Rural Affairs and Islands Committee 03 September 2025
That is a good question. The difficulty in answering it is the fact that everybody has to eat food to survive. There is a broad spectrum of ultra-processed foods, and 50 per cent of everybody’s food basket tends to be made up of that type of food. We need to take care to say that they are not all under the same umbrella.
Processing does not actually refer to the composition of the food. It can use things such as emulsifiers to make foods more palatable and easier to digest, as well as things that make people eat more quickly, but processing itself does not reflect the composition of the food. For example, wholemeal bread that you can buy in the supermarket would be classed as ultra-processed. There is a wide array of multiple ultra-processed foods, and, if we think of issues such as inequality, we need to be careful about how we divvy them up.
However, we have a very strong evidence base on how products that are high in fats, salt and sugar impact our health. That evidence is long standing and it forms the basis of the dietary goals. We are reviewing the dietary goals at the moment. We have an additional lens on sustainability, and things such as ultra-processed foods have been considered in the review group’s debates as it considers whether the goals are fit for purpose, whether we need to change them and what the evidence base is saying.
At the moment, the evidence base around ultra-processed foods per se is not strong enough. Although I understand your concerns, the fact is that the dietary goals will capture foods that are high in fat, salt and sugar. It might not be that explicit, but that is the underpinning vision within the population health framework, and that is our means of assessing how healthy or otherwise food is. I accept that that is not necessarily helpful to you.
We talk about healthy diets, not healthy foods. That is why the delineation of the issue of what is classed as health harming can be more challenging in relation to food than in relation to other commodities such as tobacco or alcohol, which are easier to define. You can eat the odd treat as part of a healthy diet, but it is the overall balance that is important.
I reassure members that we are keeping our eye on the evidence base—the totality of it and the consensus. Some interesting new publications are looking at diets that are matched exactly—one ultra-processed and one not—to see what impacts each has, and we can see that the ultra-processed diet has less favourable outcomes. It is interesting that a lot of people dropped out of the diet that was not ultra-processed because they did not like it.
There are challenges on both sides, but we are across the evidence base and we will keep ourselves up to date as things progress.