I am increasingly uneasy about this UPF business. If you have been worrying about bigger things – the Kakhovka dam, the demise of summer polar ice by 2030 – you may not know that UPFs are ultra-processed foods, engineered to be as hard to resist as the TikTok algorithm: nutritionally empty, stuffed with texture and flavour enhancers. “It’s not nourishment,” Dr Chris Van Tulleken, whose book, Ultra-Processed People, explores their pervasiveness and impact, told the Guardian Science Weekly podcast.
I am in thrall to Big Hoops: my obsession with reconstituted crispy potato is one of my main personality traits. But otherwise, I’m not especially chill about what I eat; I love food but it’s not simple. It is a long, dreary hangover, I suppose, from my early 20s when I would avidly read women’s health magazines while on the train to see a lovely psychiatrist who was treating me for bulimia, bringing along a neat food diary, proudly tracking how many healthy fruit and vegetables I had eaten.
Compared with the #nutrition TikToks I get served – carefully contoured girls in Lululemon leggings weighing blueberries – I’m an amateur neurotic. I have just had to look up what “tracking macros” means (it’s what I did in my 90s food diary, but fancier). I go whole years letting greed and joy win over rigidity. But when something in my life, or the world at large, feels dangerously out of control, that is my maladaptive way of coping. This last year of a world teetering on the edge of multiple catastrophes has sent me weird again: it started with that “eat 30 plants a week” recommendation from Prof Tim Spector, which had me self-soothing by totting up my intake and fretting about my microbiome. Now I’m scanning packaging for emulsifiers and humectants too.
If this annoys and bores you – God, me too. The self-absorption; the misdirected energy. That’s my unease about UPFs, really. I can afford good food and choice in my life; I’ll be fine (or I’ll be run over by a bus, faculties weakened by tediously contemplating my antioxidant intake). As Van Tulleken says: “We know that rich people eat far less ultra-processed food than poor people; if you simply give people money, they stop eating it.” People rely on UPFs for convenience, cost and little or large hits of comfort, and avoiding them takes time and cash. In a study on the impact of UPF consumption on calorie intake and weight, researchers in Maryland spent 40% more money buying the food for trial participants’ unprocessed diet. It is the same set of problems with eating the optimal 30 plants a week – how expensive is that, especially in our stupid post-Brexit food economy? It’s beyond the reach of a vast swathe – perhaps most – of the population.
So those who can apply their resources and energy to getting healthier do so and the gulf grows. It seems grindingly unfair. We have known health outcomes are income-correlated since at least the 19th century, but the insidious ubiquity of UPFs rigs an already unfair game to a scandalous degree.
We have an ever more sophisticated understanding of how to be healthier. It is brilliant that research is furthering our knowledge of how diet affects health and, crucially, how food manufacturing makes us unhealthier. But so far, it feels as if that mainly benefits a lucky few: there are better and more important uses for this data than giving the affluent “worried well” extra stuff to optimise.
I don’t know how that happens. There is industry-wide irresponsibility, and without regulation it won’t change; there is so much else that needs to change too, it feels overwhelming. I want to soak some linseeds just thinking about it. But we have to think radically about food, how we access it and how it is produced. Change isn’t impossible: in Liège in Belgium, which is by no means a rich city, they are working towards 100% organic, locally produced school food by 2024; 5,000 children in the poorest areas get free soup or fruit at breaktime. There are initiatives like that across the world. They are infinitesimally small, and maybe they are not even part of the bigger answer in the long term. But they sure as hell are a better answer than me tracking my macros.
Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist
