UPF makers continue to push their unhealthy products unabashed. They’re apparently taking a page from the playbook developed over decades by Big Tobacco to downplay the health threat posed by their similarly addictive products…
Barry Popkin, the W.R. Kenan Jr. Distinguished Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Gillings School of Global Public Health, told CNN: “Companies can ‘double or triple their profits’ by turning corn, wheat, beans and other whole foods, “into a colorless and flavorless sawdust which is then reconstructed with artificial flavorings and additives.”
And they’re not the least bit apologetic. In spite of a growing chorus of complaints and warnings from consumers, nutritionists and scientists that UPFs are taking over the Western Diet.
How is this happening?
A new three-part exposé in the British medical journal Lancet commissioned for the UNICEF and the World Health Organization warns that IPF makers are not being humbled by the increasingly available dirty facts about their business. In fact, they’re fighting even harder to carve out larger shares of the junk food market in a weakening world economy. UPFs are the foundation of a huge global industry that will apparently stop at nothing to enhance its profits.
“We found evidence that UPF consumption is increasing everywhere around the world, fueled by powerful global corporations,” exposé coauthor Carlos Augusto Monteiro, professor emeritus of nutrition and public health in the School of Public Health at Brazil’s University of São Paulo, told CNN.
“To keep this business model, which is highly profitable, the industry cannot afford to make mini-mally processed foods as they did in the past, so they use extensive political lobbying to stop effective public health policies that support healthy eating,” Monteiro explained.
No coincidence…
Food processors are in fact using a tried and tested ‘play book’ developed by Big Tobacco back in the 1950s to entice millions of people to smoke. For decades, the tobacco industry’s front men insisted that smoking posed no health threat and nicotine was not addictive.
The authors of the Lancet series insist that a global effort by governments and other socially influ-ential ‘powers’ must come together to fight the continuing onslaught of Ultra-processed foods. “Governments must lead a whole-of-society approach that ensures this generation is the first in which children’s rights to nutrition, food, and health are prioritized over corporate profit.”
It took more than 4o years to even begin to turn the tide on smoking. Even with society’s strongest efforts employed against the deadly and monstrously expensive habit.
My take
This past May, The World Health Organization (WHO) put out a global call for scientists to join in its work on ultra-processed foods. WHO described the escalating consumption of UPFs as, “a systemic threat to public health, equity, and environmental sustainability.”
The sooner the ‘good guys’ get on their collective horse and start fighting back aggressively against UPFs, the better for all of us.
~ Maggie J.