When I first started really delving into the topic of UPF, I felt completely overwhelmed. I can still remember one evening supermarket dash, knowing that everyone would be arriving home soon and that the fridge was empty. ‘I don’t have time to make some organic bloody lentil flipping atrocity that my kids won’t eat,’ I muttered darkly to myself as I pushed my trolley around the aisles. Two experiences I already found stressful – the overstimulating, brightly lit supermarket, and thinking up ‘meal plans’ for our family of two adults and three children, one of whom has severe allergies – now had a whole new layer to add: UPF.
When I’d first read about ultra-processed food, I hadn’t been particularly worried. We cook a lot in our house, and I’d assumed we were already consuming a fairly low amount of it. But then I started reading labels – something I was already well-versed in with a child with allergies in the house – looking at every packet and tin and asking new questions: do I have these ingredients in my kitchen? Is that just a fancy word for salt or is it made in some industrial vat somewhere? WTF is carrageenan? My eyes began to ache from it all.
I wandered the aisles that night, ostensibly searching for a quick family dinner but presumably looking somewhat deranged. It was as if a really horrible UPF lightbulb had been switched on, illuminating a whole load of things I’d rather not see. What was once just a bog-standard stressful experience had taken on a kind of existential malaise. ‘what on Earth are we all doing here?’, I wanted to shout to the all the other zombie shoppers. ‘wake up!!’
All of the plastic packaging, the chemical additives, the bread that isn’t really bread, the puddings in trays, the fridge raiders, the palm oil in everything, the crisps that aren’t potato...even the tins of chickpeas I thought made me some kind of home cookery master contained an ‘antioxidant’ called ‘ascorbic acid’. ‘DOES THIS MAKE THEM UPF?’,
I wanted to yell at the hideous ceiling lights. I already had what felt like an unreasonable number of worries – now I had to add saving the bloody planet and my family’s health by soaking pulses overnight and making my own flipping hummus. I left that night with a stack of frozen pizzas, a cheap bottle of pinot grigio, and a feeling of defeat.
What is ultra-processed food?
Go into your nearest supermarket and just stand still for a moment. Look around. Notice the prepacked sandwiches, the yoghurts in plastic pots, the brightly coloured boxes of cereals, the microwave meals for one, the freezer pizzas, the doughnuts with their epic shelf-life. Now imagine yourself as a time-traveller. Maybe you’ve swung by via horse-and-carriage from Victorian England, or maybe Marty McFly picked you up this morning from your Stone Age settlement, or perhaps you’re from somewhere else. It doesn’t really matter where you imagine yourself having time-travelled from, because if you are human and from literally any period or place in the world prior to around 1970, you won’t recognise any of this stuff at all. You will be unlikely to even identify it as food. Almost everything you see as you look around the shelves (even a small convenience store carries thousands of items, larger supermarkets may have tens of thousands) is very likely to be ultra-processed food (UPF). Of course, there are obvious exceptions. Most of us could work out that an apple or an egg – easily recognisable to our time-traveller – are not UPF, but what about all that other stuff? How do you know what is UPF and what isn’t?
Naming the problem
People have tried to define UPF in a variety of ways; for example, the food writer Michael Pollan has used the term "edible food-like substances", while doctor and author of Ultra-Processed People, Chris van Tulleken, explains it as anything "wrapped in plastic and with at least one ingredient that you would not find in your kitchen". Van Tulleken also suggests that another warning sign is packaging plastered with messages like, ‘low fat’, ‘high in fibre’ or ‘supports your family’s health’ because almost every food with such health claims on the packet is UPF.
Food writer Bee Wilson points out that UPFs are "so altered that it can be hard to recognise the underlying ingredients", calling them "concoctions of concoctions". The current definition on Wikipedia describes them as "industrially formulated edible substances".
You’ll notice that there’s a distinct reluctance from all of these voices to refer to UPF as ‘food’ and, indeed, many argue that we should stop calling it this. Most recently, researchers at the Nova Institute for Health in Maryland have argued that the term ‘food’ is a misnomer and "...sits in foundational misalignment with how food has been defined, perceived, deliberated on, engaged with, and experienced by humans over millennia".
So, what are the characteristics of ultra-processed food (UPF)?
In summary, something is likely to be UPF if it ticks the following boxes:
• ingredients you don’t recognise as food;
• made in a factory and packaged in branded, appealing plastic packaging with health claims;
• hyperpalatable, i.e. tasty and moreish;
• low-cost ingredients, heavily marketed, for maximum profit.
Oh, so you don’t just mean junk food then?
Unfortunately, no, not really – that would be simple! In fact, there’s a common misconception that if it’s expensive or upmarket in any way, it’s not UPF. This really isn’t the case – there are plenty of higher-end items that tick the UPF box: fancy cakes, luxury lunch salads, posh crisps, top-of-the-range ready meals, to name a few examples. And whilst it’s probably safe to say that all junk food is ultra-processed, it doesn’t therefore follow that all UPFs are what we perceive as junk food. For example, not many of us think of a loaf of sliced bread as junk food, and yet almost all factory-made, supermarket bread – a staple of many of our diets – is ultra-processed. Likewise, breakfast cereals, which many of us have grown up being told are a ‘healthy start’ to the day, are almost all UPF, and so are most of the ‘healthy’ yoghurts, and so are cereal snack bars.
The scale of UPF production is mind-boggling – on a single day in the UK alone, over 3,000 factories churn out 12 million loaves of bread and 10 million cakes and biscuits.
What exactly is the problem with UPF?
The problem seems to be, put simply, that we were never meant to eat this stuff. It may be ‘edible’, but, when you think about it, so is craft glue, face cream, paper, chalk and crayons (in small quantities, but don’t try this at home, folks!). You could even eat a house brick if you felt inclined. But being able to put something in your mouth, chew it, swallow it and survive is not really what defines something as ‘food’. It has to be nutritious, but it also has to not be the opposite – i.e. detrimental to our health. And there is growing evidence that UPFs, which humans have only been consuming for around fifty years (not long when you consider we’ve been on the planet for millennia), and which are becoming more and more ubiquitous in our diets, are causing us real harm.
A note on nuance
To make things clear, especially for people who are new to the idea of UPF, it’s easiest to start with a black-and-white approach: yes this item is UPF, no this item is not. But as you progress through your own journey of thinking differently about food, you may find that there are some grey areas where you feel the health benefits or even the convenience of a particular item outweighs the concern that it may be UPF.
Perhaps it just has one ingredient you don’t recognise. Maybe your child is a fussy eater and you know this is something they won’t object to. Or maybe it’s something like a stock cube and you’re going to add it to a fantastic home-cooked meal. And, it’s not just about reading the ingredients list and saying yay or nay – we need to reconsider our relationship with what we eat and reintroduce values of gratitude and mindfulness to our diet. But we have to understand what UPF is first, and then we can introduce some nuance and decide what approach we are going to take. It’s a journey.
