Ultra-processed food and elite opinion

The least liberal view is the most fashionable view

A chef turned novelist by the name of Simon Wroe has written an article about ultra-processed food (UPF) for the Financial Times. It is abysmal but since it is typical of a mainstream newspaper op-ed on this topic, let’s take a look.

It begins with the usual “we did it with cigarettes so let’s do it with food” rhetoric that bears a striking resemblance to the supposedly fallacious slippery slope.

Picture a world where Tony the Tiger is caged, Ronald McDonald has hung up his clown shoes, and Colonel Sanders is court-martialled; where what’s euphemistically referred to as “less healthy” food is sold without spin. A world without mascots grinning over photo-shopped burgers or whispering, ‘Go on, try it’ through the TV. If we did it to the Marlboro man; we can do it to a cartoon tiger.

It took the UK 50 years from discovering the link between smoking and lung cancer to finally stubbing out cigarette advertising in 2003, and a further 13 years to end branded packaging.

And it took only seven years after branded packaging was ended for the government to make plans for a total, albeit gradual, ban on tobacco. The lesson is that once zealots are in charge, regulation becomes a runaway train with prohibition as the final destination.

Leaving aside the fact that neither advertising bans nor plain packaging are effective public health policies, they were both proposed for tobacco on the basis that cigarettes are a uniquely dangerous product. Concerns about the slippery slope were shouted down by anti-smoking campaigners, such as Deborah Arnott from ASH who said in 2012 that “the ‘domino theory’ i.e. that once a measure has been applied to tobacco it will be applied to other products is patently false. The same argument was used against the ban on tobacco advertising, but 9 years after the tobacco ban in the UK, alcohol advertising is still permitted with no sign of it being prohibited.”

Alcohol advertising is still permitted but, as Mr Wroe acknowledges, advertisements for a huge range of food products will be illegal online and on TV from next October. Not unpredictably, even these extraordinary, world-first restrictions on food marketing are not sufficient for him.

This is not enough. As with cigarettes, it’s time we had honest branding — or no branding — when it comes to fast and ultra-processed food. Obesity costs the NHS £6.5bn a year and is the biggest preventable cause of cancer after smoking. One in four adults in England is obese. More shockingly, a nationwide study this year found nearly one in four children in England’s primary schools are obese by the time they leave, making them more likely to suffer health issues throughout their lives.

I trust that you, dear reader, are aware that childhood obesity statistics in the UK are not worth the paper they are written on and that estimates of the costs of obesity to the NHS are equally worthless when they ignore the savings. This leaves us with the fact that a quarter of adults have a BMI over 30. For some reason, Simon Wroe thinks this is because a few food products have cartoon mascots.

The last six months have seen a flood of reports about ultra-processed foods, both the threat they pose to our health and their ubiquity. Items we might not have considered particularly bad, such as pasta sauces and ready meals, are on the list. UPFs now make up more than half the average British diet.

What, exactly, is it about pasta sauce - and countless other foods that are caught in the ludicrously wide UPF net - that is dangerous? No one has been able to give a convincing answer to this. Some food is more fattening than others but this is due to its nutritional content and calorie density, not the mode of production. The calories in a spaghetti bolognese come overwhelmingly from the spaghetti and the mince - neither of which are ultra-processed - not the sauce. And the sauce itself is mostly tomatoes so you need to have some almost supernatural beliefs about emulsifiers to think that it is the processing that is making you fat.

I’m not suggesting a ban on the food itself. People should be allowed to make their own decisions, good or bad.

That’s what they said about tobacco. We’ve seen how this works, Mr Wroe, and it is you who started with the tobacco analogy, not me. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

Aggressive taxation has some effect. According to new research in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, the UK’s sugar tax halved child consumption in just one year.

That is what a Guardian headline said but it is not what the study said and you have to be extremely gullible to believe it. Wroe disqualifies himself from the conversation for falling for such obvious fake news. And yet even though he thinks that children’s sugar consumption halved in the space of a year due to an 8p tax on a can of pop, it is still not enough for him.

That’s cause for celebration but it’s not the whole story. Soft drinks companies have just replaced sugar with artificial sweeteners. Punitive measures target one ingredient but encourage dishonesty — now drinks are “sugar-free” and “diet” — rather than helping people understand what they’re consuming. The underlying problem remains: our food is lying to us.

What is he even talking about? The drinks no longer contain sugar, so where is the lie in calling them “sugar-free”?

Warnings and labels are a start. Some say counting the calories in mac-n-cheese drains the pleasure out of eating it. Yet it’s nothing we don’t already know. Our shock at having the truth spoken out loud feels like a stagy overreaction.

Calorie labelling has been around for years, including in the out-of-home sector since 2022. Like everything else that has been tried, it has not reduced obesity, presumably because - as Wroe says - it doesn’t tell us anything we don’t already know. We might not know exactly how many calories are in a cream cake, but we know that it’s a lot more than in a stick of celery. If we’re looking to lose weight, that is probably enough.

It’s the branding that needs to go. Ban the cartoon mascots, our false friends. Ban the weasel words and crocodile smiles. Cut the trick photography and attractive packaging. Slap on health warnings where appropriate.

What would a health warning on UPF actually say? A cancer warning on a pack of cigarettes is evidence-based. If you start putting cancer warnings on pasta sauce and sliced bread, you are going to have some litigation on your hands, and rightly so. I suppose you could put a warning on all food saying “Excessive consumption of this product may cause obesity”. That would at least have some comedic value.

Let’s stop deluding ourselves and tacitly allowing others to delude us. Some food is not great for our health, and sometimes that’s what we want. We’re only human. But let’s have all the information, free of manipulation.

I agree, but Mr Wroe’s article is hardly an example of the unvarnished truth. Banning advertising and branding is not going to give us more information, and further taxation aimed at deterring people from buying the food they enjoy surely counts as manipulation.

There is a fundamental unseriousness to op-eds like this. Those who propose major policy interventions need to ask basic questions such as “will this work?”, “what would success look like?”, “what will it cost?” and “what are the unintended consequences?” You get none of this from bandwagon-jumping rent-a-gobs like Mr Wroe. It is all performative. He doesn’t seem to care that previous policies - banning ‘junk food’ ads on children’s TV, taxing sugary drinks, mandatory calorie labelling, etc. - have not reduced obesity and I doubt he will care when the next generation of policies fail to work. He just wants to show that he cares and the best way to do that in counter-Enlightenment Britain is to support the least liberal course of action.

Railing against ‘ultra-processed food’ is the perfect status-signaller in the current year. You don’t need to know anything about nutritional science to do it and it sets you apart from the masses who buy their food from supermarkets and fast food chains. Like all fads, it will pass. In the meantime, if you need further evidence that every institution has been hollowed out and dumbed down, Chris van Tulleken will be giving the Royal Institution’s Christmas lecture this year (about UPFs, of course) because he has “a very strong record of public engagement, particularly with young people”. Maybe they’ll get Mr Tumble to do it next year?