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This book was written in a rush and then hastily extended and edited during the disastrous Truss government. It shows in places, reading like a tabloid opinion column and lacking depth. It's fair enough given how little time they had to write it I guess.

Liz Truss comes across as someone who enjoys being oppositional, and doesn't really understand human relationships very well. She also doesn't seem in any way interested in detail or the responsibilities of office. A large amount of time seemed to be spent trying to get the best photo for her Instagram feed.

She seems to have a very simple supply-side economics mental model that she has confused with actual reality. It doesn't seem like her ideology is anything more than "cutting taxes makes the line go up". I'm no economist, but I'm pretty sure there's more to it than that.

The final sentence describes the Conservative party after her time in office as like The Lord of the Flies, which I find pretty amusing. I also liked the anecdote about "Things Can Only Get Better" being played at the party for the Conservative LGBT group at the party conference.

Rory Stewart walks from Herat to Kabul in Afghanistan not long after the fall of the Taliban. He does the walk in the winter months, stopping off at the villages and towns along the way.

The book is much more about the people and places on the journey than about the author, he doesn't go into much about why he's doing this other than talking about retracing the steps of the first Mughal emperor Babur.

I knew almost nothing about the places, and found the description of the Minaret of Jam in particular fascinating. His encounters vary from being welcomed with food and shelter, to a particularly tense meeting with people from the Taliban. Some of the contrasting of his experiences with the out of touch state building were very eye opening.

I felt pretty uncomfortable with the amount of times he comes across as entitled to what little food and shelter these people have, despite the difficulty of the task he set himself.

Through a lot of the journey he was joined with a dog he met along the way that he'd named Babur, at one point making it pretty clear that the dog had stopped him giving up and drifting off in the deep snow.

Van Tulleken’s work here is an outstanding compilation and explanation of dozens of research studies, historical events, and personal observations tying the state of the current obesity epidemic to the growth of the ultra-processed food industry.

His conclusions are well supported with research making his commentary poignant and powerful. Unfortunately, while he tries to provide some hope with a few methods for change, the reality of our world, our government, and capitalism make it clear that we’ll likely never have any systemic change, so any change to how we eat must be ultimately personal.

Van Tulleken puts UPF on a spectrum. While avoiding all UPF is desirable, some are worse than others simply based on the quantity of non-kitchen ingredients. And, identifying UPF is difficult. Trying to follow the simple rule that an ingredient one would not find in a normal household kitchen denotes UPF is a nice start, but it isn’t always that simple.

I really like his stance, that we shouldn’t judge people for what they eat, and we should just do our best to eat real food. And, don’t nag.

At the beginning of chapter 18, Van Tulleken summarizes the findings outlined previously in the book before moving into the ideas for moving forward. I’ve tried to record those conclusions below.

Summary from Chapter 18 -- The processing makes UPF soft, which means it is eaten quickly and a person consumes more calories per minute and don’t feel full until long after finished. ---- Can reduce facial bone size and bone density, which can lead to dental issues. -- UPF typically has a very high calorie density because it is dry and high in fat and sugar, providing more calories per mouthful. -- UPF displaces diverse whole foods from the diet, especially among low income groups. ---- UPF is often micro-nutrient deficient, which also contributes to excess consumption -- Mismatches between taste signals in the mouth and the nutrition content arriving in the gut alters metabolism and alters appetite in ways we are just beginning to understand, but seem to drive excess consumption. -- Ultra-processed food is addictive, meaning for some people binges are unavoidable. -- The emulsifiers, preservatives, modified starches and other additives damage our microbiomes, allowing inflammatory bacteria to flourish and causing our guts to leak. -- The convenience, marketing, and price of UPF urges us to eat constantly and without thought. -- The additives and physical processing mean that UPF affects our satiety system, and other additives may affect brain and endocrine functions, and plastic from the packaging might affect fertility. -- Production methods used to make UPF require expensive subsidies and drive environmental destruction, carbon emissions, and plastic pollution, which harms us all.