On junk

The similarities between ultra-processed food and social media

Like a growing number of people, I have become radicalised by internet content. The subject? Ultra-Processed Food – UPF. The synthetic, junk, non-food that we all eat every day. Sliced bread stuffed with microbiome destroying emulsifiers, Turkey Twizzlers made with thickening agents, and God-knows-what-else.

(The formal definition of UPF is usually food that is made with at least five ingredients, typically from industrial substances, and which contain additives such as preservatives, sweeteners, colourings, flavourings, and emulsifiers. It’s stuff you don’t find in your kitchen and is pretty bad for you. Annoyingly tasty too: biscuits, cakes, breakfast cereals, fizzy drinks, ready-made pizzas, instant noodles, nuggets, Pringles, and so on. They are also heavily marketed, cheap, convenient and durable.)

Thanks to a combination of Dr Chris van Tulleken’s book Ultra Processed People and online influencer / egg-fanatic Eddie Abbew, I cannot believe we have allowed ourselves to be poisoned for so long. The thought of eating a microwave meal makes feel ill. Even watching other people eat energy bars makes me feel ill. Like I said, radicalised.

The more I’ve read about UPF, the more similarities I’ve spotted with another form of junk we put in our bodies: social media clickbait. It is the mental equivalent of emulsifiers. The Big Mac of the mind.

It’s thought that 55 per cent of the daily calorie intake of adults in the UK is now made up of UPF food and drink. Interestingly, and coincidentally, according to the 2024 Ofcom Survey, 52 per cent of Brits now say they use social media as a news source.

Both our minds and bodies are being contaminated with junk.

Moreish, but nutrition free junk.

Similarity 1: junk hacks the brain

UPF hacks your brain. According to a number of scientists, we get cravings for the salty snacks and deli sandwiches and frozen pizzas that is pretty similar to any other drug. All those refined carbs and added fats seem to activate the reward centres of the brain like nicotine.

You’re not actually hungry! Your body just wants another hit of the flavouring and sugar.

This appears to be because UPFs cause dopamine – a neurotransmitter in the brain – to spike. That makes us feel good. But then it quickly crashes and so we crave it back. So we find more UPF. (I.e. re-pop the Pringles).

According to its many critics, social media is also designed as a dopamine fuelled brain hack. ‘A race to the bottom of the brain stem’, as writer Tristan Harris puts it. It draws you in and keeps you there with hidden psychological tricks. Facebook’s homepage is carefully designed to be full of visible numbers – likes, friends, posts, interactions and new messages (and always in red! Urgent!). Autoplay, endless scroll and engagement based ranking algorithms are all sculpted to keep your attention. Studies have shown that the anticipation of information is deeply involved with our dopamine reward system, and that addictiveness is maximised when the rate of reward is most variable. You never know when you might get a notification or alerts or enjoyable messages – so you keep checking, checking, checking.

It’s not surprising that a recent meta-study published in the British Medical Journal found that 14 per cent of adults and 12 per cent of children have a food addiction, and the food they are addicted to is UPF.

One study in the UK reckons that almost half of teenagers are addicted to social media. (Although other studies have put this at more like 10 per cent).

And both are a form of addiction that professionals are only just starting to understand.

Similarity 2: junk makes us depressed

The mechanisms might be different (or not?) but both UPF and social media consumption seem to be associated with depression somehow. This is notoriously hard to study, but the link is increasingly clear.

Ultra-processing of food means a lot of nutrients – vitamins, antioxidants, fibre – are lost, as everything is ground down into malleable pulp, which can then be reshaped into Twizzlers. But that’s stuff the brain needs. If our daily calories comprise UPF, it means fewer of those micro-nutrients. According to a study of 26,000 people in France, there was a significant association between UPF consumption and depression risk. Other studies are finding very similar.

Long exposure to social media seems to do something similar – although (surprisingly) the evidence is not quite as strong as for UPF. I won’t repeat all the studies, since there are many of varying quality. Suffice to say that the US Surgeon General – the most senior doctor in the country – now believes social media is driving the mental health crisis among young people.

Similarity 3: junk is cheap

Similarity 3: junk is cheap

Both social media and UPF have the same attractive selling point: total convenience. For UPF, it’s fast, cheap, tasty calories. Similarly, social media – and its delivery mechanism, the smart phone – promise accessibility to all the world’s information, for free, immediately.

Long-form, high quality journalism is extremely costly and time-consuming. This is why newspapers and periodicals cost money. Social media junk is free (at the point of consumption at least). Healthy, fresh and nutritious food is often more expensive too. All those emulsifiers and additives in UPF lengthens shelf-life, lowers transport costs, and therefore makes UPF cheaper for the consumer at the point of consumption.

And because its cheap and lasts longer, studies tend to show it’s poorer people that consume more of it. ‘Food swamps’ – places where you’ll run into a KFC and McDonalds every ten yards – are most dense in poorer neighbhourhoods. Which also means they are the people most likely to suffer from its ill-effects, too. We don’t really know whether this is true for social media consumption. But I suspect it probably is.

Similarity 4: Junk is a giant global experiment

The rate of change in our mental and physical diets has been stunning. Far quicker than we could possibly evolve either physiologically or socially. For 200,000 years, humans ate other plants and animals. Over the last 50 we have started consuming vast amounts of edible industrial substances that look and feel and even taste like food, but are made in ways – and of things – that no human before ever ate.

In a similar way, for hundreds of thousands of years we have communicated through oral stories, followed by the gradual adoption of the written word. More recently a small number of regulated media publications bound by long-established rules and codes of conducts, were consumed in digestible packages. This has been replaced over the last two decades by an info-torrent: the era of ubiquitous, constant information, which is everywhere all the time.

And just like UPF, an era of scarcity has turned into an era of abundance and over-consumption.

It’s easy to forget just how dramatic this is. It basically amounts to a mass experiment on billions of people – the results of which are still unclear.

But the signs are growing that this experiment isn’t going too well. UPF is associated with, among other things, obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiometabolic disease and all-cause mortality.

For the information junk, it’s much the same story. Over-exposure seems linked to anxiety, depression, loneliness and fear or missing out. Again, we’re still figuring it out.

To be honest, we still don’t know for sure what the effects are. And that’s because the experiment hasn’t been running long enough.

Similarity 5: junk isn’t just about freedom

Attempts to seriously regulate or control either UPF or social media tend to be met with a similar response. (And often from the same people). The nanny state is telling you how to feed your kids, telling you what to believe.

That’s not a terrible argument. Google’s promise was to provide free access to information for all. Which in a very real way, it has. And UPF has made food last longer, cheaper, easier to make, and tasty. Both are good things.

And I’m instinctively distrustful of governments telling us what’s true and what we should eat.

But there is another way to see it. All markets are regulated, and ideally to ensure citizens can make decent, informed decisions of their own. Is that what’s been happening with these brand new, complicated and experimental products? For years gut-destroying, sugary, nutrition-free junk has been labelled as ‘organic’ or ‘low-fat’ or ‘high-protein’. There are no labels on Coca Cola or energy bars or social media junk telling you about the risks to your health.

Every time I see people hunched over tiny screens while drinking an energy drink, I don’t think – ah, free choices by free people! I think – these guys were hardly given a choice at all.

Similarity 6: Junk needs lobbying

The purpose of food companies is to make a profit, not to keep you healthy. The purpose of the technology companies is to make a profit, not to keep you informed. Fair enough – that’s living under a free market. But don’t be fooled by the marketing.

This obvious mis-alignment of incentives is one reason that vast amounts money is spent trying to persuade you that Meta merely wants to connect people; and that Nestle’s main purpose is to help people have great nutrition.

The lobbying spends in both Washington and Brussels are eye-watering. Three of the top five lobbyists in Brussels are big US tech firms.

And as Van Tulleken explains in Ultra Processed People, the food industry has part-captured the policy making process in the UK too.

There is big tech. There is also big food.

***

You can always throw darts and then draw a board around them. I’ve probably done that here a bit, too.

But in the end, it’s pretty simple. Junk is a giant physical and mental experiment on billions of people, the purpose of which is to make money and our well-being is just collateral damage. There are some benefits, but over-consumption of junk makes us sick. And because junk is addictive, over-consumption is inevitable. And it’s too new, too powerful, too complicated for regulators to do much about.

And what if there is be a symbiotic relationship between junk food and junk social media?

Here’s the cycle I worry about, and have probably been on. Consumption of junk social media seems to make people anxious, nervous, worried. Research seems to find that people who are anxious consume more UPF – it’s comforting. But any short spike is followed by a crash, which makes you lose focus, and the brain fog descends. Which leads to more mindless, pointless scrolling of junk social media as you try to regain control.

The junk dystopia is someone scrolling Tik-Tok while eating Pringles at 11.30pm – forever. Miserable, anxious, and hoping some junk dopamine might help.

There is a final similarity you might have already noticed yourself. Over the last five years or so, a rebellion is slowing forming against junk. Hundreds of books published about the dangers of social media, and increasingly about UPF too. The fast-growing Smartphone Free childhood movement. Online influencers (yes, I get the irony) complaining about UPF.

’ve always seen these as two distinct movements. But maybe it’s really the same. No more junk!

I won’t write a shopping list of what we should do next. UPF is not my area of expertise, as you’ve probably noticed.

But social media is. And I think anyone looking to moderate their social media consumption can learn two big things from those fighting the proliferation of UPF.

First, Van Tulleken’s advice about cutting down on junk food is simple. It follows Alan Carr’s famous approach to giving up smoking. Don’t go ‘cold turkey’. Instead, learn as much as you can about how UPF is made and what it does to you, and then follow a diet of 80 per cent UPF. Van Tulleken spent several days eating microwave lasagnes, sausage rolls, McDonalds burgers, frozen pizzas.

Knowing how it was actually made, and what it was doing to his body, turned him off the food he’d once enjoyed. He no longer eats UPF.

It reminds me a little of one of my favourite movies, Brewsters Millions.

(Strangely my dad kind-of once did this to me, with my favourite chocolate bar. And that worked too. But that’s for another day.)

If you want to cut down on the social media use, perhaps you should try it. Read The Age of SurveillanceCapitalism by Shoshana Zuboff. Then, once you really understand exactly how these firms work – the data they collect, how they make their money, how they keep you hooked in, how they lobby – get back online. Spend as much time as you possibly can on social media. Eighty per cent of your free time if possible. Give free reign to your impulses! Ten hours a day just scrolling! And then let’s see how you feel.

Second, the person that really got me on the UPF wagon was not the well-researched erudite book Ultra Processed People. It was former body-builder turned food influencer Eddie Abbew. This 12-egg-a-day UPF-hater might be the best single communicator on the internet.

Sometimes what Eddie says might be too simplistic. Not everyone can eat beef liver for breakfast and eliminate all carbohydrates.

But he has a simple message that sticks. Stop eating shit. Cook and make your own food. More important is the way he says it. He shouts into your screen that you need to WAKE THE F*CK UP; that these companies think you’re a f*cking mug; that Logan Paul and energy drink pushers are f*cking morons.

And somehow it seems that a lot of young people find this man in mid-60s talking about food cooler than Logan Paul. It’s because he’s so blunt, and lives by his own message. And because no-one likes being told they’re taken for a fool. We have a lot of brilliant social media critics and writers. James Williams; Jaron Lanier; Shoshana Zuboff. But maybe we need an Eddie Abbew too.

Either way, in the end I think we’ll either fix both or we’ll fix neither. But we won’t fix the country until we’ve dealt with junk.