Children’s Health: Ultra-processed Foods

Lord Krebs Excerpts

Wednesday 25th October 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Krebs (CB)]

My Lords, I declare my interests as recorded in the register.

I shall start by saying what I agree with in relation to the previous two speakers: namely, that unhealthy diets are a major cause of ill health in the UK, estimated to cause 90,000 deaths a year. The risk is increasing—for example, obesity levels have doubled in the last 30 years—and is strongly linked to deprivation. Children at the age of 11 are twice as likely to be obese if they are in the poorest decile of the population than if they are in the richest decile.

The key question for this debate is: what is the cause of dietary ill health? Is it the content of certain foods—too many calories, too much fat, sugar and salt, and not enough fibre—or the way in which they are made? The UPF concept says it is the latter, but I beg to disagree. Although the noble Baroness, Lady Jenkin, said there is agreement in the scientific community, that is simply not true. I have studied a number of the original papers and shall highlight two problems.

First, numerous studies have shown that there is no agreement on what UPF is. For instance, in a study published in 2022, a panel of nutrition experts agreed on classification on the NOVA scale for only four out of 231 foodstuffs that they were presented with. Even when the experts were given the ingredients of those foods, they agreed on only three out of 120 items.

Secondly, there is no scientific evidence to show that processing is harmful to health. Most of the evidence that claims to show this comes from epidemiological studies following a large cohort of people over many years and looking for correlations between diet and health outcomes. Correlation does not prove causation, of course, so there are criteria, known as the Bradford Hill criteria, that have to be met before one can infer causation.

I have looked in detail at recent very large epidemiological studies conducted in the UK, France, Spain and the United States. Although they all show correlations, they do not meet the Bradford Hill criteria for inferring causation of a link between consumption of ultra-processed food and ill health. Furthermore, these studies, which were set up many years ago—sometimes decades ago—were not designed to look at UPF, so the dietary records of participants did not include references to it. The researchers had to retrofit a categorisation, and I have said how little agreement there is on the NOVA classification scheme.

The noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, also cited an experimental study carried out by Kevin Hall, but when one reads the paper that study does not show that UPF is harmful. It shows that when people are offered unlimited hyperpalatable food that is high in fat, salt and sugar, they overconsume. They consume more calories; no one disagrees with that and it is hardly surprising, but it has nothing to do with UPF. I therefore agree with the Minister, who has said many times that the real danger in our diets is HFSS, not UPF. For me, the real pity is that the Government, having correctly identified the problem, are doing so little to tackle it. Here I agree with the points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley.

Finally, I have tried to take a dispassionate look at the evidence, and one should always be open to the possibility that the evidence will change. But for now, I conclude that UPF is a red herring in the diet and ill-health debate. Since the noble Baroness, Lady Jenkin, mentioned addiction, the paper published in the British Medical Journal on 9 October does not say that the UPF category in NOVA is addictive. First, it acknowledges that the DSM-5 manual—the standard manual for mental health problems—does not recognise food addiction. Secondly, it says:

“The UPF category … captures foods that may be unlikely to have strong addictive potential”


and that homemade foods, such as homemade cookies,

“may … be addictive but would not be considered a UPF based on the NOVA classification”.

Children’s Health: Sugar

Lord Krebs Excerpts

Tuesday 12th September 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Markham (Con)]

I think one of the things that, hopefully, I have learned in the almost year that I have been answering Questions is when I know the answer to a question and when I do not. I am afraid this is one of the examples of the latter. I will happily look up the Canadian example of the use of whole milk and write to the noble Lord on it.

[Lord Krebs (CB)]

My Lords, I declare my interests, as recorded in the register. I was very pleased to hear the Minister refer to the soft drinks industry levy, which has been a very successful way of reducing sugar consumption in soft drinks. Therefore, do the Government have plans to extend that levy to other products that contain a lot of sugar? That would be a very effective way of reducing sugar consumption.

[Lord Markham (Con)]

The noble Lord is correct; that has been a success story. Overall, we have seen a 46% reduction of sugar, while at the same time sales of drinks in that category have gone up by 21%—that is 60%-plus if you combine the two. We are now looking at other moves that can help. The movement of product positioning to remove the so-called “pester power” is a key step forward in this. Of all the modelling that has been done, that is the thing that it is thought will reduce calories by the most—by 96%. That is the current focus; it has been in place for almost a year and early evidence is that it is working, but as ever we must keep everything under review.

Ultra-processed Food

Lord Krebs Excerpts

Tuesday 18th July 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Markham (Con)]

Absolutely. Some of the foods are not healthy at all, and we totally want to discourage them. We have taken a lot of steps in that space. The whole product positioning strategy, whereby you cannot now put such foods in places where there will be so called pester-power influences, is beginning to have an effect. We are already seeing healthier foods outgrowing non-healthy foods from that. Those sorts of actions were modelled to show that they were effective for 96% of the things that we are trying to target to reduce in terms of calories.

[Lord Krebs (CB)]

My Lords, I declare my interests as listed in the register and I hate to disagree with my noble friend Lady Boycott but, on this occasion, I do. Does the Minister agree with the conclusions of the nutritional advisory committee of the five Nordic countries, published on 20 June 2023? It says:

“The … committee’s view is that the current categorization of foods as ultra-processed foods does not add to the already existing food classifications and recommendations”.


Does he also agree with the Brazilian scientists who coined the notion of ultra-processed food when they say that their classification is a good way to understand the food system, but not individual foods?

[Lord Markham (Con)]

Yes, the noble Lord is absolutely correct and makes the point that I have been trying to make but far more eloquently; I thank him. That is precisely the point. Some ultra-processed foods are very unhealthy and we should be doing everything we can to discourage them. Others, such as wholemeal bread or baked beans, are totally fine.

Childhood Obesity

Lord Krebs Excerpts

Monday 17th October 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Markham (Con)]

I thank and agree with my noble friend. He is correct. The cost of obesity to the NHS amounts to around £6.5 billion a year; obviously, this is in addition to not being very good for the people concerned in terms of healthy lifestyles. That is why we have a programme of action, as I outlined. This is something we feel it is important for us to get on with, not just for children but, as the noble Lord referred to, to help adults in this area as well.

[Lord Krebs (CB)]

My Lords, last year, the Government published a report on the promotion of food. I shall quote a few sentences from it:

“Although promotions appear to be mechanisms to help consumers save money, data shows that they increase consumer spending by encouraging people to buy more than they intended to buy in the first place … The latest data shows that we buy almost 20% more as a direct result of promotions. Consumers typically do not stockpile these extra purchases to take advantage of the lower price, instead they increase their consumption.”


It went on to say that the latest data

“shows that shoppers who buy more of their food and drink on promotion tend to purchase more HFSS”—

high-fat, sugar and salt—

“products, in greater volume, and are more likely to be overweight or living with obesity.”

Does the Minister agree with this analysis, published by his Government last year? If so, what are the Government doing about it in policy terms?

[Lord Markham (Con)]

I thank the noble Lord. The figures to which he refers are a mixture of the pricing of these so-called “buy one, get one free”-type promotions and their positioning in a supermarket. In fact, the data shows that as much as a 50% increase in sales can be driven by where these promotions are placed in a supermarket. That is why the focus now is on what changes will be made on 1 October to reduce the purchase of a lot of the types of food groups we are talking about by moving them away from prominent areas. Once we see the results of those changes, we will be in a position to review some of the pricing and promotions to which the noble Lord refers.

Food-related Crime

Lord Krebs Excerpts

Monday 22nd February 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

I am enormously grateful to the noble Baroness for her support in this matter. I reassure her that we are focused and working on it, and I will bring forward an update as soon as I reasonably can.

[Lord Krebs (CB) [V]]

My Lords, detecting food crime often depends on trading standards officers and public analysts. Does the Minister consider that the current number of trading standards officers and public analysts is adequate to give the public confidence that food crime is being detected in a timely and comprehensive way? Could he also tell us what progress has been made on detecting honey fraud? It is estimated that about 15% of honey on sale in Europe is adulterated, and it is now over a year since Defra held a seminar on detection methods.

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

The noble Lord undoubtedly knows that, since January 2021, the FSA has been running a 12-month pilot of the new model of working with local authorities on trading standards in order to improve the work between the FSA and trading standards to address any gaps there may be in that collaboration. On the noble Lord’s question about honey fraud, I completely endorse his shock and outrage that the honey that we buy in the supermarket may be adulterated. It is sometimes said that there is 10 times the amount of manuka honey on sale than could ever be possibly made by the bees of New Zealand. There are challenges on nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy allocations, as the noble Lord undoubtedly knows. We are working extremely hard with both Defra and the Laboratory of the Government Chemist to put pressure on international authorities to align the data needed in order to investigate honey more closely.