C hris van Tulleken has suggested we meet at his local pizza place, Sweet Thursday, in Hackney, east London. If the choice seems counterintuitive for a man with a mission to improve our national diet, he puts me right when we sit down. “Pizza has become emblematic of junk food,” he says, “but proper homemade pizza is very healthy.
” At Sweet Thursday, purist Italian chefs work their fresh sourdough bases in an open kitchen (rumour has it they are so purist in this vocation that they draw the line at making salad). But it is not just authenticity that counts, it is also community. Van Tulleken lives around the corner; the owner grew up nearby and this is where local families tend to come to catch up or to celebrate.
“Above all, a restaurant should never be just a way of extracting money in exchange for nutrition,” Van Tulleken says. “Or for paying dividends to offshore investors. And I think these things are actually obvious even if you don’t live, like me, in a world of nutritional studies.
” The distinctions Van Tulleken makes go to the heart of his research into the damage that ultra-processed foods (UPFs) are causing to our physical and mental health. The contention of his bestselling book Ultra-Processed People is that food engineered by corporations with additives and emulsifiers and modified starches essentially “hacks our brains”, disrupting the normal regulation of appetite. It tricks us into eating more by being softer, slicker, saltier, sweeter t.
