The reasons to avoid ultraprocessed foods just keep coming. The largest review of evidence to date, published earlier this year in the British Medical Journal, highlighted 32 ways in which UPFs are doing us dirty, from obesity and heart disease to type 2 diabetes and cancer. As Dr Chris van Tulleken, one of the world’s leading experts on UPFs, put it at the time, an “enormous number of independent studies … clearly link a diet high in UPFs to multiple damaging health outcomes, including early death”.
And yet still we buy them. In the UK and US, they now account for more than half of the average diet.
