{"id":87725,"date":"2025-11-20T08:14:06","date_gmt":"2025-11-20T08:14:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/?p=87725"},"modified":"2025-11-20T08:14:06","modified_gmt":"2025-11-20T08:14:06","slug":"ultra-processed-food-is-not-a-dietary-choice-it-is-a-political-economy-problem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/2025\/11\/20\/ultra-processed-food-is-not-a-dietary-choice-it-is-a-political-economy-problem\/","title":{"rendered":"Ultra-processed food is not a dietary choice. It is a political economy problem."},"content":{"rendered":"

There is a sentence in The<\/em> Lancet<\/i>\u2019s<\/a> new series on ultra-processed foods (UPFs), published this week, that makes clear exactly what the issue with them is. It says that UPFs are;<\/p>\n

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emblematic of a food system increasingly controlled by transnational corporations that prioritise corporate profit ahead of public health.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

That is not a nutritional observation. It is a political economy diagnosis. And it is one that governments have been unwilling to make for far too long, although the need to do so has been apparent; I have been discussing this issue for some time.<\/p>\n

Let me spell this out then: we do not eat UPFs because we lack willpower. We eat them because corporate power has redesigned our food environment to make UPFs unavoidable, cheap, aggressively marketed, and engineered to undermine our capacity to choose better. That is the heart of the matter. We are living with a food system that is designed to undermine our health in pursuit of corporate profit, and that is exactly what it is achieving at enormous costs to us and the state.<\/p>\n

This needs some unpacking, as the issue is deeply significant, not least for the future health of the people of this country and the ever-growing costs of the NHS, which UPFs are fuelling.<\/p>\n

What UPFs really are<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Lancet<\/i> series repeats what many public health researchers have been warning for a decade: UPFs are not simply \u201cfoods that are high in sugar or fat\u201d. They are industrial formulations built from commodity crops like maize, wheat, soy and palm oil, which are processed into extracts, powders, stabilisers and additives, and then combined with colourings and flavourings, before being packaged in plastic and sold as food, when they are nothing like that which we ate only a few decades ago, and throughout human life until then. This is not food; it is an industrial product designed for shelf life, transport efficiency, and profit margin. And our bodies are not adapted to survive on them. That is the problem.<\/p>\n

Critics claim that the UPF category is too broad because it includes fortified cereals and flavoured yoghurts (which, in my opinion, are most definitely UPFs). But this misses the point entirely. UPFs rarely exist as individual products: they form dietary patterns. Once they enter a household, they displace real food. The harm to health arises from the system. And the system is now dominant.<\/p>\n

In the UK, around half of all calories consumed come from UPFs. In many poorer countries, consumption is rising at alarming rates as global corporations push aggressively into newly \u201cliberalised\u201d markets. Ultra-processing is becoming the world\u2019s default diet.<\/p>\n

The political economy of engineered diets<\/b><\/p>\n

What the Lancet<\/i> shows is that UPF consumption is not an accident. It is the result of concentrated corporate power.<\/p>\n

A tiny handful of transnational corporations \u2013 Nestl\u00e9, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Unilever and a few others \u2013 dominate the global market. Their business model depends on turning cheap commodities into branded substances with high retail margins. And because their profits depend on volume, they market UPFs with relentless intensity, often targeting children, women, and lower-income households.<\/p>\n

They also make them addictive, to the extent that they are designed so that they do not satisfy the craving for food for long, leading to excess consumption when that is not required, with the obesity epidemic being the inevitable result.<\/p>\n

The consequences are profound:<\/p>\n