Category: Substack

Does anyone still remember the Lancet’s Ultra-Processed Food series? At the time, it caused some minor media attention – and the authors dismissed most of the criticism. As one of the authors – Professor van Tulleken – said on BBC Radio 4 Today (transcript from the BBC): “I should say these comments that are coming

How often do you eat processed, packaged, or fast food that is not made from fresh ingredients? e.g., McDonalds, Dominos, microwave meals, processed canned food, deli meats/cold cuts, noodles in a cup, packaged crisps/chips, sweets/candies, sodas/fizzy drinks’ ‘Several times a day’, ‘Once a day’, ‘A few times a week’; ‘A few times a month’; and

Menu labels are supposed to help us make healthier choices. They are policy in action – mandatory calorie disclosure, salt content warnings, traffic lights and NutriScore. There is just a small problem: they are more often wrong than they are right. We measured the salt content in takeaways from both local shops and major chains.

There is nothing wrong with eating food simply for the enjoyment – food is not exclusively for the nourishment of the body, but also for the nourishment of the soul. Sometimes, a tub of ice cream can make unpleasant news more palatable, while other events call for a celebratory ham. Yet some people seem to

Additives have a very bad reputation. After all, chemicals with incomprehensible names must be dangerous. And who wants to have emulsifiers, preservatives or thickeners in their food anyway? 1 As regular as clockwork, nutritionists and others warn of the inherent dangers of additives and advise that they should be avoided. They often point to some

Food is so much more than just a source of energy and nutrients – and while I’m sure there are some people who consider raw Broccoli 🥦 to be comfort food, for most, this is quite different. A favourite of mine is Linzertorte. Despite its name, it is also quite popular in the part of

I don’t think my opinion about ultra-processed foods is a secret. I’ve written about it ad nauseam. Not only is there no evidence that categorising food by processing is superior to the old-fashioned idea of using food composition – shoehorning in a new category distracts from many of the real problems we currently face in

Imagine you are eating an apple. It could be a Bramley, a Braeburn or a Blenheim Orange – and could be fresh from the tree or it could have been stored for months in a controlled atmosphere. Perhaps you like to peel your apple carefully, core it and only eat carefully carved slices – or

Last week, the Lancet published a series of papers on Ultra-Processed Foods and the alleged dangers they pose. It is a complicated topic that ranges from basic physiology (do these foods really harm health) to social questions (how do ultra-processed foods and industry affect our food system). There has obviously been a lot of media

It it no secret that I have little faith in the many stories about the dangers of ultra-processed foods – I’ve written about this before. One reason is the poor quality of the definition: it is so ambiguous that it can’t easily be explained to the general public, and even experts seem to be unable