THIS morning, I spread a “mechanical mixture” made through “the ingenuity of depraved human genius” on my toast. I’m sure some of you are thinking I must be in the camp that enjoys a certain divisive, brown savoury condiment that is common in the UK (and yes, I do love Marmite!). However, it was simply an emulsion of vegetable oil and water. A processed, more sustainable and healthier alternative to an animal product. In other words, it was margarine and those alarmist words were .
Anxiety about new foods and how they are produced continues today. Public discourse is full of overhyped concerns that “ultra-processed foods” or “UPFs” are demonically unhealthy. But how and where what we eat is made isn’t a proxy for how safe or nutritious it is. Being wrapped in plastic, having more than five ingredients or containing something you can’t pronounce doesn’t tell you if it is good for you. It just tells you where it was (probably) made – in a factory.
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The term “ultra-processed” was first used in 2009 by , a nutritionist. In a 2017 paper, – that the shared experience of cooking was being increasingly lost and people weren’t eating together. He was also seeing rising rates of diabetes and obesity. Keen to identify the root cause of these perceived issues, he homed in on food not made at home, but in factories.
To identify these, he developed a sociopolitical classification scheme. At five paragraphs long, his considers everything from packaging, branding and marketing to types of ingredients, highlighting those for which there are “no domestic equivalents”. It is subjective, using phrases like “many” and “some”, but on the whole it does a fantastic job of telling you if a food was made in a small kitchen or not. Homemade potato wedges or a chocolate cake wouldn’t be classed as UPFs, but store-bought tofu or prepared salad would be.
Herein lies the problem: the UPF categorisation was never designed to group foods on the basis of nutrition. Monteiro states this explicitly, right in the title of his seminal paper: “The issue is not food, nor nutrients, so much as processing”. Despite this, many well-meaning nutrition scientists have attempted to use his framework in studies looking at links between diet and health.
The results are, understandably, bewildering, and to be expected when the category includes everything from salty, oily potato crisps to fibre-rich soya mince.
One particular category I have been researching is in a fierce spotlight: plant-based meats. Just like pork sausages and chicken nuggets, plant-based alternatives are made in factories, so are considered UPFs. But unlike their meat counterparts, they don’t require antibiotics or hormones during production, don’t increase the risk of zoonotic diseases evolving, , have carbon emissions up to 98 per cent lower, need up to and result in 100 per cent fewer animals dying.
And side by side, they are almost always healthier than the processed animal meat products they replace, especially on fat and fibre content. Just compare the labels on the packets next time you are in the supermarket.
Many loud voices are raising concerns, suggesting that all UPFs, and in particular plant-based meats, are “unnatural”, “fake” and “full of chemicals”. We are seeing history repeat itself, and a fear of new foods being invoked all over again. But the science is as clear as the discourse is unclear: diets rich in plant-based fare are better for both people and the planet, factory or no factory.
Jenny Chapman’s on plant-based meat issues was published by the Churchill Fellowship
