Yahoo Sports There is nothing healthy about our paranoia over ultra-processed food
Until a few months ago, the concept of ultra-processed food (UPF) was only mentioned in a handful of academic journals and the occasional newspaper article. The term itself was only coined in 2009. This year, mainly thanks to Chris van Tulleken’s heavily promoted book Ultra-Processed People, fear of UPF has gone mainstream. A number of journalists have written about their struggle to keep UPFs out of their lives. Van Tulleken himself was on Channel 4 News last night blaming UPFs for “pandemic obesity” and Panorama followed this with a documentary about “chemicals” in the food supply.
No one ever lost money by underestimating the scientific literacy of the British public, but even by the standard of food fads, the UPF peril is hilariously threadbare. The definition of an ultra-processed food product is one that is wrapped in plastic and contains ingredients that you wouldn’t find in a domestic kitchen. I am not making this up. It is just a variation of the old trope about not eating anything your grandmother wouldn’t recognise and it is based on about the same amount of science.
One curious aspect of the UPF panic is that it lets all three of the traditional dietary villains off the hook. Salt, sugar and fat are all everyday kitchen essentials that your grandmother would recognise and are therefore considered OK. You can have cakes, biscuits and chips so long as you make them yourself. Bubbling under the surface is a reactionary impulse that modernity is not to be trusted, mass consumption is vulgar and a woman’s place is in the home. It is not just the food that is ultra-processed. It is the people themselves, as the title of Van Tulleken’s book suggests. You are what you eat.
UPFs are alleged to cause cancer, diabetes and obesity. Some have claimed that they are also addictive. Evidence for any of this is thin on the ground, but one piece of research that is much cited by UPF’s growing band of enemies involved giving ten people a minimally processed diet while another ten people were given an ultra-processed diet. Both groups were served meals with twice as many calories as they needed to maintain a healthy weight and after two weeks the ultra-processed group had put on weight while the minimally processed group lost weight.
In many respects, this is not surprising. Give people large quantities of free French fries and cookies and they are more likely to overeat than if you give them steamed rice and broccoli. But the anti-UPF evangelists say that it is not simply a matter of calories. The suggestion is that there is something about the food industry’s additives that makes people put on weight. They admit that they don’t know what it is, but that’s no excuse not to upend the entire food supply.
It is possible that somewhere in the long list of emulsifiers, sweeteners, flavourings and preservatives, there is something that has a peculiarly obesogenic effect. It is pure speculation, but it is not impossible. It is also possible that one or more of these ingredients is carcinogenic, although that is less likely since they have all been rigorously tested by regulators around the world. Without an obvious suspect and with a definition of ultra-processed food that is ludicrously broad, we are simply advised to boycott them all.
In truth, there is no reason to think that modified cornflour, whey powder or xanthan gum, for example, pose any risk to our health. Just because potassium sorbate, calcium propionate and ascorbic acid sound a bit sciency is no reason to fear them (ascorbic acid is more commonly known as Vitamin C). Being scared of something because you don’t know what it is and you don’t have it in your kitchen is not an enlightened way to approach the world. It is primitive.
For the avoidance of doubt, a diet heavy in fresh fruit and vegetables is better for you than one that is heavy in energy-dense processed snacks. Most of the food that is bad for your health is probably ‘ultra-processed’. Cooking is a great skill to have and people should think about what they’re eating. But the anti-UPF blowhards go far beyond telling us to have a balanced diet and eat our greens. A recent article in The Sunday Times saw a journalist worrying about sliced bread, sandwiches, granola bars, plant burgers, Bertolli olive oil spread, pesto and Weetabix, the latter because it contains malted barley extract. This is not a diet. It is a glorified eating disorder for the worried well.
The best that can be said of last night’s Panorama is that it tried to narrow down the list of suspects to find the killer ingredient (sorry, “chemical”). It was the most irresponsible piece of television I have seen in years. At one point, the BBC walked into a nursery and effectively told the parents that their children are going to get cancer if they keep buying shop-bought cakes. A maverick academic was wheeled out to challenge the scientific consensus that aspartame is safe. Emulsifiers were described as “basically a glue” and we were told, on the basis of unpublished research, that they might cause breast cancer and heart disease. The maverick academic then reappeared to warn of the dangers of Bisphenol A (BPA) leaching out from plastic food packaging. The presenter explained that high levels of BPA have been linked to cancer and infertility. She did not explain that public health agencies in every major country in the world, as well as the WHO, has concluded that normal exposure is not associated with any risk. The programme then degenerated into what appeared to be a borderline libellous conspiracy theory about the UK’s Committee on Toxicity which it asserted had “downplayed the risks of BPA” because its chairman is an unpaid board member of an organisation that receives money from “Big Food”.
This way can only lead to madness. There is nothing healthy about this level of paranoia. Food fads come and go. For the sanity of the nation, we must hope that this one goes away more quickly than most.
Christopher Snowdon is head of lifestyle economics at the Institute of Economic Affairs
