Ultra-processed food labels

 

From the BBC...

Ultra-processed food should be clearly labelled - study

Ultra-processed foods should be clearly labelled, experts say.

Scientists said the warnings were needed as some ultra-processed foods could fall into the "healthy" green category of the "traffic-light" system.

Is that a problem with the labels or is it the problem with inventing an excessively broad category?

 

UCL senior research fellow and weight-management specialist Dr Adrian Brown told BBC News he had looked at a "meat alternative", for example.

"Generally, it can be considered highly processed - but if you look at front-of-package labelling for energy, fat, saturated fat and sugar, they're all green, which would be considered healthy," he said.

'Meat alternatives' offer a good opportunity to test the UPF theory. Run some trials to find out if they are associated with obesity and/or cancer. If they don't then the claim that UPFs are associated with obesity and cancer (which is made in the BBC article) is false.

The curious thing about the article is that no one is quoted saying that UPFs should be labelled and the only people mentioned consider it to be an open question as to whether UPFs as a category are bad for health. And although the headline seems to quote a study, the only study mentioned in the article has yet to be written.

 

Dr Brown's team at UCL have now begun a trial to see how healthy a UFP-only diet can be, compared with a minimally processed one, and whether guidance should be given to consumers.

"We're putting people on an eight-week diet which meets the government's recommendations for salt, fat, sugar and energy - what is considered healthy - and we're comparing the outcomes of them, related to weight and other changes in terms of health as well," he said.

 

Good stuff. Makes sure it's randomised and that people are given different versions of the same meal this time. Better still, change the methodology and give the control group a diet that is merely processed (not minimally processed or ultra-processed).

As for UPF's alleged relationship to cancer, it's worth reading this response from some scientists to the authors of a study who made that claim recently...

The authors conclude that “our results suggest that higher consumption of UPF increases the risk of cancer and cardiometabolic multimorbidity”, but their data only show that consumption of foods of animal origin and sugary or artificially sweetened beverages is associated with such a risk, which is not surprising.

This indicates that the association between UPF consumption and the risk of multimorbidity would disappear if the data were adjusted not only for the consumption of sugary or artificially sweetened beverages, but also for foods of animal origin at the same time. Indeed, in our opinion, the article underlines the absolute need to return to the evaluation of foods on the basis of their nutritional role (including their nutrient composition, quantities consumed, metabolic effects, etc.) and not on the basis of their degree of processing.

 

 Amen.