Ultra-Processed People by Chris van Tulleken - a review

Ultra-Processed People was on sale at half price on Amazon recently so I took the plunge and read it. I have written a lengthy and not particularly glowing review for The Critic.

 

He simply asserts that: “The evidence is clear that we are eating more calories than ever and that trying to change our energy expenditure is not going to make a significant difference to weight.”

To support the second of these claims, he cites the Hadza hunter-gatherers of Tanzania. These people will be familiar to anyone who has read a book like this before, such as Henry Dimbleby’s Ravenous. A 2012 study found that their daily energy expenditure was not much different to that of your regular desk-bound Westerner, and yet none of them were obese. Van Tulleken admits that when the Hadza are not hunting or gathering, they rest a great deal but he incorporates this into his theory by inferring that “if we are active, our bodies compensate by using less energy on other things, so that our overall energy expenditure stays the same”. This is why he reckons that coal miners and athletes burn the same number of calories as the rest of us

His claim about coal miners rests on a study of miners in the USA and Turkey which, he says, found that they burned “2,100 and 2,800 calories per day — the same as the rest of us.” Alas, he completely misread the study. That is how much they burned at work. In the course of a whole day, they burned an average of 3,658 calories. Furthermore, the number of calories burned depended on how physically active they were, with the most active miners burning 4,414 calories a day: 

Average energy expenditures according to activity levels were 3289.4 ± 356.64 kcal/d, 3910.0 ± 438.57 kcal/d, and 4413.8 ± 343.24 kcal/d (moderate, heavy, and above heavy activities; respectively).

This tells you all you need to know about the effect of physical activity on energy expenditure and it tells you a fair bit about the rigour of Chris van Tulleken’s research.

  

Part one is here and part two is here.

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