Are ultra-processed foods really so bad?

Last week saw a flurry of media reports, of whose headlines one of the worst preceded one of the best reports. ‘Eating too many ultra-processed foods has been linked to a higher risk of early death,’ barked the Telegraph – but went on to explain carefully and fairly a ground-breaking report. Other broadsheets opted for the easy option: big report, ultra-processed food, death.

The report caught my eye because I’ve been consistently sceptical about sensationalist books and statements demonising in wholesale terms the consumption of foods categorised, in pseudo-scientific language, as ‘ultra-processed’. I question the usefulness of the category. Food-type blaming can be a comforting evasion of a simple truth: that overeating makes you fat and unhealthy. Instead, we’re told food manufacturers are to blame. Telling people that obesity and ill-health are somebody else’s fault sells books and newspaper articles. But what if this area of knowledge is a house built on sand?

So I read the whole Harvard report, usefully set out in the British Medical Journal. Its findings are almost grotesquely inconsistent with those headlines. The report pours a bucket of cold (if academically phrased) water on generalised and simplistic linkages between ultra-processed food (UPF) and ill-health. (Here I should state that I have no vested interest in defending any of this often unwholesome stuff, nor the remotest association with the food industry.)

In summary, the Harvard report found an astonishingly weak link (4 per cent) between heavy intake of UPF and reduced longevity; and when processed meats, dairy and high sugar content were subtracted from the equation, there was no link at all. Nor was there any link with cancers or heart disease. In fact a good deal of UPF, for instance nut-based, wholegrain cereal-based and even wholegrain bread, turns out to be positively life-prolonging.