A new report by the influential “nudge” body Nesta has urged the government against expanding its obesity strategy to include specific targets against ultra-processed foods, warning it risks “undermining” the war on obesity.
Nesta has produced figures that show up to 80% of UPF categories, including products such as confectionery, morning goods, cakes and crisps, are already covered by the government’s 2004 nutrient profiling model.
It analysed Kantar Worldpanel data covering more than 3.3 million transactions from a leading UK supermarket. It found that 64% of UPF calories, under the so-called NOVA classification, came from food categories already classified as HFSS.
However, the figure rose to 80%, including staple foods such as bread and yoghurt that are often UPF but, said Nesta, were not strongly linked to negative health outcomes.
The findings come with leading figures including former food tsar Henry Dimbleby, the House of Lords’ obesity committee and the Food Foundation calling on the government to use its new Food Strategy to extend the scope of the UK’s obesity strategy to include UPF, amid huge media coverage on the subject.
However, Nesta, which along with the Food Foundation is represented on the government’s new Food Strategy Advisory board (FSAB), is strongly urging ministers to reject the calls.
“We argue against shifting to a UPF-based approach, which lacks a strong enough evidence base to guide policy,” it says. “Instead, we advocate for strengthening the existing NPM framework, which offers a practical basis for addressing problems in the food environment now.”
Nesta’s report recognises the “growing body of evidence” that high consumption of UPFs is associated with increased risk of diet-related disease, including obesity, hypertension and diabetes.
But it says the UK should not follow the likes of Belgium and Brazil in introducing new national dietary recommendations against the consumption of UPFs to their national diet, or the likes of Colombia, which has introduced a new UPF tax.
“While some are demanding that policymakers shift their focus to reducing the prevalence of ultra-processed food in our diets, the Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition (SACN) cautions that there is no strong evidence that processing itself causes harm.
“But it’s not clear that these two approaches are really in competition. Most typical ‘junk food’ – chocolate bars, crisps, doughnuts – are classified as unhealthy either way. And too much debate over the details is dangerous: misplaced disagreement only creates space for bad actors to undermine well-supported policies.”
While Nesta admitted there were some limitations to its report, including the figures being for 2021 and from only one supermarket, it said it was unlikely the market had shifted substantially.
And it was confident the large scale of the Kantar figures provided selected sales across the sector.
“For some people, the concept of ultra-processed foods has become a new tool to consider the healthiness of the food they are purchasing,” said Nesta deputy director of healthy life, Dr John Barber. “As a result, a growing number of prominent figures are now suggesting that ultra-processed foods should be regulated. This would mean replacing or changing the current approach, where food and drink are regulated according to a defined nutrient profile model, which includes how much fat, salt and sugar they contain.
“We wanted to understand if there would be a benefit in regulating ultra-processed food too or even instead of the current approach. Our research found that there is strong overlap between the unhealthy products included by the two definitions, meaning a majority of ultra-processed foods are already captured in existing measures intended to reduce sales of unhealthy products, such as advertising restrictions.
“In fact, some food that is generally considered to be affordable and nutritious – such as bread and yoghurt – is categorised as ultra-processed. We found that when you exclude these food staples from our analysis that the overlap of unhealthy foods was even greater.
“Ultimately, the evidence is just not there at present for ultra-processed food as a category to be used more broadly in regulation. For that, we should stick to definitions that we know work and get on with getting more ambitious policies in place to tackle the obesity crisis as soon as possible.
“To really help people who want to choose healthier food, the government will need to step in and get retailers to agree targets for the healthiness of the average basket of food sold, using tried and tested nutrient profiling models.”
However, Dimbleby has launched a new call on ministers to declare war on UPF, with new taxes and a total ban on advertising.
He told the Food Foundation’s Food Industry Investor Summit on Friday that food companies were “battling it out to sell food that will kill us” and warned that it would be impossible to stop harms from UPF without regulation.
“The government needs to break this cycle and make it less attractive to sell this food by taxing and banning advertising,” he said.
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