Take a look at a supermarket cereal. Is that an ultra-processed food (UPF)? What about a slice of Hovis wholemeal toast? Or longlife almond milk splashed into a morning coffee? This doesn’t sound like the worst breakfast, but in each case you are likely to have put a UPF into your body.
UPFs have been associated with increases in serious diseases including cancer and diabetes, but people do not typically have a good understanding of what a UPF is. Processed foods might be tinned fish, smoked meat or salted peanuts. A UPF is often engineered from already refined ingredients, such as vegetable oils, flours, whey proteins and sugars. These ingredients are then combined to create something appetising using additives such as emulsifiers, flavourings and colouring – often ingredients you can’t buy in a regular store. Do you have any butylated hydroxyanisole anti-oxidant food preservative in your cupboard? You do if you have a 99p packet of Batchelors Super Noodles.
UPFs are not just “junk foods” such as a hotdog or a tube of Pringles. They are also low-fat margarines and vitamin-fortified cereals, food that has long been advocated – correctly, in many ways – as healthier alternatives.
Looking for a UPF in the typical kitchen cupboard can be like discovering an ant’s nest: first you see one, then another, and before you know it they are everywhere you look. UPFs account for 57% of calories consumed in the UK, a 2019 study found, and the figure is higher among children. A 2022 study put UPFs’ dominance in America at 72% of foods.
It has been happening for a while. Consider the transformation in the Spanish national diet from 1990, when only one in 10 calories was provided by a UPF, to 2010, when it was close to a third. In Brazil, people eating more UPFs consumed more saturated and trans fats and less fibre. In the US, more UPFs were found to mean less potassium, magnesium and vitamin C and more sugar.
UPFs tend to be higher calorie, lower nutrition and lower cost than processed or raw ingredients. As a result poorer people eat more of them, making the consequences of UPF a class issue.
Only in recent years have efforts accelerated to understand the consequences of this dietary takeover.
A surprise nonfiction bestseller recently has been Dr Chris van Tulleken’s book, Ultra Processed People, subtitled “Why do we all eat stuff that isn’t food … and why can’t we stop?”. Public concern is reflected by its position this weekend at the top of the Nielsen hardback sales charts.
“This is an emergency,” Van Tulleken has said. “We need to think about the big food companies in the same way we do the tobacco companies.”
Van Tulleken believes there needs to be national guidance that states UPV is strongly associated with “inflammatory diseases like Crohn’s disease, metabolic diseases like type 2 diabetes, certain cancers, depression and anxiety, obesity and early death.”
Henry Dimbleby, the founder of the Leon restaurant chain, who wrote a food strategy for the government in 2021 that identified the UK’s UPF consumption as nearly four times higher than Italy, believes food is the biggest thing that is making us sick.
“We’re stuck in a junk food cycle,” he has said. “Unless we break that we are in real trouble as a society.”
The UK government’s scientific advisory committee on nutrition said last month that the “observed associations between higher consumption of [ultra-] processed foods and adverse health outcomes are concerning”. But it urged caution in weighing the evidence so far.
It called for more studies of the links between UPFs and health outcomes. The Soil Association, a campaigning charity, said that response was too weak and highlighted members’ links to the food industry. It wants ministers to set reduction targets on the consumption of ultra-processed foods, as France has done.
