Sun, Feb-26-23, 01:54
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Plan: Muscle Centric
Stats: 238/153/160
BF:
Progress: 109%
Location: UK
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Unprocessed by Kimberley Wilson review: our diet is damaging our brains
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Unprocessed by Kimberley Wilson review: our diet is damaging our brains
We know that processed foods cause obesity — this alarming book shows that they are making us dumber too
Much of the food we eat, especially the cheap stuff, contains chemicals you have never heard of. How many of these do you have in your store cupboard: modified maize starch, ascorbic acid and potassium sorbate? All of them, probably; you just didn’t know. They were all in a rather innocent-looking jar of Waitrose Bramley apple sauce I just picked up.
These are ultra-processed foods (UPFs) and they account for 55 per cent of the British diet, the highest figure in Europe. Only the American diet is worse, with 57 per cent UPFs. The Italians get by with just 14 per cent.
This book, if widely read, will make UPFs as alarming as nicotine and much scarier than cheese or red meat. Kimberley Wilson is a distinguished psychologist and nutritionist, and she has serious backing — Professor Tim Spector, one of the country’s most respected scientists, has supported the book. Bizarrely, she was also a finalist in The Great British Bake Off. There can’t have been much healthy food consumed there.
Almost all nutritional advice is directed at preventing obesity and heart disease. But Wilson’s focus is on our brains and the effect on them of UPFs. This is truly scary, not least because the human brain accounts for 23 per cent of energy use when we are at rest; in a baby that figure rises to 74 per cent. The brain is not only the main energy consumer, it is also “one of the fattest organs in the body”. It needs, primarily, omega-3 fats, most plentiful in fatty fish and seafood, which, according to Wilson, “are absolutely essential to the structural integrity and proper functioning of our brains. In a sense they made us who we are.”
Yet we, the Brits, eat very little fish and our children eat even less. Worse still, we eat processed foods, and not only do these take up more space in what we eat, they also limit, Wilson asserts, our uptake of omega-3s. If so, then they directly inhibit brain function and growth.
The massive and increasing consumption of processed foods correlates with the increase in mental health problems. Evidence also suggests a link between premature birth and mental health problems. As omega-3 reduces the rate of premature births, Wilson concludes that a sensible intervention would be for all pregnant women to be given free prescription omega-3 supplements.
Nutrition is now an urgent social and political matter. The Marmot Review, commissioned by the Labour Party in 2008, found that the UK was in freefall in terms of the health and longevity of the poor. Austerity was blamed then, but now that unprocessed foods cost three times more than those that are processed, we can add diet to the mix. “The nutritional and health inequalities faced by children from poor households put them at a neurological disadvantage from the moment of conception,” Wilson writes.
Of course, at this point an ideological problem rears its ugly head. The Nobel prizewinning economist James Heckman said: “The highest rate of economic returns comes from the earliest investments in children.”
Universal free school meals would be a start. Wilson quotes a recent report by PwC showing that expanding free school meal provision would result in substantial benefits to the economy over 20 years. Without these reforms, Wilson argues, the poor will continue to die younger, and their IQs decline.
This ideological problem is closely linked to a business problem. Big food companies are very big and they are the baddies in this analysis. They use UPFs in vast quantities.
But to a large extent they did follow the advice of doctors and scientists in trying to cut cholesterol and sugar, and, in general, attempting to offer healthier food. Unfortunately, we have still grown fatter and poorer. The advice was wrong or inadequate because it did not take into account the effects of processing. One study showed that if you remove all UPFs from your diet you can eat what you want and not get fat.
The food companies will be in deep trouble if we start demanding the removal of UPFs. People will eat ever more fresh foods and sell-by dates on packaged foods will shorten enormously. Wilson’s advice on how we should eat is clear: at regular intervals, five or six portions a day of vegetables, beans, fruit and mushrooms; fish two or three times a week; wholegrain cereals; no more than 500g a week of red meat; and drink 1-1.5 litres of liquid a day. Alcohol is pretty much banned.
This book has its irritations. For one thing, the text is punctuated by sections under the heading A Tale of Two Brains, showing the progress of two girls, the first with a classy Mediterranean diet, the other with a dodgy English diet. These are unnecessary since the lessons are obvious if you just read the book.
There is also an unevenness of tone. Wilson oscillates between analysis and polemic, but her book is more powerful when the anger is controlled by reference to facts and research.
Nevertheless, this is an essential and urgent read. It marks a transformation in our thinking about diets. With luck, it may one day make our brains better, a development that is long overdue.
Unprocessed: How the Food We Eat Is Fuelling Our Mental Health Crisis by Kimberley Wilson
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https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/...eview-phqzvf7mq |
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