TEN DONUTS OR FIVE APPLES?

 

For an equal sum of money, you can get ten donuts, but only five apples (half as many). If you opt for the donuts, you get a lot more calories.

But not all calories are created equal. Apples, a fresh fruit, contain fibre and vitamins, while donuts, an ultra-processed food, are full of saturated fats and chemically processed ingredients.

Even though apples are healthier for you, you'll have to eat more of them (three apples) to get the same number of calories as one donut. And it will cost you about half the price more.

The same goes for fresh strawberries, which by the way are usually more expensive out of season (springtime or early summer, depending on the climate), and ultra-processed strawberry jams and preserves (which are way cheaper than fresh strawberries all year round). Not to mention that genuine handmade strawberry preserves cost way more than ultra-processed ones.

Which means the cost-effective choice is not usually the nutritionally-sound one.

Then, why are fresh ingredients and fresh products (like meats, fish, seafood, eggs, fruit, veg, dairy) more expensive? Is it because they have a shorter shelf life? Because they take more effort to produce? For both of these reasons?

Government subsidies also play a role in this price difference; governments do not subsidize leafy greens in the same (huge) way that they subsidize wheat, soy, and corn; three crops that make up a lot of ultra-processed food, so products full of high-fructose corn syrup and soybean oil have an unfair advantage. When it comes to cost, the less nutritious foods will win out.

There's also the time factor: cooking at home with fresh ingredients takes more time than purchasing or making ultra-processed food (think cup noodles or canned soup, Knorr risotto...), which is done in up to five minutes.

Cream o' Galloway vanilla ice cream appears to be made from the same ingredients that you might use at home: milk, cream, sugar, skimmed milk powder, egg yolk, vanilla essence. 

That's great, but the result is that the product can't be sold nationwide. Real ice cream is less tolerant of all that transporting around.

The ingredients used in Cream o' Galloway vanilla ice cream are also reflected in the price: £3.60 for 500ml. That's about 14 times more expensive than, for example, Ms Molly's Vanilla, exclusive to Tesco, which is sold nationwide and £1 for two litres. 

Unsurprisingly, Ms Molly uses very different ingredients: reconstituted skimmed milk concentrate, partially reconstituted whey powder (milk), glucose syrup, sugar, dextrose, palm stearin, palm oil, palm kernel oil, emulsifier (mono- and diglycerides of fatty acids), stabilisers (guar gum, sodium alginate), flavouring, colours (carotenes).

According to Paul, many of these – palm stearin, palm kernel oil, the reconstituted milks, the emulsifiers – are simply mimicking real and expensive ingredients such as milk, cream, and eggs. This molecular replacement is key to all UPF (ultra-processed food).

Curiosidad del día: el aceite de palma que hay en la Nutella/Nocilla, en la crema de cacahuete, en las galletas... ha sido procesado (refinado, blanqueado, hidrogenado, privado de su sabor) para que dure mucho más y pueda ser usado en más alimentos. En resumen, lo han desnaturalizado.

Palm oil is an interesting example because you’ll see that on many ingredient lists and of course, it is a traditional food. I’ve worked a lot in West and Central Africa, and if you crush a palm nut and eat it, you get this extraordinary spicy bright red oil.

The palm oil that’s in our chocolate spreads, in our peanut butter, in our bread and biscuits is refined, bleached, deodorized, hydrogenated and inter-esterified, in order to take it from that spicy red flavourful oil that spoils quite quickly into an absolutely solid commodity fat that’s interchangeable with anything from chicken fat to beef, soy to butter to any of the other solid fats that we can make out of palm oils. So, yes, we don’t label food accurately. I think that’s fair to say.

So when you’re in these Big Food companies, many of the people at the companies want to do things differently. And I give an example of Emmanuel Faber at Danone who I believe sincerely wanted to make Danone a company that was better for the environment and better for people’s health. He was removed very rapidly by activist investors.

So there’s this trap, this loop of kind of late capitalism, where huge asset funds own these companies and drive these behaviors that generate profit at the expense of everything else. The people who can make a choice aren’t the people in the food companies, they’re not in control. Governments can and doctors can choose. We have signed up to obligations to our patients and the population in general, we’re very clear, we are paid not by those people. I make good money working as a doctor, I can pay all my bills, and so we do have the freedom to say, “I’m not actually going to take money from tobacco, alcohol, food or Pharma” and yet we do.

Ultra-processed food is part of a financialised food system whose purpose is profit. For example, it incentivises squeezing every last sellable ingredient out of things that aren’t even grown for human consumption: soy protein isolate, corn syrup and modified starches all come from crops farmed at vast scale.

UPF dominates our food landscape by winning the global race for money. It harnesses factory farming, industrially fractionates whole foods into substances that are modified and reassembled, produces edible products that are low-cost, convenient, very tasty, and have a long shelf life. These are distributed through the global supply chain, elbowing out less processed and less profitable foods from people’s diets.

“How UPF hacks our brains.” Some of the highlights: since UPF is soft, calorie-dense, and convenient, we eat more of it than we would of other foods.

Having evolved in a competition for market share, UPF mismatches taste signals and nutrition content in ways that drive excessive consumption. The additives in UPF affect our satiety system directly and, for some people UPF is addictive, resulting in unavoidable binges. Healthy or unhealthy eating isn’t about sugar, exercise or willpower, it’s largely about a food system.

So processing is fine and if we eat processed food, most of us should be pretty good at regulating our nutritional intake without an instruction manual. The difficulty that’s been reported since the 1920s is if we eat ultra-processed food, it has been designed in a way that gets around our satiety mechanisms particularly.

There followed, after the Great War, a new era of synthetic food chemistry, in which such ingredients helped to make mass-produced food cheaper and more appealing to the palate, as well as longer-lasting and easier to transport. For cost-conscious, time-poor consumers, these innovations were a godsend. But processed foods, we now know, also seem to drive excessive consumption.

The food industry — by recruiting compliant scientists, funding studies, pushing clever marketing messages and influencing policy — has been able to cook up a self-serving narrative that shifts the blame for the harm their products cause. It is not crisps and fizzy drinks that make us fat, we are deceived into believing, but our own shortcomings in the form of sedentary lifestyles and feeble willpower.

The problem of UPF is systemic, and that the most important solutions must come from governments, scientists, and doctors holding the food industry to account.

Policymakers, doctors and scientists need to see themselves as regulators, and the rules of the road have to be set by governments. Yet, surprisingly, the aim of policy should not be for people to eat less UPF, but rather to have a better set of food choices.