The science of ultra processed food demands urgent action

The most consequential story for public policy in today's media is a scientific study produced by Harvard. Michigan and Duke universities. The message is stark and cannot be ignored – Ultra Processed Foods (UPFs) have more in common with cigarettes than they do with fruit and vegetables.

The researchers point out that the fact that UPCs are engineered for addiction and maximum consumption and that their consumption is linked to a widespread range of significant health damage. The authors argue that this is much more like the outcomes from tobacco products than eating food we would identify as natural.

In fact the study goes further than that in the comparison; it identifies the processes involved in the production of UPFs as themselves being similar to the processes used in the manufacture of cigarettes. In particular the practice of actively targeting reward pathways in the brain and measuring optimum results based on dosage is derived directly from tobacco processing.

The authors go on to compare the use of apparently health-based claims on UPFs ('low fat', 'sugar free') to the 'health washing' that took place with cigarette manufacture when the first science on the harms of smoking was emerging, such as the inclusion of largely ineffective 'filters' to cigarettes.

Perhaps as telling as anything in this study is that participants who consume large amounts of UPFs themselves describe their reactions to the food in terms of addiction and compulsion, with some directly making the comparison with tobacco addiction and some explicitly saying they have replaced tobacco addiction with UPF addiction.

It should be noted that there is some criticism of this study. Some raise the question of whether UPFs are intrinsically addictive (there is a withdrawal effect from nicotine which is inherent and pharmacological) or whether they simply exploit learned behaviour pathways.

Another criticism questions whether the primary harm is done by the contents of the UPF, the displacement of different contents from traditional food or some combination of both. Part of the impact of UPFs is almost certainly to do with lack of natural dietary fibre. Cigarettes do not displace other nutrients so the comparator isn't direct.

But something important has to be read into both this study and the critiques of it. No-one in this debate is questioning whether UPFs are making us ill and killing us. The science and the data on that are conclusive. They are. UPFs have almost as negative a health impact as smoking cigarettes. The only remaining question is why?

That is why this study is the most consequential news story for public policy because it requires that policy-makers pay attention. Like climate science, the UPF industry will take studies like this and use them to claim that the science is 'contested' or that 'we don't know for sure'.

That is not what this study and any critique of it mean at all. The correct reading is that we now know the dangers in UPFs and they are substantial, consistent and measurable. We also know a number of the mechanisms for why these negative health outcomes occur, though we don't know for sure the exact importance of each.

We know that this is intentional on the part of manufacturers and we know enough about the manufacturing process to understand how the negative characteristics of UPFs are achieved and maximised. We also know what happens if they displace dietary nutrients that we know to be essential to human health.

In other words it took us 400 years to learn as much about the harm of tobacco as we have learned in about a decade of research on UPFs, which means we now know significantly more about the harms of UPFs than we did about the harms of tobacco at the point at which stringent tobacco regulation was introduced.

But this situation is much worse. UPFs make up two thirds of the calories consumed in wealthy countries with toddlers getting half their calories from UPFs but catching up to the rest of the population by the age of seven. Tobacco addiction was never that widespread.

Yet we are continuing to debate and crack down on tobacco products while we have barely taken a step to regulate UPFs. In fact we barely produce adequate health guidance; the UK Government still does not offer guidance on avoiding UPFs and last year did a U-turn on action on UPFs under pressure from industry lobbyists.

The failure to take action is nothing short of anti-science and the victims are the nation's children. That failure will one day be considered one of the great political scandals of our time.