Children’s Health: Ultra-processed Foods

Baroness Walmsley Excerpts

Wednesday 25th October 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Walmsley (LD)]

My Lords, I agree with every word of the noble Baroness’s excellent speech, as noble Lords will hear. We humans have evolved, along with our diets and our gut microbiome, over millennia. Ultra-processed foods, however, are the new kids on the block, and their availability and ubiquity in our diets correspond exactly to the increase in diet-related diseases. Figures show that 60% of the UK diet is UPF, and it could be worse for children. That corresponds with serious concerns about height and weight revealed by the UK child measurement programme. It is pretty obvious that something is going wrong.

Whenever I raise the topic of ultra-processed foods with the Minister, he replies that the Government cannot take action because it is difficult to define them, since brown bread is an ultra-processed food. I would like to tackle that head on. Brown bread could be ultra-processed, but it does not have to be—it certainly is not in my kitchen. So let us look at definitions. You could say that UPF contains things you would not find in a normal kitchen. That is helpful, but not enough. More helpful is the NOVA system, which puts foods into four categories, only the fourth of which is ultra-processed. Brown bread is not always found in that group.

NOVA provides a framework for assessing the degree and purpose of processing, and the relation between dietary patterns and health outcomes. It should be seen as complementary to nutrient-based approaches. Some national Governments have already begun to introduce policies informed by NOVA.

Foods and diets are of course complex. Lots of HFSS foods—high in fat, salt and sugar—are UPF, which is often called junk food, and lots of UPF are HFSS, so it is important to untangle the two. One piece of research did that neatly. Two groups of people were given diets for a week that were comparable in fat, sugar, salt and quality and told they could eat as much as they liked. One diet was made of minimally processed foods and the other UPF. Those on UPF ate 500 calories more than the others and gained weight. When they swapped the two groups around, the same thing happened. Dozens more studies have controlled for fat, salt, sugar and diet quality and have still found ultra-processed diets to be strongly associated with poor health. Other research shows that UPF are designed to make people eat more. They are soft and easily digested, taste good, are energy dense and, as has been said, some people become addicted to them.

Not every UPF is bad; it is the quantity and the overarching dietary pattern that matter. Our priority should be rebalancing the diet as a whole, and that is where government dietary guidelines come in. In the UK, reformulation has long been the focus of policy but, given the overlap between UPF and HFSS, reformulation should be only a first step to addressing the health outcomes associated with ultra-processed dietary patterns.

Part of the issue is profit maximisation. The business model is this: you take cheap commodity ingredients, deconstruct them and put them together in a different way, bind them with cosmetic additives and then brand and market the product with the aim of increasing sales and normalising consumption. In a capitalist economy, financial resources flow to the sectors that are the most profitable, and UPF is hugely profitable.

So what to do? Research definitively demonstrates that existing guidelines are inadequate—there is not a word about UPF in government guidelines—so will the Government amend their guidelines to promote the consumption of minimally-processed foods, improve the food in schools and public settings, and implement the existing legislation on advertising junk food on TV and online and relating to “buy one, get one free”? Many people on lower incomes rely on cheap UPF, so policy should not place further burdens on them.