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Junk Science Week: Terence Corcoran — Non-processed food science Back to video

The latest food alarm spreading through the media claims that ultra-processed foods — thousands of items from ice cream to doughnuts, flavoured yogurt, potato chips, pizza, cereals, frozen lasagna, sausages, biscuits and margarine — are health threats. They are known as UPFs, and today’s leading public agitator against them is a British physician, Chris van Tulleken, who is now promoting a new book provocatively titled Ultra-Processed People: Why We Can’t Stop Eating Food that Isn’t Food.

Over the past few weeks commentaries by van Tulleken, in which he aligns processed food producers with tobacco companies, have appeared in The Guardian in London and the Globe and Mail in Canada, supported by an enthusiastic review in The Financial Times. He was also given a 25-minute block of time on CBC Radio.

In Ultra-Processed People, van Tulleken delivers his categorical conclusion that the science is settled. Ultra-processed foods are killing people around the world and the killers are corporations dedicated to making profits. “The science is very clear: The problem isn’t me, or you — it’s the food.” Writing in The Guardian, he said, “food has replaced tobacco as the leading cause of early death globally.” He claims in his book that “you may find it hard to consider UPF as equivalent to cigarettes, but poor diet is linked to more deaths globally than tobacco, high blood pressure or any other health risk.”

But exactly how clear is the science? What does “linked” mean? Any objective survey of the voluminous research into ultra-processed foods (UPFs) suggests their relationship to health is far from conclusive. The causal connections between UPFs and such specific illnesses as cancer, obesity, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and scores of other diseases and mental conditions have never been identified. Instead, the science is grounded in epidemiological methods based on statistical models and volumes of seemingly related data that do not identify direct causes.

The latest example is a new paper in the Journal of Affective Disorders that found a statistical link between UPF and depression. But the qualification is that the research shows only “an association” between UPF and depression, plus many “limitations.” The association was also evident only among depressed people with “very high consumption” of UPFs. Could it be that depression leads people to consume more UPFs rather than vegetables and fresh fruit? Nobody knows.

Another paper just published in The Lancet, “Food Processing and Cancer Risk in Europe,” concludes that the research “suggests” that replacing processed and ultra-processed foods with an equal amount of minimally processed foods “might” reduce the risk of various cancer types.

That kind of step-back into limitations and qualifications runs through all UPF research. Van Tulleken’s claims regarding UPF deaths come from a 2017 paper (funded by the Gates Foundation) that contains dozens of warnings about data “imitations,” the weakness of evidence, and a note that says “the strength of evidence was generally weaker than the strength of evidence” that exists for tobacco.

The best the study could conclude was that poor dietary habits are “associated with” a range of diseases and “can potentially” be a major contributor to non-communicable disease. As for the deaths cited by van Tulleken, the study found that the main contributors to increased deaths related to diet since 1990 were aging populations and increased population growth. More people, in other words, equals more deaths.

Words like “can potentially” and “is associated with” don’t provide the kind of scientific evidence essential to justify sweeping causal statements to justify the major national and global food policy shifts demanded by van Tulleken and other activists pushing for governments to remake the world of food.

The rise of processed foods around the world is acknowledged by scientists to have been a major positive contributor to the global food supply and the environment. An increasingly industrialized food system is highly effective in terms of large-scale production, long product shelf life, lower prices, convenience and microbiological safety.

Despite the benefits, the global adoption of UPFs has been condemned by activists as a destructive “nutrition transition,” a term invented decades ago by Barry Popkin at the University of North Carolina. Popkin is the godfather of the anti-UPF movement, and he now wants to bring in a new transition away from processed foods. “The entire food system must change,” he said in a recent paper, an effort that requires global social purpose-oriented leadership “to stand up against Big Food interests.”

According to Popkin, the global food industry promotes ineffectual policies and obstructs impactful ones. “We must continue to expose such actions. Public health rather than Big Food must lead government actions and generate hope for the future.”

The anti-UPF movement, in other words, is a duplication of the standard ideological campaign. Big Tobacco is the evil model for Big Oil, Big Pharma, Big Food and Big Chem companies. The “just transition” model to eliminate fossil fuels is now to be applied to forms of processed foods via a new “nutrition transition.”

As with the fossil fuel transition, the massive benefits to humanity provided by processed foods and fertilizers are to be replaced by production systems that have either not yet been identified or are known to be more difficult and more costly.

Van Tulleken told a CBC interviewer he opposes a UPF tax. “We mustn’t tax this or ban that,” he said, although his book notes without objection Chile’s tax on certain UPF products. He also references carbon taxes as sound policy to fight climate change.