Read this book!!!

An immensely important and profound book that should without doubt be read by all especially the policy makers

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Excellent listen

Really good listen with a balance of arguments and list of recommendations with revealing status updates. Would have liked to hear more on changing behaviours - not just sugar tax given emerging issues with artificial sweeteners - but how we explore more bitter / sour foods with relish rather than disguising them with sugar filled dressings.

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Excellent

Packed with facts, figures and examples, this book exposes the many problems with our global food system for our health and the health of the planet. It offers plenty of solutions and governments really need to listen.

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Insightful, important and pithy

To the point, easy to read, insightful - lots of people should read it. Loved the structure. We need more Henry Dimbleby’s in and advising government.

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Such an important message

This is a fascinating book - so well researched. The reading of this book should be made compulsory reading in schools. Hard to hear in places. I for one am going to adopt the one third vegetarian idea and if we all did, there is a chance we could save the planet. I only wish the government would adopt all his recommendations.

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Best non-fiction book I’ve read in decades

Dimbleby takes an impartial, non-judgemental and comprehensive look at the food system, it’s health and environmental impacts, and what can be done to improve these. But don’t let the weighty topic put you off! It’s written in a highly engaging style with lots of fun facts and interesting anecdotes. Definitely the most important and interesting non-fiction book I’ve read in decades. (And the only book I’ve ever been moved enough write a review for!) Would recommend for anyone interested in food, health, the environment or government policy.

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A sobering must listen for every Homo sapiens. Especially well told by one of the authors Henry Dimbleby.

A brilliant educational overview of the state of our food supply systems and the consumption of that food and how both are terribly unwell and require action and intervention if we are to survive and thrive as a species.
Our behaviour and habits are making the world and all who live herein sick and some parts of the book are exceptionally hard to listen to especially our treatment of the animals we eat.
But knowledge is power and I believe we will make the changes necessary even if it involves holding our heads in shame that we ever allowed ourselves to get into this appalling state.

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amazing book

- This is a fascinating and important book by Henry Dimberley, one of the founders of Leon, who was recently asked to write up a government food policy to improve the food we are putting in our body that is causing us harm and killing us, and how the food we are doing this with, has also begun to destroy the planet. When the policy, commissioned by the government, went no-where and achieved little, he decided to write a book to counter act a policy that no one was going to read, let alone do anything with. So, he wrote this remarkable and readable book that explores these themes and offers solutions that we need to implement.
- In 1950 the total population of obese people was 1% and today it is now 28% - and will continue to rise. People haven’t changed but the environment and the food we eat certainly has. People often believe that we have free will, but food companies have learnt to manipulate what we are putting into our mouths using a fat-sugar-salt ratio that isn’t found in any food in the world – with the one exception of breast milk which we only need in the first (or first few) years of our lives. People have gone from eating a diet of mainly natural or processed foods (e.g., milk, cheese, tinned fruit, fish) and cooking food from scratch to a world of ready-made meals, processed bread that never goes stale and fast-food junk foods that in 1 in 5 teenagers makes up 80% of their diet. The effects are startling.
- 70 years ago, it was assumed that we would run out of food, but scientists came up with modified ways to increase production and grow crops and farm animals and along with improved sanitation and health care, populations around the world grew. But the cost to our health and the planet would become considerable. Norman Borlaug learnt that if you experimented and messed around with splicing different types of grains together, eventually, he was able to produce a super breed of wheat that would be able to feed the world to the point that there is reduced starvation. We are now feeding a world of 8 billion people. However, this idea that has saved so many lives and fed so many people has come at a cost.
- We now live in a world, where a third of the population of UK is now overweight or obese, mainly due to new ultra processed foods (UPF) that contain calories but little in the way of important micronutrients (e.g., vitamins, minerals, etc.) and is wrecking our bodies, leading to increases in diabetes, cardio issues, cancers, strokes as well as mental health and early dementia. But we have become addicted to these new foods and it’s all around us. Over 80% of the processed foods we are eating in the UK is unhealthy but it’s not due to the food manufacturers being evil, it’s due to supply and demand and unhealthy food that is easier to sell. We spent £3.9 billion each year on confectionery compared to £2.4 billion on fruit and vegetables. People don’t realise they are in a system where a set of things working together as a larger whole, influence all of us. Also, very few people who are obese or suffering from diet-related diseases are happy and the state must pick up the tab. But it isn’t their fault, blaming people for being obese is like blaming poor people for living in poverty. It is the fault of the food companies and the tricks they use to make people believe that what they are eating is healthy or desirable. The problem is that the food companies know that the food that they are serving and selling is bad for our health, but they also know that it makes 90% of their sales, and if they start selling healthier product-based food, then other companies would take over and it becomes a catch 22 situation.
- 60% of people in UK are now overweight or obese, and by 2060 that population is expected to reach 80%. The UK economy loses £74 billion a year to lost workforces productivity, shortened lives and NHS costs because of conditions related to high BMI. “No other avoidable cause of illness – not even smoking – steals so many years of life from us”. Side effects of obesity include depression, anxiety, infertility, high blood pressure, painful joints, breathlessness, and broken sleep as well as cancer, dementia, heart failure, and type 2 diabetes which can include blindness, peripheral vision neuropathy and limb amputation”. If a novel virus started killing or disabling people at such a rate there would be a public uproar – think Covid, and yet there is no public outcry. Instead, as this has occurred gradually, people are bored, don’t care or feel helpless.
- People in UK believe that the simple formula of dietary health knowledge, exercise & willpower are all you need, but this is an illusion. Most people know what a healthy diet is and what they should be eating. They're just not eating that kind of food. If physical exercise were marketed as a pill, it would be a blockbuster drug, and everybody would want it. Exercise supports the building blocks of learning in the brain, affects mood, reduces anxiety, and improves attention, it guards against stress and reverses some of the effects of aging in the brain, it can starve off the sometimes-tumultuous effects of hormonal change, it increases levels of serotonin, norepinephrine and dopamine which are important neurotransmitters that traffic our thoughts and emotions. It reduces depression, improves cardiology, supports cell signalling and connections between the billions of nerve cells in the brain, unleashes a cascade of neuro chemicals and growth factors – and yet the one thing it doesn’t do is help you to lose weight. The things that will help you lose weight are not eating UPF, eating more plants and vegetables, eating fibre, and making foods from scratch.
- APPETITE: The book looks at how appetite works and how this is a powerful driver in what we eat. An example of this is that in 1972, there was a plane crash in the Andes. The football team even began to eat their own colleagues who died in the crash, it is one of the most powerful biological drives that we have.
- There is a pea shaped part of the brain called the hypothalamus which goes all the way back to our wormlike ancestors and it powerfully drives our appetite. In experiments with mice where the hypothalamus has been damaged, they will refuse to eat and in those who have an overactive hypothalamus they will overheat and gorge on food. The hypothalamus is driven by feedback signals received from the body from what we might see in food to what we might smell and taste, but it seems to be regulated by four different hormones in the body that activate appetite for us to drive us to eat. The two main ones are Ghrelin (found in the stomach that tells us we are hungry) and Leptin (found in fat cells that tell us we are full). It's worth knowing that in the past people who were hungry and were able to seek and find food and feed their appetite survived but now that we live in a world of plenty, those same people are now suffering from obesity.
- Experiments on mice where the outer hypothalamus is damaged will refuse to eat and starve themselves to death, even when food is placed in front of them. When the inner hypothalamus is damaged (or cut), they gorge unstoppably until they become obese – and its usually only humans that are ever overweight in the world of animals.
- When your brain is flooded with ghrelin, it is impossible to think of anything else but to eat. We become ‘mad with hunger’. During bariatric stomach surgery where ghrelin production is reduced, eventually people revert back to their previous weight. Metabolism and appetite work hand in hand to adapt to the calorific environment. When food is scarce, we reduce energy but when food becomes plentiful, our appetite increases to ensure we have sufficient fat reserves to survive the next famine. It’s a survival mechanism from the past but today, in many western countries we are overwhelmed with food.
- There is the impression that if we go on a diet, we will lose weight, but our hormones will regulate against this and going on a diet is one of the best indicators that someone is going to gain weight. We must look for better ideas to support those trying to lose weight.
- ANATOMY OF AN EGG SANDWICH: Pick up an average sandwich in a garage and read the mind numbingly long list of ingredients – you can’t even tell what it is. Emulsifiers, flavourings, additives, fatty acids, dextrose, gums will be included on this list. If I presented the list and no other details, you would probably never guess it was a supposedly handmade egg sandwich. We are eating industrially manufactured edible substances but not sure you can really call it food. In the processing, many essential nutrients have been removed so it might fill you up but that’s all it will do – and as soon as you eat it, you will want more.
- ULTRA PROCESSED FOODS (UPF): Rats and mice have many of the same metabolic quirks that you find in humans. When you give rats UPF, their leptin reacts differently to food, they develop resistance to their own leptin and become obese. Once back on a normal diet, they lose that weight again.
- UPF have a disproportionate effect on weight and health when compared to equivalent foods cooked from scratch. UPF in a person's diet is correlated with the 12% increase in cancers, a 21% increase in depressive symptoms and a 12% increase in cardiovascular disease risk. In controlled studies where people are given two weeks on a natural diet and two weeks on UPF diet with the same calories, the people on the UPF foods gained up to a kg in weight compared and lost up to almost 1kg on the natural based diet. When asked to rate both sets of food for pleasure, there was little difference. On UPF, participants ate an average of 500 calories more per day than when eating nature’s foods.
- We also know that their around 26000 distinct biochemicals across the entire range of food eaten by humans but in the process of UPF’s, these micronutrients are different or absent in quantity and type.
- BREASTMILK: We each have around 33 – 37 trillion cells in our body, every one of which runs of the energy provided by the food we eat. There are also 40 trillion bacteria in our gut – our microbiome – which feed off the same foods. Note: mothers express breast milk contains chains of sugar molecules known as ‘human milk oligosaccharides’ (HMOs), the third largest solid component of breast milk and yet they can’t be digested by the human body. Their sole function is to feed bacteria in our gut and it’s to feed just a single bacterium: Bifidobacterium infatis.
- GP’s: most UK doctors and medical students in a recent survey said they had less than 2 hours of nutritional intervention and yet most people coming through GP and hospital doors are there due to diseases related to poor diet. Food companies spend a fortune to make us eat more of their products, how it tastes and the feel of it in our mouth and to hijack our satiety hormones so that it takes longer to feel full and has no health benefits.
- INEQUALITY: It’s hard to eat well if you’re poor. The poor are the most overweight and have the highest numbers of health issues and increased numbers of early death and they consume a third less fruit and veg, 75% less oily fish and fifth less fibre than the healthiest 20%. Children in the most deprived areas are three times more likely to have tooth decay at age 5. Parents are almost twice as likely to die from diet related disease. 1.9 million people in UK don’t have a cooker; 2.8 million are without a freezer and 900,000 without a fridge. And cooking from scratch requires knowledge – and lots of people don’t know how to cook. It’s a fact that UPF is cheap, quick, and easy.
- Consumers are bombarded with the idea that UPF contain no sugar so is low in calories and other misleading pieces of information
- SHOULD NANNY TELL US WHAT TO EAT: in a remote part of Finland, which had one of the worst health rates in the world, where men were dying in their 40’s and 50’s, they had the highest mortality rate of heart failure ever measured in the world. Then Eva Timonen, a governor begun using similar techniques used for the army to the children and adults of the region of North Karelia. He changed the whole environment – banned tobacco advertisements, built new bike paths, improved year-round fruit consumption, advised people how to eat, improved school meals, and health rates dramatically improved – heart disease alone fell by 85% and average life expectancy rose by 7y for men and 6y for women.
- The Nanny state was coined in the UK by a ruling class of men, whose families were so rich that their children were raised by nannies, but we probably do need to do something like this to save lives and improve both physical and mental health, particularly in our children. Many people don’t have a car and to go to their local shop means that often, only convenience food is available. There is no access to food such as butchers, places selling vegetables but lots of junk food places.
- It is estimated that the NHS spent £6.1 billion on overweight and obesity-related ill-health in 2014 to 2015. Annual spending on the treatment of obesity and diabetes is greater than the amount spent on the police, the fire service and the judicial system combined.
- PART 2: LAND: If you are worried about biodiversity loss, fresh water supply and quality, deforestation, overfishing, climate change, then on all of these, you need to focus on food.
- The second part of the book looks at what the food we are producing is doing to the land and to the environment through the food that we eat. We mainly rely on only three types of crops which make up 50% of what we export and eat, and the cost to the ecological system, with some animals now on the edge of extinction due to changes to climate, the land, and the planet due to the food we consume. The problem is with the incentive of growing vast numbers of crops to keep the price of food cheap, the government subsidises the destruction of the planet. It is now looking at things like solar power and wind power and yet it has done nothing to look at the cost at producing food and the cost of what this is doing to our health and the cost on the planet itself.
- Environmental destruction and climate change create enormous and growing costs for governments, and thus taxpayers. Yet none of this is factored into the GDP with which we measure a nation's health.
- MEAT: There are currently 80 billion animals on this planet currently being raised for food and the cost to the environment is extreme, but the only way we can really manage this is to cut down on the consumption of meat.
- The book looks at the paradox of the meat industry and how so many people love to eat meat, but the harm that has been caused to the animals itself is shocking. Animals do feel pain and suffering. We should be eating more plant base food and the other thing about all of this is that the land is being monopolised by cattle and livestock, which only counter a small number of calories, as compared to plant food. Meat, dairy and eggs provide only 32% of the calories we eat. By contrast, the 15% of farmland (half in the UK, the rest overseas) used to grow plants for human consumption provides 68% of our calories.
- Cattle make up more of the population of this planet than anything else, including humans who are second, but if we ate a lot less meat, we could improve our planet and land, which would be able to absorb more of the carbon which is killing the planet and that must be a good thing because the consequences of climate change will be catastrophic.
- 60% of all the birds in the world are domesticated chickens that we will eventually eat,
- The book looks at how wasteful we are with the foods that we grow and we need to teach people how to cook. Even just reducing our meat consumption, even by one third, so no dairy or meat on Monday and Tuesday and the job would be done.
- WASTE: The last part of the book looks at the future, and examines how Japanese culture has gone from a relatively unhealthy diet to something quite transformative in a very short period of time and where everybody has changed for the better, people even talk to one another, but it took a while to achieve. But there is also a higher intervention by the Japanese state to look after its own people and whether this could be replicated in UK, I don’t know. This is brilliantly explained in Bee Wilson’s book ‘First Bite’. Japanese people are the longest lived with an average life expectancy across both sexes of 84.6 years. This compares to 77.3 for the USA and 80.9 for the UK. It is also impressive how fit and well this ageing population is. The Japanese have remarkably low rates of heart disease, cancers, and diseases of the reproductive system and the lowest obesity rates in the world: 4.4%.
- Almost every medical problem nowadays from back pain to cancer has poor diet at the heart of what is causing these problems. We need to change the way that we eat as well as the way that we grow food.
- “In America, almost 70% of the population is now overweight or obese. Around 40% have a 'metabolic syndrome', which means they are suffering from at least three of the following conditions: obesity or excessive visceral fat; elevated blood triglycerides (fat in blood) and low levels of HDL (good) cholesterol; high blood pressure; elevated blood sugar; or insulin resistance. Metabolic syndrome massively increases the risk of heart disease, stroke, and type 2 diabetes. An estimated 1/3 of the US population is pre-diabetic, although 80% of them don't even realize.... every year the population of the US loses 73,000 lower limbs to amputation, caused by type 2 diabetes. Americans currently spend two and a half times more per capita than UK on HealthCare - but that money cannot protect them from the commercial incentives that are built into the junk food cycle.”
- WHAT CAN WE DO: We need to make food that will make us well instead of sick, is resilient enough to withstand global shocks, help restore nature and halt climate change so that we leave a healthier planet to our children, and meets a standard the public expect on health, environment, and animal welfare. Recommendations include escaping the junk food cycle, reduce diet related inequality, make the best use of our land, and create a long-term shift in our food culture. We need to teach children (and adults) how to cook, provide better school meals, and start investing in solutions to stop diet related illnesses – we would make more money than lose.
- This brilliant book should be read by anyone with an interest in health, food, climate changes and well-being.

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essential reading

A hugely important book that provides genuine insight and realistic solutions to the issues within the UK's food and farming industries.

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A comprehensive look at the broken food system

Fascinating look at our broken food system with clear, practical suggestions for reform. Required reading for anyone in politics or the food industry.

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