Irresistible: Why We Can’t Stop Eating, review: it’s galling how food companies are manipulating us
I approached Irresistible: Why We Can’t Stop Eating (BBC Two) with trepidation. It is an investigation into ultra-processed food, presented by Dr Chris van Tulleken, who has spent the past 18 months talking about this subject. I had never heard of UPFs before he brought them to widespread attention, and have started thinking more carefully about food choices as a result of his work.
But I’m still partial to a mid-afternoon Twix and my kids eat fishfingers. Would this programme make me feel miserably guilty? “My friends and family think I’m obsessed with this, and they’re right. I am,” van Tulleken said at the programme’s outset.
To my relief, he didn’t go on to berate viewers for their food choices. Instead, this documentary squarely blamed the food industry for the crisis in public health, and the particular focus was on the clever ways in which it makes us buy more of the things that aren’t good for us.
Many processed foods, for example, are designed to feel soft in your mouth. Even things that are initially crunchy – corn snacks, cereal – quickly turn to mush. You’re essentially slurping rather than chewing, which bypasses the normal mechanism that tells you that you’re full. This “vanishing caloric density” explains why you end up consuming so much of these foods – your brain doesn’t tell you it’s time to stop because it doesn’t realise how much you’re eating.
Various scientists and psychologists who had advised food giants over the years explained the research that goes into all this, beginning in the 1970s with the rise of convenience foods. Howard Moskowitz, an experimental psychologist, explained how he discovered “the bliss point” at which a combination of sugar, salt and fat becomes irresistible. Unilever put people in brain scanners and monitored their orbito-frontal cortex to see which type of ice cream was most appealing. The click and hiss of opening a fizzy drinks can was designed by sound engineers as a form of “sonic branding”. And on it goes.
Cost comes into it, of course. The founders of a product development company explained that a homemade lemon cake would cost £4.86 to make and have a shelf-life of four days; the industrially processed version, laden with stabilisers and preservatives, a mere 23p and would last for 30 days.
The programme gave credit where it is due, and featured Prof Carlos Monteiro, a Brazilian professor of nutrition who coined the term “ultra-processed foods”. Van Tulleken has brought the subject to wider attention, and this documentary was persuasive without hectoring.
Irresistible: Why We Can’t Stop Eating is available now on BBC iPlayer and airs on BBC Two on Monday 25 November