Ultra-processed food (UPF) is directly linked to 32 harmful effects to health, including a higher risk of heart disease, cancer, type 2 diabetes, adverse mental health and early death, according to the world’s largest review of its kind.
The report is here.
Effectively, anything a step up from a raw turnip kills you. Our attitude is rather different, eating only raw turnips would make one wish for death - we all die so why not enjoy the food while we’re here? Yes, we know, not in accord with the world’s currently puritanical cast but there we are.
Given that there’s no good nor useful definition of UPF (this one here includes “cakes” although they’re not, actually, UPF at all but they’re enjoyable so they’re on the list) we do tend to think this is simply a confected hysteria.
However, our real complaint here is the standard of evidence being used. For example:
However, Dr Chris van Tulleken, an associate professor at University College London and one of the world’s leading UPF experts, said the findings were “entirely consistent” with a now “enormous number of independent studies which clearly link a diet high in UPF to multiple damaging health outcomes including early death”.
“We have good understanding of the mechanisms by which these foods drive harm,” he added. “In part it is because of their poor nutritional profile – they are often high in saturated fat, salt and free sugar.
But the way they are processed is also important – they’re engineered and marketed in ways which drive excess consumption – for example they are typically soft and energy dense and aggressively marketed usually to disadvantaged communities.”
The bloke with a best selling book claiming that UPF is killing us all is used as independent proof of the fact that UPF is killing us all. And then there’s this:
In a linked editorial, academics from Brazil said UPFs were “often chemically manipulated cheap ingredients” and “made palatable and attractive by using combinations of flavours, colours, emulsifiers, thickeners and other additives”.
They added: “It is now time for UN agencies, with member states, to develop and implement a framework convention on ultra-processed foods analogous to the framework on tobacco.”
That editorial is here. “Carlos A Monteiro, professor,” Ah. Carlos is the guy who invented the very idea that UPF is killing us all.
It’s possibly necessary to be slightly delicate here, but two folk who are heavily invested - to be that delicate - in the idea that UPF is Bad, M’Kay? are to be used as independent proof of the idea that UPF is Bad, M’Kay?
We are less than impressed by that standard of evidence to be honest with you.
Especially since this is the proof being used to insist that the United Nations should be put in charge of banning cake and insisting we all subsist upon raw turnips. To be fair we cannot think of any level of evidence that would convince is of that. If people desire to eat cake until they pop like a weenie on an overheated grill then good luck to them - it’s their path from cradle to grave, not anyone else’s. We are, after all, liberals around here. But even so we really do think that perhaps these puritans should be putting just that little bit more effort into independent and convincing evidence.