Nine easy swaps to reduce ultra-processed foods in your diet: it’s not an ‘all-or-nothing approach’

Emma Joyce takes a close look at food labels. Photograph: Jessica Hromas/The Guardian

“It’s not poor willpower,” says Mark Lawrence. The ecological nutrition professor from Deakin University is a global expert in ultra-processed foods, a beacon of knowledge in the proliferation of UPFs. “It’s really difficult to avoid them.”

Australia, alongside the US and UK, has one of the world’s highest consumption rates of ultra-processed foods which have been linked to “multiple diet-related chronic diseases”, according to a global report of which Lawrence was a co-author.