Цитаты из книги Ultra-Processed People

UPF seems to be more addictive for more people than many addictive drugs. Of course, many people are able to consume UPF in moderation, but that’s also true for cocaine, alcohol and cigarettes. Compare the numbers. The transition from trying UPF to being unable to stop using it is extremely high: 40 per cent of the US population live with obesity and we know that the majority of them will try to lose weight in a given year. Cessation rates are so low as to be non-existent. There is no other drug that, having tried it, 40 per cent of people will continue to use regularly despite negative health consequences (a definition of addiction). For example, over 90 per cent of people in the USA consume alcohol but only 14 per cent develop an alcohol-use disorder. Even with illicit drugs like cocaine, only a relatively small subset of users (20 per cent) go on to become addicted.

The original experiment, better known as the marshmallow experiment, was devised by Stanford’s Walter Mischel in the 1970s. It’s a simple enough idea: leave a child alone in a room with a marshmallow for fifteen minutes and tell them that, if they can resist eating it, you’ll come back with another one. The child has a choice: enjoy the treat now, or delay gratification for double the reward. Mischel followed ninety of the test participants for the next two decades, and found that those who had been able to delay gratification had lower BMIs and higher educational attainment. But the study has since been repeated with a much larger number of subjects – 918 children from a range of backgrounds.19 And this new analysis seemed to show that the biggest predictor of whether a child could delay gratification was socioeconomic background: the children were more likely to take the instant reward if they came from disadvantaged households.

The model emphasises that powerful signals inside and outside the body influence food intake and energy balance far, far below the level of consciousness, involving slippery related ideas like salience, wanting, motivation and reward. We smear a conscious layer over all this, but eating is far less of a choice than it appears. This is one of the many reasons why simple advice like ‘Eat less and move more!’ is ineffective for sustained weight loss. It’s as crazy as saying ‘Drink less water!’ to someone who’s feeling thirsty.

Humans have a natural body composition that is fattier than most other land mammals. Male elephants carry around 8.5 per cent body fat and females roughly 10 per cent. Apes, such as chimpanzees and bonobos, have less than 10 per cent body fat. By contrast, even hunter-gatherer human populations have body fat percentages of around 21 per cent in women and 14 per cent in men.

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In many contemporary human societies in the third age of eating, most of us have body-fat percentages on par with those of famously fatty sea mammals. Blue whales have one of the highest percentages of any wild animal at around 35 per cent, and – spoiler alert – by the end of my diet I was getting close to this proportion.