Ultra-processed foods (UPFs) have more in common with cigarettes than with fruit or vegetables, and require far tighter regulation, according to a new report.
UPFs and cigarettes are engineered to encourage addiction and consumption, researchers from three US universities said, pointing to the parallels in widespread health harms that link both.
UPFs, which are widely available worldwide, are food products that have been industrially manufactured, often using emulsifiers or artificial colouring and flavours. The category includes soft drinks and packaged snacks such as crisps and biscuits.
There are similarities in the production processes of UPFs and cigarettes, and in manufacturers’ efforts to optimise the “doses” of products and how quickly they act on reward pathways in the body, according to the paper from researchers at Harvard, the University of Michigan and Duke University.
One of the authors, Prof Ashley Gearhardt of the University of Michigan, a clinical psychologist specialising in addiction, said her patients made the same links: “They would say, ‘I feel addicted to this stuff, I crave it – I used to smoke cigarettes [and] now I have the same habit but it’s with soda and doughnuts. I know it’s killing me; I want to quit, but I can’t.’”
Bread literally is a UPF most of the time. Not necessarily the fresh baked bread that you get from a bakery, but the manufactured bread that’s slightly less healthy but is much cheaper and more accessible to people in remote or impoverished places.
A lot of ultra-processed foods exist because they’re solving specific problems, and you can’t just ban them without providing a better solution to those problems.
In my part of the world, there’s been alarms raised about growing obesity because of increasingly sedate lifestyles brought upon a lot of entertainment options, but then in poor neighborhoods I often pass by I see a lot of thin kids as malnutrition remains prevalent.