Ultra-Processed People The Science Behind Food That Isn't Food - Chris van Tulleken

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I finally finished this book and struggled a bit to get through the last chapters. They weren't as interesting to me because I knew a lot of it which is all right and seems important, but I couldn't find the focus I had at the start. The start and the middle were pretty good and informative to me though. I liked being eased into the story and the science seems well-founded and I'm interested in checking some of the sources out and catch up on the debates and maybe some future science. I found myself a bit hesitant to just believe everything blindly, but j did dip into some of the "other side" arguments which seemed heavily based on highly emotional "he's just telling us what to do/that we are doing it wrong '' which isn't a particularly good defense in my honest opinion.

I got the most awaited explanations of how additives that is used in Ultra processed food make our body dysfunctional. I wish this chapter were more broad with branching out for more than emulsifiers and xantham gum. But still yeah something is better than nothing.
Also for the texture part, my initial thought was maybe the various textures like gooey, crunchy, and soft but crunchy is something to do with since it probably makes our chewing activity more enjoyable. Well seems like I was entirely wrong about it. Although it's quite weird to know chewing on soft edibles changes our jaw morphology and eating quantity.
Then the discussion on book's funny smell chapter actually reminded me of air-up bottle which has fruit-scented pods on its neck and it tricks our brain into thinking we are drinking fruit juice, not water. Hmm i am quite shocked to know that our sense of vision is more prominent to our sense of smell.

I hate that cancer is being displayed here as a "diet-related disease". Scientists say that eating healthy may help preventing cancer, but you could eat healthy for 50 years and still get cancer. Cancer doesn't have a set-in-stone cause, and I believe that calling it a "died-related disease" just serves as a shock factor.
Last year I read Why We Sleep and the author also used cancer as a shock value for his book. He kept saying over and over again that not sleeping, sleeping poorly, sleeping less than 8 hours, sleeping too much, all those were bad and could end up in cancer and cardiovascular diseases. I might be entirely wrong in the way I think about this, but I just hate how cancer is used as a consequence of everything. It gives a sense of impending doom that I hate, and to me these authors use it exclusively for the shock value.

I have also noticed a bit of an effect on how I approach food. I don't like cutting things out completely and, you know, I live in a flawed world and need to be able to cope with the flaws. So I'm not cutting processed foods out of my life. But I'm more aware of what I eat and when, and how much of it is processed.