Let's take lessons from Brazil's crusade against processed food

Let’s all eat like Brazilians. No, I’m not recommending another bikini body diet, but the latest Brazilian Ministry of Health’s dietary guidelines, a radical southern hemisphere nutritional cocktail that’s even more refreshing than a stiff Caipirinha.

The full document, with its ample, lucid justification for its various recommendations, boils down to one golden rule: ‘Always prefer natural or minimally processed foods and freshly made dishes and meals to ultra-processed foods.’

If that’s not crystal-clear enough, here’s further elaboration: ‘Limit the use of processed foods’ and ‘avoid ultra-processed foods’. Why? Ingredients and techniques used in the manufacture of such products, it quite correctly points out, ‘unfavourably alter the nutritional composition of the foods from which they are derived’.

What sanity. This is exactly what our own government should be telling us. Forget measuring macronutrients and counting calories. It couldn’t be clearer that official UK healthy eating advice, as enshrined in NHS Choices’ discredited, bankrupt Eatwell plate, doesn’t and can’t work because it dodges the main driver of obesity: increased consumption of processed food.

No government here has had the vision or the bottle to challenge the power of food manufacturers, to tell citizens that these companies’ products are slowly killing us. Instead they settle for a comfort zone of dishonest homilies: no such thing as bad foods, only bad diets etc.

Thanks to this lazy fudge, the Eatwell plate includes a can of cola, as though this disastrous product really was a legitimate daily component in a state-endorsed diet. Our dietetic establishment people with long strings of professional qualifications who sit on august committees have invested in this failed paradigm and continue to lend it credence. Admitting this guidance is hopelessly flawed might lead people to challenge its authority.

But Brazil has told its citizens, loud and clear, that ‘the production, distribution, marketing, and consumption [of processed food] damage culture, social life, and the environment’.

We need such candour here, and in a hurry.

Joanna Blythman is a journalist and author of Swallow This