We’re quickly waking up to the potential dangers of ultra-processed foods. The stakes are higher for those on low incomes… but is there a way back?
Ultra-processed foods have been all over the news recently. They’re all over our supermarkets, restaurants and kitchens as well, of course, which has made the revelations about their potential harms all the more unpalatable.
While scientists and doctors have been wary of ultra-processed foods (UPFs) for a while, it’s the intervention from TV presenter and medic Dr Chris van Tulleken that’s caused waves most recently.
After a TV experiment for the BBC where he threw himself in headfirst, switching to a diet made up of 80 per cent UPFs for a month, he wrote a book about the effects on our health.
What made van Tulleken’s interest even more remarkable was the fact that he’s someone who really enjoyed UPFs himself.
UPF is shorthand for a product that’s been through high levels of processing and contains in its list of ingredients something that we wouldn’t typically find in a domestic kitchen. So it’s not just the usual suspects like ready meals, chicken nuggets and instant noodles.
Imagine you’re in the poorest half of all UK households. If you wanted to adhere to our national healthy-eating guidelines, you’d need to spend almost 30 per cent of your disposable income
Dr Chris van Tulleken
Van Tulleken says that UPFs make up 60 per cent of the average diet – and for one in five people in the UK that’s up to 80 per cent. Most British children also get the bulk of their calories from UPFs. This makes us by far the biggest consumers of these foods in Europe.
The reasons for this? Well, van Tulleken says it’s a lot to do with cost.
“In 2017, before the current cost-of-living crisis, we were spending just 8 per cent of our household budget on food, less than almost anywhere else in the world,” he says in his book, Ultra-processed People.
“You don’t get much whole food, such as meat or broccoli, for 8 per cent of your budget. UPF, however, is quite a bit cheaper.
“Imagine you’re in the poorest half of all UK households. If you wanted to adhere to our national healthy-eating guidelines, you’d need to spend almost 30 per cent of your disposable income.”
The problem is so entwined with the nation’s health that van Tulleken has estimated that if we could solve poverty in the UK we’d wipe out 50 per cent of obesity at a stroke.
So while we know these products are bad news, it appears they’re more insidious for people on low incomes.
Cheap as chips?
It’s not just that they’re often the most readily available foods to people who rely on convenience stores. As van Tulleken points out, UPFs can be cheap and have been engineered to stay fresh longer than whole foods, meaning they’re especially appealing to anyone who has to watch their food spend.
Often a lack of cooking skills is blamed for the toxic British dependence on UPFs, but this doesn’t show the whole picture. Families may struggle with minimal, if any, kitchen facilities as well as the cost of energy. There’s often a mistaken belief that UPFs can be a healthy option based on misleading packaging or advertising. Van Tulleken has pointed out that almost every product that makes a health claim on the packaging is actually ultra-processed.
Conscious of the availability and price point of many UPFs, Dr Sonya Babu-Narayan, associate medical director at the British Heart Foundation, has called for more research into the links to cardiovascular disease.
“We don’t know to what degree this is driven by artificial additives or the high levels of salt, sugar and fat that these foods tend to contain,” she said.
“We do know that the world around us doesn’t always make it easy for the healthy option to be the accessible and affordable option. On the contrary, less healthy foods often take centre stage.”
But, pressured by retailers, food companies are working to tight margins and to remain profitable they need to sell us more and more of their products. That means a lot of science goes into making sure we eat more of them than we need.
From additives to make the texture easier to chew and swallow, to artificial sweetness that keeps our brains craving the sugar it’s been promised, we are literally tricking our bodies into consuming more calories than we require.
For people on low budgets, of course, this is insidious. A frozen lasagne might seem cheap but van Tulleken says the ultra-processing is more harmful than anything we could put in a homemade equivalent – even if we’re heavy on the salt and cheese.
And if it’s going to leave people feeling they need more food, it’s easy to see why they’ve been linked to such a wide array of health issues. It’s also fair to argue that UPFs might not be as budget-friendly as people assume.
Food for thought
Robbie Davison, of the Can Cook social enterprise in the north-west of England, draws a distinction between feeding people and feeding them well.
Can Cook supports families with meals the social enterprise team have cooked from scratch – free at first before moving to a payment model.
“What’s important about this is it gets people back into buying and enjoying good food again,” he says.
“It’s about both habit and dignity. If you get people who’ve been in crisis for a long time, they’ve been eating really poor food for a long time. Their taste buds have gone and they’re definitely not cooking.
“I completely get why people do and don’t eat good food. We get people cooking, we introduce taste back into it – we’ve taught 17,000 people to cook.”
Working on the front line as he does, Davison is familiar with the barriers that can stop people eating better food.
If you want a good meal, a decent meal, use a slow cooker. The energy it uses costs 19p for a meal to feed a family of four
Robbie Davison, Can Cook social enterprise
But simple shifts in habits and mindsets could be key to behavioural change, he says.
“There was some information that came out saying the cheapest piece of equipment you could use was a microwave,” he says.
“Absolutely nonsensical advice. People don’t cook things in microwaves, they warm things up. If you want a good meal, a decent meal, use a slow cooker. The energy it uses costs 19p for a meal to feed a family of four.”
At their sister enterprise Well Fed, Davison and his colleagues are providing slow cookers, bags of food to cook in them and the training to give people the confidence to get the most out of the appliance.
It’s far from the only scheme of its type – councils, housing associations and other organisations across the country have been running similar initiatives with slow cookers. It’s often about saving energy, but the fact remains that providing something that makes it easy to eat well, cheaply and with minimal energy spend, immediately negates some of the main UPF selling points.
“People can get 1,000 good slow cooker recipes off the internet,” Davison adds. “Pulses and vegetables go really well. The cheapest cuts of meat, interestingly, are the ones that cook best in slow cookers.”
Image: Alexander Grey / Pexels
