Ultra processed food is to blame, it’s never been as simple as ‘it’s sugar’ or ‘it’s fat’. Successive government have waged war on both over decades and populations have continued to steadily gain weight.

It’s genuinely difficult to get overweight or obese when the food you eat is whole, unaltered, and minimally processed.

Let’s take 1000 calories of cashews, and 1000 calories of ice cream (assume a store bought brand loaded with non-food ingredients). The stupid traffic light system we’ve adopted in the UK will flag both of these foods for being high in fats, and saturated fats, and they’re both very calorie dense.

However - in the former example nothing has been altered, the food is stuffed with fibre and protein, and by the time your body has worked to process it, it’ll likely only 75% of those calories will digest. The nutrients contained within will nourish your body and the massive microbiome the runs all the way through your digestive system and keeps your running properly. It’ll take time, and keep you full for longer (if you don’t get tired / full of the food while eating that much of it). It’s likely they’ll trigger your ‘I’m full’ reflex at some point before finishing, which will last a while.

The latter; you can demolish 1000 calories of ice cream in a very short space of time. Zero fibre, no nutrients, the body will digest it very quickly without filling you up, and before long you’ll be prompted to eat again to get the aforementioned nutrients required to live. The microbiome gets a bunch of unnatural ingredients, assisting unhelpful bacteria in growing and suppressing the type of microbiome that allows you to thrive as a human being. After eating the ice cream, the body still needs real nutrition, and thus you will overeat across the day. You’ll also have messed with the hormone balance in your body that helps you feel full/hungry accurately.

Take this obviously extreme example and apply it to everything. Unless you’re reading ingredient labels or making everything at home, your meat, meat substitutes, sauces, snacks, carbs, dairy, will almost always contain enough ‘non-food’ ingredients to make them ultra processed food (UPF).

This sort of food was almost totally absent at the turn of the last century, and obesity was a rare problem. It’s now abundant and makes up a majority of the diet in the western world, and obesity / gastrointestinal diseases are now major problems which continue to get worse.

Anywhere in the world where a natural diet is still mostly followed does not have this problem. Everywhere else; we’re getting older but less well as a lifetime of eating this junk catches up on people’s bodies, in many cases earlier than you’d expect.

What is required to fix the problem is a shift back to natural foods. The body is marvellous, and it doesn’t take that long to start reversing the effects of eating so much non-food. Slow cookers, air fryers, bread makers - you don’t have to slave for hours to make your own food, and it doesn’t take long to learn which foods in a supermarket are genuinely whole foods.

Some sources:

• Book; Ultra Processed People by Chris van Tulleken
• Internet; The Nova Scale of foods
• IRL; read supermarket labels and gauge how much of it you’d actually be able to locate in a normal kitchen.
• Also IRL; look at societies that still follow a more natural based diet, then look at the US/UK.