What even is ultra-processed food anymore? Can’t we just be ultra sensible? - David Behrens

Now that the supermarkets have run out of mince pies and stocked up on Easter eggs, our thoughts will turn to how we’re ever going to work off the weight we put on over Christmas.

I had thought of making a new year’s resolution to cut out all the ultra-processed foods I’m not supposed to eat. But the truth is, I don’t know which ones they are… and neither does anyone else.

Because, aren’t all foods processed? Processed peas must be; it says so on the tin. But unless you work for Batchelors, you probably have no idea what the process actually is. I know I haven’t.

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So what’s the difference between processing and ultra-processing? The academic reports I’ve read have made me none the wiser; all they’ve done is warn me that if I eat the wrong things I’ll be fat and dead, in that order.

A loaf of sliced white bread. PIC: Peter Byrne/PA WireA loaf of sliced white bread. PIC: Peter Byrne/PA Wire
A loaf of sliced white bread. PIC: Peter Byrne/PA Wire

Scientists at the University of São Paulo in Brazil are to blame for all this. It was they who invented the designation ‘ultra-processed’ as the highest of four categories that encompass everything we eat. But something must have got lost in translation from the original Portuguese because it includes items which to you or I appear completely natural – like bread and porridge.

I eat porridge most mornings and the packet lists the ingredients as 100 per cent oats. So unless you count windmills as industrial food processors I can’t see why they’ve found their way onto a Brazilian hit list.

Bread, likewise, contains mostly flour, water and yeast. People have been baking it since the stone age and no-one has told them before that they should stop. Not even when they started using electric mixers.

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It’s when you deviate from the standard recipes that the alchemy goes awry. Adding syrup to your porridge makes it processed, in São Paulo terms. And when supermarkets put it in plastic pots with flavourings and dried milk so that all you need to add is boiling water, it becomes ultra-processed.

But honestly, is that so terrible? Dried skimmed milk is what the wartime government distributed to keep everyone healthy when the real stuff was rationed. No-one accused Lord Woolton and his food ministry of ultra-processing.

Bread, too, is a staple of a healthy diet, even when it’s baked by Morrisons and not by your mum. It’s true that in the interests of making it last longer they put in stuff you wouldn’t find in your own cupboard (the ingredients of a £1 ‘farmhouse loaf’ include calcium propionate and diglycerides of fatty acids) but it’s still just bread. Yet those extras have caused cheap supermarket loaves to be written off as ultra-processed.

There’s a difference, though, between food that’s been processed and that which is plain junk and you don’t need a Brazilian scientist to tell one from the other. Bread is good for you. Some loaves are better than others but no bread is bad unless you eat nothing else. The same goes for porridge and just about every other edible substance.

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It’s not new, this business of adulterating food with chemicals and inferior additives. I wince when I think of the junk I ate 50 years ago as a young adult newly away from home. Tinned burgers in gravy made with unspecified meat that must have been 50 per cent gristle – yes, please. I’d have been better off eating Winalot straight from the tin.

But our national diet was more constrained in those days. People cooked meals from scratch because microwaves hadn’t been invented. If you wanted convenience food you added an Oxo cube. I was 17 before I saw a pizza and only then because I was in America at the time.

It’s undeniable that sections of the food production industry have taken liberties with what they sell us. Bags of artificial colours and flavours masquerading as snacks; burgers soaked in saturated, addictive fat; chicken nuggets that are 90 per cent nugget and 10 per cent chicken: if these are all you eat you will grow fat and that’s all there is to it.

The most important ingredient in any diet is common sense – and if they can’t see that in São Paulo they’re Brazil nuts. The health minister Wes Streeting should have realised it last month when he announced a ban on junk food adverts before 9pm and included porridge. It’s not oats that are bad for us – it’s his government.

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It’s also why two British universities have said we should learn more about ultra-processed food before we tell people to stop eating it.

So as my new year’s resolution I’m going to stop worrying about it all. I’ll cut out chocolate Hobnobs and other obvious causes of weight gain – at least until I lapse in early February – but I’m not reevaluating my entire diet on the basis of a scientist’s spreadsheet. If I could survive those tinned burgers I’ll survive anything.

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