Ultra-Processed Food: The Profitable Filth Capitalism Feeds Us

By Ezra Ellis

Republished from In Defence of Marxism.

Capitalism is polluting the air we breathe, the water we drink and the very food we eat: all in the name of profit. Further evidence of this comes from a review published by the British Medical Journal (BMJ) on 28 February, evaluating the best available research on the effect of ‘ultra-processed food’ (UPF) on our health. This review included 45 studies and almost 10 million participants, and crucially did not include any research funded by the big food companies. The findings are categorical.

The review found that consumption of UPF was linked to a substantially increased risk of at least 32 harmful health outcomes including all-cause mortality, cancer, diabetes, inflammatory bowel diseases and mental health problems. This review confirms what UCL doctor and health researcher, Chris van Tulleken, argued in his book Ultra Processed People (published 2023): the food we eat is making us sick.

In general, the discussion around diet today is a monotonous sermon. From the newspaper columns to the television studios, the problem, we are told, begins and ends with the individual. The root cause of the global nutrition epidemic is boiled down to a lack of will to exercise, a lack of discipline to resist unhealthy snacks, and a lack of intelligence or capacity to teach oneself how to cook and prepare varied meals.

In this stale atmosphere, van Tulleken’s book, Ultra Processed People comes as a breath of fresh air. He puts forward a rigorous materialist analysis of the effect of the capitalist system on both the global food system and human diet.

Using a wide range of research data and interviews, van Tulleken challenges the consensus that humans have just become lazy and greedy.

Instead, he proposes the leading cause of growing levels of obesity is the drastic change in our modern diet that has come with the introduction and proliferation of UPF, pushed for profit over all else. UPF now constitutes more than half our diet in the UK, US, Canada and Australia but the big food companies are trying (successfully) to make it the staple across the globe.

UPF: not really food

UPF is a scientific definition for a category of food, originally drawn up by Carlos Monteiro, a Brazilian nutrition researcher. The hallmarks of UPF are the addition of stabilisers, emulsifiers, gums, lecithin and obscure oils you’ll never find in a supermarket or ordinary kitchen. What these ingredients have in common is they save corporations money, as they reduce the need for real ingredients in the food.

Not all scientists are in agreement that UPF is the problem. There have been many to speak out in defence of UPF, some even arguing that it can be good for you. However, a closer inspection shows that these scientists defending UPF have ties to the big food corporations manufacturing UPF such as Mcdonald's, Nestle and Coke.

UPF and Overeating

By analysing the past 100 years of research, the book demonstrates that it's neither fat, sugar, nor lack of exercise that has fundamentally led to the obesity crisis and increase in metabolic disorders. Instead, it is the nature of UPF itself that results in weight gain and poor health, as these foods are designed to encourage overeating.

UPF is soft and low in fibre making it faster to eat and digest, leaving you less full, and the flavour additives in it rarely correlate to the nutritional content interfering with our bodies' hormonal appetite regulation. UPF is engineered to keep you eating, and studies have found it can activate the brain in the same way as alcohol and drugs.

Van Tulleken references a study that demonstrated UPF leads to overeating and associated weight gain. The researchers fed two groups a diet identical in nutritional content, one 80 percent UPF and the other UPF-free, and swapped the groups over after two weeks. The same individuals ate an average of 500 calories more a day on the UPF diet.

This overconsumption of food has become a global health epidemic. Since 2017, more people in the world have been obese than underweight. Obesity is paradoxically beginning to be understood as a form of malnutrition, as UPF is high in calories but low in nutritional content.

In some places, this transformation has happened over just a few years, as multinational food companies like Nestle extend their reach into the developing world and swamp the local markets with UPF. The consequences for people in low-income and developing countries can be devastating as they have no access to dentistry or healthcare to address the problems UPF consumption causes, like tooth decay and diabetes.

You can’t ‘run off’ UPF

The proposed solution to overeating is exercise. This is often pu forward by the same multinationals causing the crisis. For example, Coke funded the ‘Exercise is Medicine’ programme, and funded many studies to ‘prove’ that the cause of the obesity crisis is lack of exercise, not Coke consumption.

However, Ultra Processed People examines the evidence and demonstrates that increasing exercise will not increase our bodies' expenditure of calories.

The book uses a study of the Hadza, a hunter-gatherer tribe in Tanzania, and discovered they burned the same amount of calories as an American office worker. This isn’t to say Van Tulleken believes we should stop exercising. Exercise is good for your health – both physical and mental. However, diet is the crucial factor.

UPF is often the only option

Despite the effect UPF has on our bodies, the domination of the big food monopolies means that, for many, UPF is the only option.

23.5 million Americans live in food deserts, where fresh food isn’t available. 3 million people in the UK don't have a shop selling raw ingredients within 15 minutes of their home by public transport. Almost a million people in the UK don’t have a fridge, 2 million have no cooker, 3 million have no freezer, and the cost of energy now means many who do have it, can’t use it. UPF is consequently indispensable.

Deprived areas of England have more than twice as many fast food outlets (per capita) as more affluent areas. Teenagers are swamped with UPF, their bus tickets contain McDonald’s vouchers and fast food restaurants are often the only place they can hang out after school given the closure of youth clubs and community centres.

In the developing world, the situation is even worse. Coke is often cheaper than water, and as the influx of cheap UPF squeezes local farmers out of the market, UPF quickly becomes the only option. Globally 75 percent of our diet today consists of only 12 plants and five animals, UPF has replaced traditional foods.

To see the depravity of the capitalists you need look no further than the baby formula monopolies, like Nestle. They have aggressively pushed their products in countries where it was impossible to access safe drinking water, leading to 80,000 preventable infant deaths a year.

Why companies can’t stop selling it

What Ultra Processed People makes clear is that we can’t just change UPF and make it healthier. The products that are most addictive will sell best and do best on the market.

The book gives the example of ice cream. This is most often made using emulsifiers as an egg substitute, as it is cheaper and easier to store and transport. The reason companies are driven to experiment with the ingredients is that there is no room left to reduce costs in other areas. Capitalism drives companies to cut costs in production wherever possible, and UPF is cheaper to make, easier to store and transport, and has a much longer shelf life.

The evidence of the dangers of UPF, as found by the BMJ, falls on deaf ears for the capitalists, who respond with more processing: adding probiotics to ‘counteract’ their microbiome-damaging emulsifiers, adding artificial sweeteners, adding vitamins and minerals after all the original ones have been bleached out.

However they reformulate their products, their ultimate priority will always be to make profit, to sell as much as possible, and therefore to drive excess consumption.

The reason for the proliferation of UPF, despite these detrimental effects on nearly every aspect of human health is straightforward economics: a food that people consume more is food that sells more. This comes with the double benefit that you can sell a gym plan, “weight loss” branded UPF, or private healthcare membership as solutions to add even more revenue.

It is no coincidence that our diets are killing us – it is part and parcel of the capitalist profit-seeking system.

Why we need a revolution

What Ultra Processed People demonstrates is that consumers are largely powerless to cut out UPF, as we eat what we can afford. Companies are almost equally powerless to change things as they must produce the most profitable commodities, and rubbish that we can’t stop eating is a gold mine for them.

The main shortcoming of Van Tulleken’s book is that, having drawn these conclusions, he calls for government reform as the solution. In reality the government – through campaign funding, outright bribes and lucrative ‘job’ opportunities for MPs – is bought off by the food companies. And capitalists trying to cut their costs by feeding us rubbish is as old as capitalism itself; Marx was talking about the adulteration of bread going back to the beginning of the 18th century.

If we want to imagine a world without UPF, which is possible, we have to imagine a world without capitalism.

UPF has become indispensable, because the living and working conditions of the working class are so poor. Even before the cost of living crisis, British people spent 8 percent of their household budget on food. If the poorest 50 percent of households wanted to eat a diet that adhered to current healthy living guidelines they would need to spend 30 percent of their budget on food. The reason we spend so little? Because everything else (rent, utilities, transport) costs so much.

Even if you can afford to buy healthier real food, most people don’t have the time or energy after work to cook three meals from scratch every day. Many other people are completely dependent on ready meals because they are unable, through disability or illness, to cook for themselves.

Despite the industrialisation of agriculture, and the production of 2.6 times the food that humanity needs to feed itself, at least 2.3 billion people lack secure access to healthy and nutritious food. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

Through a socialist plan of production, we could easily produce enough real food to meet everyone’s needs. With the creation of public canteens serving healthy and delicious food, we could socialise the domestic labour of cooking, which is currently primarily the burden of women. We could enable people to engage socially at mealtimes, rather than the lonely reality many face today of returning from a long day at work to eat a ready meal in front of the television.

This is all possible and it is the only way we can free ourselves from dependence on UPF. But it requires abandoning the profit motive and recreating our society at every level for the benefit of the working class – the overwhelming majority of the population.

How Capitalism Killed Nutrition: A Review of 'Ultra-Processed People'

By Luka Kiernan

Republished from Red Flag.

Review of Ultra-Processed People: Why Do We All Eat Stuff That Isn’t Food ... and Why Can’t We Stop? By Chris van Tulleken. Cornerstone Press; 384 pages.

The maiden voyage of the Terra Grande, also known as Nestlé Até Você a Bordo (Nestlé takes you on board), set sail from the Brazilian port city of Belém in July 2010. The barge was described as a “floating supermarket” as it embarked on an eighteen-day circuit up the rivers of the Amazon lowlands, providing 800,000 people in impoverished riverside towns with the glories of the modern Western diet. The best-sellers were Kit-Kats, an 80-gram serving of which contains 38 grams of sugar. 

The products rapidly infiltrated the communities. To compete, local stores began stocking the ultra-processed junk food peddled by Nestlé. In its wake, the Terra Grande left dietary chaos. High sugar, ultra-processed food became a core food group. Childhood obesity rates rose as high as 30 percent in some communities, and cases of Type 2 diabetes have since been reported in large numbers, a disease that was previously unheard of.

Nestlé complemented the floating supermarket with another program, Nestlé Até Você (Nestlé Comes to You), to better access Brazil’s urban slums. Seven thousand women were employed as door-to-door salespeople, and the program now visits 700,000 low-income households each month with its ultra-processed goodness. As one company supervisor put it: “The essence of our program is to reach the poor”. 

This story of a multinational food company destroying the health of impoverished populations is recounted in Chris Van Tulleken’s Ultra-Processed People. The book is an insightful scientific, political and economic look into capitalism’s global destruction of nutrition and health. It points the finger squarely at the profiteering multinationals and complicit governments, regulatory bodies and NGOs. Van Tulleken contends that the rise of “ultra-processed food” (UPF), defined as any food containing synthetic additives, has led to the deterioration of people’s health. Today, in Australia, the UK, the US and Canada, UPF constitutes up to 60 percent of the average diet.

A tendency has emerged across the world over the last 50 years regarding health that contradicts the rest of human history. In most countries, the poorest people eat the most calories. They are also the most nutritionally malnourished. “Diet quality and associated health outcomes follow a social gradient in Australia, and internationally,” concluded a recent VicHealth study. In the UK, working-class children are getting shorter on average, at the same time that they are getting fatter. Rich children continue to grow. 

From the 1950s onwards, savvy food companies figured out ever more novel ways of using additives and synthetic ingredients to mimic more expensive foods. Modified starches from potatoes or corn were far cheaper than dairy fats, and, once packed with bulking agents, flavouring and colouring, could appear close enough to the real thing. The cheapest forms of fats, proteins and carbohydrates could be processed in any number of ways to create a lucrative mass product. With added preservatives, food was much more suited to the logistics of the market. Beyond just reducing ingredient costs, these chemicals and methods of processing were used to “extend shelf life, facilitate centralised production and, as it turns out, drive excess consumption”, according to Van Tulleken. Excess consumption became increasingly central to the profitability of these products.

There are an estimated 10,000 additives in modern food production, according to a study published in the journal Comprehensive Reviews in Food Science and Food Safety: flavouring, colouring, foaming and anti-foaming agents, bulking and anti-bulking agents, preservatives, emulsifiers and gums, among many others. Some of these have known serious health effects, but the overwhelming majority haven’t been researched enough to determine their consequences conclusively. The average UK resident consumes eight kilograms of these substances a year. 

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These additives are also incredibly effective at subverting the body’s natural regulatory system. Van Tulleken writes about studies that have shown that, when infants are given full access to a variety of nutritious foods, they feed themselves a nutritionally balanced diet, without over- or under-eating. This indicates that the body’s regulation of nutritional intake is as sophisticated as that for temperature or blood pressure. But the rise of UPF has disrupted these processes.

For instance, a 2019 study by the US National Institutes of Health found that even when UPF and unprocessed foods have identical nutritional profiles (in terms of calories, and macro and micronutrients), people will overeat the processed food. 

According to Van Tulleken, there has been “an evolutionary selection process over many decades, whereby the products that are purchased and eaten in the greatest quantities are the ones that survive best in the market. To achieve this, they have evolved to subvert the systems in the body that regulate weight and many other functions”. That is, getting people addicted to calorie-dense, nutritionally lacking, additive-loaded products—to the immense detriment of their health—is the food industry’s main game. 

Coca-Cola, for example, is packed full of sugar: ten teaspoons per can. To make it palatable (because spoonfuls of raw sugar don’t taste good) Coca-Cola adds bitter flavouring that cancels out some of the sweetness, so that consumers get the unnatural sugar and caffeine hit without their body rejecting it. 

Like the quantity of additives in their products, the profits of these companies are immense. Nestlé, the biggest of them all, grossed US$45 billion last year, PepsiCo $46 billion, Mondalez $11 billion, Archer-Daniels-Midland $7.5 billion.

Van Tulleken makes a series of compelling arguments throughout the book regarding the social and economic factors behind the health crisis. He rejects the individualist, personal responsibility framework that dominates mainstream discussions of nutrition and health. The book is explicitly not a self-help guide. 

He writes that, across the West, “there was a dramatic increase in obesity, beginning in the 1970s. The idea that there has been a simultaneous collapse in personal responsibility in both men and women across age and ethnic groups is not plausible”. 

Over the past 30 years, childhood obesity in England has increased by 700 percent, and severe obesity by 1,600 percent. This can be explained only by tectonic shifts in the diets made available. 

In Australia, the number of people living with Type 2 diabetes has tripled (or doubled when adjusted for population growth and age structure) over the last twenty years, according to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. Comprehensive meta-analysis has demonstrated a conclusive link between UPF consumption and Type 2 diabetes. Multiple studies have indicated that higher consumption of UPF also leads to massively increased risks of heart attack and stroke.

Consistent with this structural approach, the book centres inequality as a major factor in health outcomes. The consumption of UPF is directly correlated with income, the poorest eating the most. This can largely be explained by pretty simple personal economics. In the UK, a study by the Food Foundation charity shows that the poorest half of the population would need to spend a third of their disposable income on food to meet the minimum nutritional guidelines. The bottom 10 percent would need to spend 75 percent. There are twice as many fast-food outlets in the poorer suburbs of England as in the richer, and advertising is most concentrated in those areas. 

In Australia, age-standardised rates of Type 2 diabetes are more than twice as high in the lowest socioeconomic areas as in the highest. Van Tulleken makes the case that diet and access to quality food are major transmitters of the “health-wealth” gap, alongside smoking and access to health care.

The book also decries the crimes of the major food companies that get rich by destroying the health of billions. For instance, in the 1970s Nestlé was accused of getting mothers in sub-Saharan Africa hooked on free samples of baby formula to the point where they stopped lactating. Mothers were then compelled to purchase baby formula or have their children starve—which thousands of the poorest did. 

In Ghana, one of the poorest countries in the world, obesity rates have risen from 2 percent to 13.6 percent since 1980, as fast-food outlets and UPF companies have expanded their territory. Former CEO of YUM!, KFC’s parent company, justified their intervention by saying: “It’s so much safer to eat at a KFC in Ghana, than it is to eat, obviously, you know, pretty much anywhere else”.

The agricultural system that serves the modern food industry is equally as destructive. Brazilian rainforests are chopped down to grow soybeans, which are used to force-feed factory-raised animals and produce various proteins and fats in their cheapest forms. Indonesian peat forests are burned to clear land for palm oil production, generating thick blankets of smoke and unfathomable amounts of pollution. In 2015, the burning of these forests emitted more CO2 in just a couple of months than the entire German economy that year. Modern agriculture is one of the biggest contributors to global warming, fuelled by the demands of the industrial food sector. 

There are broader dynamics at play than just the individual wickedness of CEOs. As Van Tulleken puts it, each company “is in an arms race with other companies ... all vying for that real estate in the shops that maximises sales. If Kellogg’s decided to take a stand [by making their food healthier and less profitable], the space would instantly be filled by another product from another company”. The nutrition crisis is a built-in product of modern capitalism, stemming from its competitive economic structures.

In this way, Van Tulleken approaches an anti-capitalist perspective. He argues that “shame and outrage are clearly inadequate to limit the survival of companies that are complicit in atrocities” and “their behaviour only changes when the flow of the money is diverted”.

Van Tulleken also lacerates the useful idiots and the actively complicit of the health NGO world. He slams the growth of “healthwashing”, whereby the worst offenders of the obesity crisis fund research about the very crisis that they are causing. He puts it firmly: “Organisations that take money from, for example, Coca-Cola, and claim to be fighting obesity are simply extensions of the marketing division of Coca-Cola ... the interests of [these companies] and those of obesity campaigners are not, and cannot be, aligned”.

However, Van Tulleken stops short of the full-blooded anti-capitalism that is required really to tackle the systemic issues he describes so clearly. While rejecting regressive proposals, such as sugar taxes, he falls back on milquetoast technocratic solutions. His proposals for policies like limits on fast food advertising and better regulated health research to prevent corporate influence would be welcome, but will not even scratch the surface of the structural causes behind the obesity epidemic. 

Elsewhere, Van Tulleken devolves into utopianism, arguing for a “fixing” of the agricultural system which today is based on monoculture crops, mass use of antibiotics and massive environmental destruction. But without a way to fight for such a system, the suggestions remain, as Marx put it 150 years ago, “recipes for the cookshops of the future”.

Ultimately, what Ultra-Processed People clearly demonstrates, but does not actually say, is that there is no solution to the health crisis under capitalism. For business, even the most essential of products, food, is just another way to make obscene amounts of money. The health of billions is sacrificed in the interest of profit.