I don’t believe in New Year’s resolutions because they rarely work. But this year, I urge you all to make one: cut down on how much fake food you eat.
What do I mean by fake food? I mean the packaged, glossy, edible food-like substances lining our shelves that are slowly reducing our life and health span.
Choosing what we eat is the most important decision we can make to improve our health and the health of the planet, so in 2024 let’s make it a priority.
In 2023, ultra-processed food (UPF) regularly made headlines – and for all the wrong reasons. In my view, each year these products make 2.5 million people sick and prevent them from working and living healthy lives.
Everyone in the UK would benefit from reducing their intake of UPFs and increasing their intake of real food.
Now, I’m partial to a chocolate digestive, and I enjoy them as a treat every so often. But for many of us in the UK, UPFs make up a large percentage – around 60 per cent – of our total calorie intake each day. And worryingly, for children that percentage is even higher.
Compared with other countries, we are doing quite poorly. Only the US consumes more UPFs than us.
UPFs are designed to be easy to eat and difficult to stop eating. Their texture and lack of fibre make them quick to digest, leading to spikes in blood sugar and blood fat, which cause inflammation. UPFs also leave you feeling hungry, causing you to eat more than you need.
So how do you spot UPFs in the supermarket?
Although there are academic arguments about the precise definition of UPFs, in practice they are easy to spot. If you couldn’t find most of the ingredients listed on the packet in your kitchen, it’s ultra-processed.
While it’s probably no surprise to you that chocolate digestives are classed as UPFs, it’s likely you consume more of these products than you realise. For instance, most supermarket breads, breakfast cereals, snacks and juices are also UPFs. They are everywhere and they are increasingly difficult to avoid.
I was recently at a conference about the future of nutrition in the UK, and not one speaker mentioned the elephant in the room: UPFs. There was some talk of fibre and the complexity of polyphenols, liquid soups and miracle shakes that reverse Type 2 diabetes, lots of reformulating and “fortifying” foods, and plenty of excitement about drugs like Ozempic.
Fortifying food is certainly a good idea for countries where access to enough food is challenging. But in the UK we have more than enough to go around.
We cannot reformulate and medicate our way out of our nutritional slump. The problem is that the vast majority of the food we eat is rubbish: UPFs are very low in nutrients. Fortifying them is not the answer. It’s like putting a sticking plaster on an amputated limb.
I was invited to join the panel at the end of the conference alongside esteemed academics, a community dietitian and some industry voices. Like the line-up on Have I Got News For You, everyone had a statement.
The science and the talks were interesting, but because industry representatives were in the room, nobody wanted to be the person to raise the biggest issue: the quality of our food.
My friend Henry Dimbleby closed the conference by outlining the huge cost of NHS care directly caused by poor diet. The evidence is clear: epidemiological studies involving hundreds of thousands of people show a very obvious relationship between eating more UPFs and worse health outcomes.
Brilliant research based on data from the UK Biobank shows that changing our Western diet to a healthy diet could add 10 years to our lives. People are losing an entire decade of life because Big Food has a stranglehold on the discussion surrounding these products. Adding extra calcium, protein or fibre to an otherwise nutrient-free lump does not constitute a health intervention.
Most of the people at the conference likely don’t get the majority of their calories from UPFs, but they are in the minority in the UK. According to an apocryphal story, Marie Antoinette said “Let them eat cake” when she learned that the peasants were starving. Today, we are showing a similar disregard for the general population. We are essentially saying “Let them eat edible food-like substances that make them sick”.
So why aren’t we doing something about this? It is a disgrace that the government is largely ignoring this problem, but it is not altogether surprising. Modern politics is short-term. Any intervention is unlikely to make a difference before the next election, so if making a positive change won’t help them stay in power, their motivation to make that change is low.
But they are allowing our nation to sleepwalk deeper into a health crisis.
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