Upf Quotes

Another existential threat to human life caused by UPF but not mentioned on the packaging is antibiotic resistance.

UPF has a long, formal scientific definition, but it can be boiled down to this: if it’s wrapped in plastic and has at least one ingredient that you wouldn’t usually find in a standard home kitchen, it’s UPF.

We might think of flavour as frivolous, but there’s a school of thought that says artificial flavouring is the problem when it comes to obesity and overconsumption. Since I did my diet, it’s the word ‘flavouring’ that I avoid more than any other in food. Flavourings signal that something is UPF, and the need for flavouring tells us a lot about some of the ways UPF does us harm.

Sugar and salt are the two greatest food additives in terms of driving appetite, which is why they are nearly universal in UPF, whether it’s beans or pizza. So, high sugar content is one of the properties of UPF that drives weight gain.

But the main reason that I don’t think we can reformulate UPF to make it better for us is that it is designed to be purchased and consumed in the largest possible quantities. And a food that is consumed less will never sell as well as a food that’s consumed more.*

Her father would return from China. He’d come back with all his soldiers. He’d pick her up in his strong arms and say that he’d never meant to leave, that he hadn’t meant to sail away and leave her and her mother alone in the canals of the Drowned Cities as the Army of God and the UPF and the Freedom Militia came down like a hammer on every single person who’d ever trafficked with the peacekeepers. A stupid little dream for a stupid little war maggot. Mahlia hated herself for dreaming it. But sometimes she curled in on herself and held the stump of her right hand to her chest and pretended that none of it had happened. That her father was still here, and she still had a hand, and everything was going to get better.

Removing industry from the table will require a cultural shift before any shift in legislation. It will gradually become shameful for activists to work with the UPF industry as the understanding spreads that the companies are as responsible for diet-related disease as the tobacco industry is for smoking-related disease.

None of the UPF snacks and discretionary products are necessary for human diet, meaning that many of the environmental impacts could be avoided.

The third external cost that I want to touch on is how UPF harms the environment through production and use of plastic.

And the nature of UPF means that the manufacturing process typically cannot allow for concern for the environment or high standards of animal care. It encourages excess consumption of food and necessarily diminishes our knowledge about its origins. If you buy fresh beef or chicken, it will often say on the pack grass-fed’ or ‘corn-fed’. People often want to know which farm it came from. But very few people ask about what the chicken in their prepacked UPF sandwich was fed on, although this is, it turns out, an important question to ask.

For these commodity crops to be profitable, they need to be turned into something, and there are two options (or three, if you count biofuel): ‘You can force the crops through a factory-farmed animal to produce meat, or process them into an aggressively marketed UPF.

Some people think that UPF is just lousy food in terms of nutrition and that it’s eaten by people who eat generally poor diets. But when you correct for all that, the effects on death and depression and weight and heart attacks remain the same.’ It is the ultra-processing, not the nutritional content, that’s the problem.

I recall a podcast featuring American white nationalist Jared Taylor. He claims that every important decision in their lives - where to live, whom to marry, where to send their children to school - 'liberals are not different from members of the Ku Klux Klan'. And, if you believe the Age article, in the only federal electorate held by the Greens, families are making their schooling decision as if they're in the UPF.

This is the science behind how UPF affects the human body: • The destruction of the food matrix by physical, chemical and thermal processing means that UPF is, in general, soft. This means you eat it fast, which means you eat far more calories per minute and don’t feel full until long after you’ve finished. It also potentially reduces facial bone size and bone density, leading to dental problems. • UPF typically has a very high calorie density because it’s dry, and high in fat and sugar and low in fibre, so you get more calories per mouthful. • It displaces diverse whole foods from the diet, especially among low-income groups. And UPF itself is often micronutrient-deficient, which may also contribute to excess consumption. • The mismatch between the taste signals from the mouth and the nutrition content in some UPF alters metabolism and appetite in ways that we are only beginning to understand, but that seem to drive excess consumption. • UPF is addictive, meaning that for some people binges are unavoidable. • The emulsifiers, preservatives, modified starches and other additives damage the microbiome, which could allow inflammatory bacteria to flourish and cause the gut to leak. • The convenience, price and marketing of UPF urge us to eat constantly and without thought, which leads to more snacking, less chewing, faster eating, increased consumption and tooth decay. • The additives and physical processing mean that UPF affects our satiety system directly. Other additives may affect brain and endocrine function, and plastics from the packaging might affect fertility. • The production methods used to make UPF require expensive subsidy and drive environmental destruction, carbon emissions and plastic pollution, which harm us all.

Factory farming and UPFs are two sides of the same industrial food coin,’ Percival said. ‘And then, of course, lots (though not all) of that factory farmed meat is subsequently turned into UPF.’ The result of this is that, of the thousands of different strains of plants and breeds of animals that have been cultivated since the birth of agriculture, just twelve plants and five animals now make up 75 per cent of all the food eaten or thrown away on earth.14-17

So it turns out I wasn't the only Jew at the rally. There were two and a half more. Not protesting against the UPF, but supporting them? That clinches it. Skinheads side by side with Jews; immigrants against immigrants; Shermon's promise of a far-right hajj – this is a case for John Safran, Jew Detective.

Factory farming and UPFs are two sides of the same industrial food coin,’ Percival said. ‘And then, of course, lots (though not all) of that factory farmed meat is subsequently turned into UPF.

A report in the peer-reviewed journal Public Health Nutrition showed that the organisation accepted more than $4 million from food companies and industry associations, including Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Nestlé, Hershey, Kellogg’s and Conagra.39 And this was just between 2011 and 2017. In addition, they had significant equity in UPF companies including more than a million dollars of stocks in PepsiCo, Nestlé and J.M. Smucker.40 Meanwhile, back across the Atlantic, Diabetes UK lists Boots, Tesco and Abbott as corporate partners.41 Cancer Research UK is funded by Compass, Roadchef, Slimming World, Tesco and Warburtons.42 The British Heart Foundation takes money from Tesco.43 The British Dietetic Association has Abbott, Danone and Quorn as its current strategic partners, with other food companies as supporters.44 The

It is so, so normal to work with and take funding from industry, that many of these groups may not be fully aware of how working with companies that make and sell UPF allows for ‘healthwashing’ of the brand. It’s a great opportunity for the company to get publicity for weak promises and delaying tactics as they fight for ‘voluntary’ measures to challenge what they do.

The impact of the current food system is not sustainable for the next few decades – let alone the next few millennia. The environmental cost is so immense that, even if we stopped all fossil-fuel emissions, emissions from the global food system alone will take us well beyond the fatal 1.5°C rise in temperature by 2100.12 And, while there will always be an environmental impact from farming and processing food for 8 billion people, UPF is a particular driver of carbon emissions and environmental destruction.

Many UPF products contain ingredients from four or five continents. Your lasagne or ice cream may have palm oil from Asia, cocoa from Africa, soy from South America, wheat from the USA, flavouring from Europe and so on. Many of these ingredients will be shipped more than once – from a farm in South America to a processing plant in Europe, then to a secondary processing and packaging plant in another part of Europe, then to consumers, who might be back in South America right next to the farm.

We could at least imagine a system arranged around agroecological farming and the consumption of a diverse range of fresh and minimally processed whole foods.47 Such a system would promote biodiversity and has the capacity to produce enough healthy food for a growing population on a lower land footprint than today with massive climate benefits. We would need to eat significantly less meat, but the modelling is clear that it is possible.48-53 With this new, organic farming system, fresh and minimally processed whole foods would be more abundant and possibly cheaper. But such a system wouldn’t favour the monocultures required for UPF that do so much damage. By fixing the agricultural system so that it becomes sustainable, the production costs of whole foods should fall (without the requirement for fossil-fuel-based agrochemical inputs) – and those of UPF would rise.

Most UPF is not food, Chris. It’s an industrially produced edible substance.

UPF has a long, formal scientific definition, but it can be boiled down to this: if it’s wrapped in plastic and has at least one ingredient that you wouldn’t usually find in a standard home kitchen, it’s UPF. Much of it will be familiar to you as ‘junk food’, but there’s plenty of organic, free-range, ‘ethical’ UPF too, which might be sold as healthy, nutritious, environmentally friendly or useful for weight loss (it’s another rule of thumb that almost every food that comes with a health claim on the packet is a UPF).

a world that would offer everyone more opportunity and choice. So, there are no proposals to tax things or ban them – only a demand to improve information about UPF, and access to real food.

In 2022, a study published in the journal Neurology looked at data from over 72,000 people.30 Increasing intake of UPF by 10 per cent was associated with a 25 per cent increase in the risk of dementia and a 14 per cent increase in the risk of Alzheimer’s disease.

UPF, especially products with particular combinations of salt, fat, sugar and protein, can drive our ancient evolved systems for ‘wanting’: ‘Some ultra-processed foods may activate the brain reward system in a way that is similar to what happens when people use drugs like alcohol, or even nicotine or morphine.

She also told me about how the preservatives and emulsifiers in UPF disrupt the microbiome, how the gut is further damaged by processing that removes the fibre from food, and how high levels of fat, salt and sugar each cause their own specific harms. And there was one small comment that stuck. Whenever I talked about the ‘food’ I was eating, she corrected me: ‘Most UPF is not food, Chris. It’s an industrially produced edible substance.

The main difference in the effects of the two diets that Hall observed was that people ate the UPF much more quickly.

intake of UPF by 10 per cent was associated with a 25 per cent increase in the risk of dementia and a 14 per cent increase in the risk of Alzheimer’s disease.

Another existential threat to human life caused by UPF but not mentioned on the packaging is antibiotic resistance. Suzi Shingler nearly single-handedly runs the Alliance to Save our Antibiotics, an NGO trying to make sure that when you get a urinary tract infection or a skin infection you don’t die because it’s impossible to treat with existing antibiotics. Treating even minor infections in UK hospitals (my day job) is increasingly difficult because there is so much resistance to antibiotics.fn9 This is because antibiotics have become a routine part of animal care, and the microbes in the animals’ guts become resistant to them. We have been worrying about family doctors ‘overprescribing’, or giving antibiotics for viral infections (when they’re needed only for bacterial infections) for a long time. But this accounts for a trivially small amount of antibiotic use. The place we use the most is on industrial farms, typically to compensate for chronic failings in animal welfare.

Flavourings signal that something is UPF, and the need for flavouring tells us a lot about some of the ways UPF does us harm.