Brought to you by Penguin.

Hello and welcome to the Penguin podcast where we talk to writers about writing.

I'm Izzy Suttie and today I'm going to be talking to Dr Chris Van Tulligan, whose new book, Ultra Processed People, launches on the 27th of April.

An award-winning broadcaster as well as a practicing NHS doctor and an academic. In this new book, Chris forensically examines the history of ultra-processed

food and its social role in our diets. And he uses his own experience to explain its effects

on our health and our planet. Hello, Chris. It's great to talk to you today. Welcome to the

Penguin podcast. It is so nice to be here. Good. So I loved this book.

It's so detailed.

It's been to Portugal and back with me while I ate food absolutely loaded with UPF.

Thought about the book the whole time.

I was very pleased to see that your copy does seem to have been read, or at least it's covered in food and heavily dogged it.

It really is.

We've got corners turned over.

It's got a foundation on it.

For me, that's a sign of a book well read.

I hate keeping books pristine, but that's for another podcast.

It really is so detailed and so thoroughly researched, lots of footnotes, but interwoven with your own experience, which is

what made it so accessible for someone like me who only did GCSE science. And I didn't know

anything about UPF. If you said to me, is a ready meal ultra-processed food, I would go, yeah,

probably, it's got a plastic lid on it and it's got a long list of ingredients.

So there was a bit where you talk about your colleagues at hospital going to Pratt. And I was like, oh, Pratt. Well, that's somewhere where everything's made fresh. Yeah. That's their kind of vibe. Yeah, it's organic, I think. And I was like, oh, no, that's not the case. Is that a lot of people's reaction they kind of go, oh, right, this thing that I thought was really healthy actually does contain processed ingredients?

Yes.

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