Rating: 5 out of 5

I listened to Chris Van Tulleken’s Ultra-Processed People a couple of years ago, and I remember finding it equal parts interesting and terrifying.

Fast forward a few years: we know so much more now, but UPF is still everywhere. Milli Hill wrote a really readable book, Ultra-Processed Women, that looks at all of this specifically through a female lens.

I’ve highlighted quite a few bits (some general points, some female-specific). It’s been a good, thoughtful read.

A few of those highlighted paragraphs:

> Cadbury’s Dairy Milk marketed itself for decades with the image of a ‘glass & a half of milk in every bar’, but read the small print and you’ll find that this translates to 426ml of milk in every 227g of chocolate. Look closer: 426ml is about two highball glasses; 227g is the weight of more than four individual bars. So that’s less than 100ml of milk per bar - about half a champagne flute. I’m not sure which type of glass Cadbury’s was working from. In 2010, EU regulations meant Cadbury’s had to stop using the words ‘glass & a half of milk’ on its wrappers, but interestingly it was allowed to keep the image

> The vast majority of celebrity chefs are male, and over 75 per cent of professional chefs are male. Quitting or reducing UPF is going to mean men bringing some of those talents into the home kitchen. As well as this, corporations need to step up. At the time of writing, the CEO of every major global food company in the world is a man. These companies need to listen to women and offer us solutions for the family table that are time-saving without being toxic.

> If we then present to the doctor with our ‘unlucky’ story of severe period pain, we may find it being dismissed as something women simply have to put up with. Underlying conditions notoriously take a long time to diagnose - 7.5 years in the case of endometriosis - and women often report feeling fobbed off by medical professionals. Another common issue, heavy periods (officially known as menorrhagia), gets similar treatment - they are, according to current NHS advice, ‘common and may just be normal for you. In other words, unlucky.

> From cradle to grave we women are taught to believe that to be female is to suffer; from the pain and inconvenience of periods, to the burden of pregnancy, to the horrors of menopause, our bodies are blamed for everything. Part of the solution to this lies in calling out a medical system that simultaneously pathologizes the female body and fails to properly understand it. When I spoke to Ina Schuppe Koistinen, Associate Professor at the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden, about the vaginal microbiome, she put it to me quite succinctly: ‘The stark contrast between the millions spent on researching erectile dysfunction and the chronic underfunding of women’s health is staggering. It’s a clear reflection of societal priorities - while billions have been invested in solving one very specific issue, conditions like endometriosis, PCOS and the vaginal microbiome, affecting millions of women, remain critically under-researched.
It’s time we recognized that women’s health deserves at least the same level of attention and funding. We need to keep calling for this to happen, but while we wait for systemic change, it seems we could potentially make a big, positive impact on many of the conditions we accept as just part of the raw deal of being female, simply by turning our back on UPF.

> The sidelining of women’s health issues and the sidelining of older women makes for a menopause Venn diagram so overlapping it’s basically a circle. For a long time, menopause received barely any focus from either science or culture, and it’s only in recent years that this has started to change. Menopause has become a trending topic - and a lucrative market, with business positively booming in everything from new forms of HRT to ridiculous products like UPF ‘Menopause chocolate’. The focus often seems to be on capitalizing on women’s suffering rather than alleviating it. One American headline from 2024 sums it up: This overlooked corner of women’s health could be a $350 billion market opportunity!

> With all food, a good general rule is: eat the best you can afford.

Originally posted to my Goodreads account