there must be a lot of skinny microbes practising social distancing in cavernously empty bowels.
And if those microbes get nothing to eat, they turn nasty: they make you feel terrible, inflame your body, and refuse to help fight disease. Even worse than this, the wrong microbes can grow there instead – including two that only get in because of xanthan gum.
Before I get onto the other ways the Giants are making us fat, and why you need the structure as well the fibre, there is a simple and cheap way out of this fatten-you-up triple whammy of fibre-less, structureless food: 1) stop eating their nonsense, and 2) eat things with lots of fibre.
Like these two recipes.
Lentils with Cumin-Roast Beetroot, Apple and Black Olives
It's a rare day that I don't eat lentils – they make me feel so amazingly well – so I have an inexhaustible supply of lentil salads. I particularly like this one, especially in the autumn.
Serves 4 people
250g small lentils, cooked with pepper corns, coriander and cardamom seeds and a teaspoon of salt – or use a tin.
3 beetroots, peeled and cut into wedges
1 apple, cored and finely diced
½ red onion, finely diced
10 bitter black olives, roughly chopped
Pomegranate seeds
1 teaspoon cumin seeds
1 tablespoon finely chopped rosemary
1 teaspoon honey
2 teaspoons olive oil
2 teaspoons toasted sesame oil
Salt
Preheat the oven to 200º / 400°f / fan 180º / gas mark 6
Peel the beetroot and cut into six wedges.
Put them into a bowl, add the cumin seeds, honey, olive oil, and a pinch of salt, and mix really well with your hands to coat the beetroot thoroughly.
Roast in the oven for 40 – 60 minutes, turning from time to time; you want the beetroot to cook before it burns.
As soon as the lentils are cooked (about 30 minutes), drain really well, add more salt if needed, and the rosemary.
When they have cooled, add all the other ingredients.
Lentils alla Veneto
Lentils did not feature in my childhood – the nearest I got to eating a pulse was Heinz Baked Beans (I am almost entirely formed out of Heinz Baked Beans) – so I first came across them in my early twenties when I was studying at an opera studio in the Veneto. This very simple recipe is a great accompaniment for many things, or a base for a hearty lentil soup.
Serves 4 people
For the lentils
250g (dry weight) very small lentils
A pinch each of peppercorns, coriander seeds, and cardamom seeds (de-husked)
Salt
For the soffritto:
1 small red onion
2 carrots
2 sticks of celery
4 cloves of garlic
A few sprigs of thyme
4 teaspoons / 20 ml olive oil
Salt and pepper
Chilli – optional, and quantity depends on how hot you want to make it
For the mustard dressing
3 tablespoons / 45ml olive oil
3 tablespoons / 45ml balsamic vinegar
1 teaspoon of grainy mustard
1 teaspoon of honey
Salt and pepper
For the lentils
Cook the lentils with the whole spices and a really good pinch of salt for 30 minutes or so.
Drain and add more salt if necessary.
For the soffritto
Very finely dice all the vegetables and mix in a bowl with some salt and 2 teaspoons of olive oil.
If the thyme has woody stems, strip the leaves off – a fiddly job so use a skivvy if you have one to hand – and add to the diced vegetables.
Heat the remaining oil in a sauté or chef’s pan. You don’t want it too hot – just warm enough to let the soffritto know it’s about to get cooked. Tip it in and cook at a low temperature with the lid on till it starts to soften. Then take the lid off and continue cooking till it’s a tiny bit brown and fully cooked.
For the dressing:
Put the honey, mustard and a pinch of salt in a jar; stir them up together, then add the oil and vinegar. Put the lid on the jar and give it a good shaking.
Putting it all together:
Add everything together and pour over a couple of tablespoons of the dressing; mix really well and serve. You can eat it hot or cold.
Diva notes.
Dicing the Vegetables
They need to be very finely diced, which takes time and can be tricky to get them uniformly fine. However, if you chuck them in the food processor and pulse them until they are fine enough, it takes about 5 seconds.
Great story! Although if all you do is eliminate the sugar and ultra processing, giant amounts of fat and salt aren’t really that bad.
Thank you Lizzie - I don’t think I understood the relationship of sugar to fat via insulin properly - now I do! A question re lentils - for recipes such as these do you ever cook them in stock (vegetable or chicken)?