A speed trap is questionable traffic enforcement. Too often, it’s designed not to ensure safety for motorists but income for backwater towns.

An ultra-processed food is a questionable food product. More often than not, it’s designed not to ensure health for consumers but revenue for food producers who are anything but backwater.

An advocacy group for U.S. drivers, the National Motorists Association, posts on their website that speed traps are a win-win situation for everybody except the “poor saps” who get caught in them and suffer fines, points, and insurance surcharges. An advocate for all eaters, Chris Van Tulleken, writes in his book, Ultra-Processed People (W.W. Norton, 2023), that ultra-processed foods are the ultimate lose-lose situation for you.

That they are “specifically engineered as addictive substances,” designed to lead to excessive consumption and unwanted weight gain. Yet “irrespective of weight gain,” consuming them increases your risk of inflammatory bowel disease, dementia, heart disease, and stroke — as well as early death.

Van Tulleken, best known in the U.K. as that doctor who doles out medical and health advice on the telly for the BBC, writes many other things in his first book that’s become a bestseller in the U.S. about the world’s now-heavy reliance on UPFs. How heavy? Typical Americans, for example, now receive more than half their daily calories from them.

Quite possibly the most intriguing other thing is about the term itself. Van Tulleken claims it’s a misnomer.

In fact, he states exactly that in the book’s subtitle. You learn why he feels that way when he recounts a conversation he had with Fernanda Rauber, a researcher who worked on the study published in 2010 that coined the now-ubiquitous term.

When she explains UPF is often bleached, deodorized, hydrogenated, and interesterified (an alteration of fatty acids to change the melting point and texture of fat) and contains starches that have been modified and proteins and seed oils that have been hydrolyzed, Van Tulleken asks what all this processing does to the food.

And Rauber corrects him on his use of the word “food.”

“Most UPF is not food,” she stresses. “It’s an industrially produced edible substance.”

To illustrate this claim that’s the crux of his book, Van Tulleken shares a story about treating his family to ice cream in a park on an unusually warm autumn day.

Soon his 3-year-old wants to play on the swings, so she hands daddy her barely-eaten bowl of pistachio. The ice cream has not yet melted — even though the bowl is warm to the touch.

So Van Tulleken asks a food production expert about this. The expert explains that to make shipping and storage easier food companies need to make ice cream more tolerant of warmth, so they use a combination of stabilizers, emulsifiers and gums.

Things like monoglycerides, diglycerides, locust bean gum, guar gum, carrageenan, and xanthan gum. And that last thing in that list, truly is a thing: “A slime that bacteria produce to allow them to cling to surfaces.”

Which Van Tulleken likens in the book to the “accumulated gunk” found on the filter of your dishwasher.

Yum!

Now I use that word to be facetious, but Van Tulleken could use it to describe most of his month-long experiment featured in a BBC documentary in which he ate a diet consisting of 80 percent UPFs. He did so in order to mimic what’s “typical for children and adolescents” as well as about 20 percent of British adults.

In that month, his body fat percent went from 14 percent to more than 30 percent — a level “on par with those famously fatty sea mammals.”

Like whales.

Now whether or not his additional blubber led to eventual blubbering, Van Tulleken does not note. What he does note, however, is that as the experiment progressed, he found UPFs to be “less enjoyable [to eat], but not less desirable.”

That he felt addicted to UPFs.

But a comparison of the MRI scans of his brain taken before and after the experiment finds Van Tulleken to be mistaken. There were changes between the two scans, but they were “physiological [and] not morphological” and showed the “actual wiring [in Van Tulleken’s] brain had not changed.”

Another problem with Van Tulleken claiming to be addicted to UPFs lies in the medical definition of addiction.

According to it, what ends addiction is the abstinence of the addictive substance. Since you cannot stop eating food, no form or type can truly be addictive.

But that’s really no problem the way Van Tulleken sees it. He argues the definition only strengthens his argument that UPFs are really not food.

Rest assured, Van Tulleken does more than argue that point in his book. Read it for a better understanding of what UPFs do to your body, why food producers are so keen on producing them, and how “governments, scientists, and doctors have allowed transnational food companies to create a pandemic of diet-related diseases.”