Amid the furore over what should be done to clamp down on ultra-processed foods, a lack of hard scientific facts has consistently blunted calls for action.

So far, ministers have rejected calls for intervention, such as that from the House of Lords’ inquiry last year. It urged ministers to “hold the industry to account” and go “much further” to regulate the tens, if not hundreds of thousands of products in the firing line.

Yet any wise operator in the food industry knows this is not a debate that will simply pack its bags and go away.

Both in the UK and further afield, not least in the US under RFK Jr, those who believe UPFs are killing us continue to marshal their forces.

So with that backdrop, what are we to make of a major government funded “dialogue” with consumers, described by UK Research & Innovation (UKRI) as a “groundbreaking” bid to ensure their views on UPFs are included when drawing up the government’s new National Food Strategy?

Ask the audience

Set up in 2018, UKRI is the country’s biggest public research funder, with a budget of around £10bn per year (which, for added topicality, is around a fifth of the UK’s annual defence budget).

Its backing was seen as key to saving countless lives across the world in developing the Oxford-AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine, and it’s underpinned the UK’s rollout of wind turbines.

But is grilling thousands of random members of the public about UPFs, considering the confusing and inconclusive evidence surrounding them, a good new use of some of those billions? And is it likely to generate anything more than a lot of hot air?

UKRI says the insights of the study will be used to “shape the direction of research” and feed into work already underway in creating the new food strategy.

Thousands of households will be asked to share what they think about UPFs, including how they affect their health as well as their views on governance and regulation.

It will also ask where get their information from and who they “trust” when it comes to UPFs. 

To oversee all this, UKRI has brought together an industry and government oversight group, including key departments, health campaign groups and industry trade bodies such as the FDF. The group, which has already met once, is there to ensure “all voices” feed into the dialogue.

Yet if this vast consultation is to really to feed into the National Food Strategy – which, let’s not forget, campaign groups would like to include a swathe of new HFSS and UPF regulation – it surely must go much further than simply reflecting the public’s current widespread confusion.

While increased consumption of HFSS foods and UPFs has put the UK near the bottom of the European league table for levels of obesity, the UKRI admits products such as wholemeal bread and fish fingers find themselves being unfairly demonised.

Food for thought

As for who the public trusts, the food industry is unlikely to come out top of the list, considering the amount of anti-UPF material that has been served up by the media over the past two years.

Infamously Baroness Joan Walmsley, who headed the House of Lords inquiry, accused the food industry of “getting away with murder”, while there have been calls for a total ban on advertising for UPFs from the likes of  former health tsar Henry Dimbleby and Chris van Tulleken, author of the bestselling book Ultra-Processed People.

Surely what is far more important than what the public think – and who they blame – is what the science itself says.

Peer-reviewed research from the Rowett Institute of Nutrition & Health at the University of Aberdeen, and the University of Liverpool’s Eric Robinson were the latest to find the evidence against UPFs was “overwhelmingly” circumstantial. It warned that a clampdown on UPFs risked itself causing a national dietary crisis.

Many leading public health scientists believe that existing HFSS regulations that are either already in place or in the pipeline, cover the large majority of UPF products that may be causing harm. They argue against introducing further regulation on UPFs, at least without new facts.

Last month, health secretary Wes Streeting called on scientists to “fill the gap” in evidence, rightly ruling that government intervention on UPFs without the scientific proof to back it up was the wrong approach.

UKRI says that part of the rationale for its new consultation project will be to help identify areas where new scientific research needs to be carried out, which in itself is fair enough – though whether it requires a year-long public dialogue is questionable.

But in other respects the aims of this expensive exercise are perplexing. With great respect to the great British public, what they think about UPFs, while obviously absolutely critical for food company sales, is, when it comes to forming government policy, almost entirely irrelevant.

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