The medical doctor and broadcaster Chris van Tulleken says it is time to apply a ‘tobacco control approach’ to ultra-processed foods , including a mandatory requirement to display a “large octagonal (warning) label” on all UPFs. 

Van Tulleken, author of the best-selling book Ultra-Processed People, is clear that the explosion of diet-related disease requires a comprehensive regulatory response and says the ‘personal responsibility’ argument often mounted by industry lobbyists is now “dead and buried”.  

Van Tulleken made the comments in an interview on the BBC’s Today programme, and later on the same day in evidence to the House of Lords Committee on Food, Diet and Obesity.

Van Tulleken told the BBC presenter Amol Rajan that ultra-processed foods now make up 60% of the diet in UK, and that the dietary-led diseases they contribute to are now the biggest cause of premature death globally, overtaking tobacco.

Predatory behaviours
Van Tulleken said that the “predatory behaviours” of food corporations were strikingly similar to those of the tobacco industry in the past. He added: “The ancestry of these ultra-processed or HFSS foods is in tobacco. During the 1980s the biggest tobacco companies in the world began buying the biggest food companies in the world. They used their marketing techniques, and they used their flavour molecules, to create the range of products that make up most of our diet today. They are addictive. They are incredibly unhelpful in a lot of different ways – and they definitely drive weight gain and malnutrition. That’s why we need to use the tobacco control approach, and that’s what I will say in the Lords today.”

Questioned by Rajan about scientists who say there is insufficient evidence that ultra-processed foods are “uniquely bad”, and that they may be unhealthy simply due to high saturated fat, salt or sugar levels, van Tulleken retorted that the most widely quoted scientific scepticism on UPF often came from scientists with “current or past links to big food companies”. 

“The (ultra-processed food) industry is doing exactly what tobacco was doing. I have colleagues in Cambridge, Harvard, Princeton, UNICEF, the WHO on my side of the argument, as are the government of France, the government of Brazil, and of Mexico, Argentina, Israel, Belgium. There is absolute unanimity among independent scientists, that as a category of food, ultra-processed food drives negative health outcomes – which is a euphemism for the early death.

Dirty money
“We have a library of data showing that funding affects research – and what you say. We can demonstrate this using scientific data, but it’s also factually obvious. This is why we have come to view tobacco money as dirty money. And that’s where we need to get to with (ultra-processed food). At the moment half of the members of the government’s own scientific advisory committee take money from companies like Coca-Cola.” 

Later in the day, giving evidence to the House of Lords Committee on Food, Diet and Obesity, van Tulleken was emphatic about the need for a comprehensive regulatory response to the enormous personal and economic cost of diet-related disease. “The (personal responsibility) argument is morally, economically, socially, politically and scientifically dead and buried. All policies must entirely remove that from the table as a characteristic. They must be kind, they must draw on the lived experience of affected people. Most importantly, they have to adopt a regulatory position. They have to be free of industry influence.”

Van Tulleken says he is not calling for bans or taxes on ultra-processed food, or even to regulate UPF as a category. Instead, he wants to see tobacco style warning labels made a requirement for all ultra-processed foods. Black octagonal UPF warning labels are already used in a number of South and Central American countries, where there is a requirement that labels must take up at least 5% of packaging surface area. 

Black mark
Elaborating on this, van Tulleken told the Lords committee that the back labels would be based on pre-existing dietary recommendations: “If you did that, Coco Pops gets two big black octagons. Nutritional information published on Coco Pops packaging shows it is high in sugar and salt. These are foods you can’t make a health claim on. You can’t say it supports your family’s health. You get rid of the health claims, you get rid of the Coco monkey, you put it on a different shelf.”

Van Tulleken contrasted this proposition to the current situation: “… at the moment if you buy a can of cola it has three green traffic lights on it, and a red one for sugar. How can a cola have three green signals? My six year old can buy it in any shop.”