Why UPF is Dumb

Some delicious Ultra Processed Foods yesterday. Note that the chips are the only healthy items pictured

THE S-PLAN DIET

I stopped serious blogging a few years back due to other things taking up my time. I’d written a bit about Ultra Processed Foods, but back then I considered it little more than another stupid fad diet. It was like the Clean Eating Instagram trend from 2016 had grown up, gone to school, made a few powerful friends and got some references.

Roll on to 2024, UPF is everywhere and it feels like the world has gone mad. We currently have a children’s TV presenter presenting a stupid diet fad as the Royal Institution Christmas Lecture. I recently sat through a talk at a major UK University where the same TV presenter and some of his friends dismissed the work of some of this country’s most dedicated nutrition scientists as corrupted by industry, and a room full of people nodded along. Imagine working your entire life to improve the academic understanding of the relationship between food and health, and a smug-faced media-wanker, best known for presenting Operation Ouch, craps on your reputation to help sell his stupid fad diet book. That’s the state of serious nutrition discourse right now.

The UPF classification system is dumb and here’s why. Let’s say I was thinking about the relationship between food and health and decided that the real issue was not the nutritional composition of foods, but what letter they begin with. In a moment of inspiration, I decide that all foods beginning with the letter S are bad and should be avoided.

You’d rightly think I was a colossal fucking idiot. But imagine if I had a load of money and resources to back up my claim. I could pay people to trawl through huge dietary databases looking for associations between foods starting with S and ill health. And I can pretty much guarantee that I would find them. Because if I include salt, sugar, sausages, saturated fat and salami in my cursed S-Foods list, then I think I would find some pretty good associations with poor health outcomes. I could publish study after study, mining various nutrition databases, discovering links between high S-Food consumption and cardiovascular disease, obesity, cancer, high blood pressure and diabetes.

People would say that not all foods beginning with S are bad, and that we should exclude things like sandwiches, sushi and salad from the S-foods because they are not associated with ill health. But I would just claim that those people are in the pay of Big-S, and that the overall S-Food associations are too strong to be ignored.

Others might claim that the S-Foods Classification System (TM of Angry Chef Industries) is unclear. Should Spaghetti come under pasta? Should raw tuna be classed as Sashimi? But I would just claim that they are obfuscating, corrupted by a cartel of Big-S Corporations, conspiring to hide the truth. See the bigger picture sheeple.

People would rightly think I was a loon. But that, in essence, is exactly what has happened with Ultra Processed Foods. A broad and arbitrary category of foods has been drawn up that includes several things that we know to be associated with poor health outcomes. It includes processed meats, which are associated with small but significant increase in the risk of colorectal cancer when consumed in large quantities. It includes sugar sweetened beverages, which are known to promote excess calorie consumption when drunk in large amounts. It includes strong alcoholic spirits, which are not an ideal breakfast option. It is hardly surprising that a broad category of food that includes these things is associated with poor outcomes.

In fact, when sugar sweetened beverages and processed meats are removed from the UPF classification, a lot of the associations with negative health outcomes fall away. And when many UPF foods are studied in isolation, they are associated with positive health outcomes. Wholegrains, fibre, sources of plant protein, and ice cream all show consistent associations with good health.

Wait, what? Ice Cream?

Yes. Don’t ask. Nutritional epidemiologists don’t like to talk too much about that one, but the association is strong and consistent, perhaps indicating that making health decisions on nutritional epidemiology alone is a foolish path.

When anyone criticises the UPF classification system, suggesting that it demonises perfectly sensible food choices for no good reason, they are dismissed as industry shills. When anyone goes on to point out that the UPF system also gives other foods a free pass, including everything produced by the trillion-dollar meat and dairy industries, the UPF people whistle nervously and change the subject.

No one is seriously suggesting that all manufactured food is harmless, which is presumably what a shill would be trying to do. It’s just that the UPF system is rubbish at identifying which foods we should and shouldn’t try and reduce the consumption of. It’s so bad that the biggest advocates, especially those that coincidentally make vast amounts of money selling UPF books, media appearances and speaking fees, try to discredit nutrition academics rather than engage in a discussion of the science.

One of the problems with nutrition science is that it often does not comply with middle class prejudices about food. There is no sound, science-based reason why a six quid loaf of artisan sourdough is better for you that a cheap own label sliced white. The saturated fat in organic, grass-fed Aberdeen Angus is just a bad for you as the same type of saturated fat in a cheap frozen burger. The fancy bacon you brought from the farm shop probably has more salt and preservatives than a standard Tesco Value one.

This is not what middle class food commenters want to hear, so the UPF classification system has been music to their ears. It allows them to eat expensive, indulgent foods and blame failing population health on the choices of poor people. Or more accurately blame evil corporations, who can trick the stupid, uneducated poor into making bad choices, but not the smug middle-class wankers, who are wise to their tricks.  All that is needed is to truly believe you are better than everyone else is to accept that boring nutrition committees who disagree with you are filled with corrupt shills.

I want a world where people are guided towards better food choices. For that world to exist, we have to classify foods in some way. UPF is just a terrible way of doing it, and simply dismissing naysayers as corrupt is an incredibly lazy way of forming an argument. However, help is at hand. My trademarked S-Food Classification System will allow us to…..

TBC.

The S-Food Classification system is a trademark of Angry Chef Industries. The Angry Chef is available for talks, media appearances, S-Food training sessions and high-profile lectures at scientific institutes. Fees on application. Terms and Conditions Apply.