If the government doesn’t have the courage to ban ultra-processed foods, they should tax them with a surcharge which is ringfenced to pay into the NHS budget. – Michael Broad
Walk into any supermarket in Britain and the shelves tell the story. Boxes, pouches, and packets — brightly coloured, endlessly varied, and almost all the product of industrial chemistry rather than cookery. Ultra-processed foods (UPFs) dominate the modern diet. They’re convenient, cheap, and profitable — and they are making the nation sick. It is almost impossible at time to avoid them as they are so prevalent and many people are ‘addicted’ to them.
What Lies Beneath the Wrapper
“Ultra-processed” is not just shorthand for junk food. It describes foods that have been industrially formulated using ingredients not found in a normal kitchen — emulsifiers, stabilisers, sweeteners, modified starches, hydrogenated oils, and synthetic flavourings. They are manufactured to last long on the shelf and to deliver powerful sensory reward with minimum cost. Arguably this is not food but edible industrial products as they do not nourish but harm the individual.
Among the main culprits:
- Refined sugars and syrups, which flood the bloodstream with glucose and demand constant insulin production.
- Refined flours and starches, stripped of fibre and nutrients, digested almost as rapidly as sugar itself.
- Trans fats and oxidised seed oils, which inflame tissues and disturb insulin signalling.
- Emulsifiers and preservatives such as polysorbate-80 and carboxymethylcellulose, which disrupt the gut microbiome and intestinal barrier.
- Artificial sweeteners, whose effects on glucose tolerance and appetite regulation remain under scrutiny.
Add in excess sodium, synthetic flavours, and the high-temperature “cooking” that creates inflammatory compounds known as advanced glycation end-products, and you have a recipe for metabolic breakdown.
The result is a perfect storm of over-stimulation and under-nutrition — calories without nourishment, pleasure without satiety. The human metabolism simply isn’t designed for it.
The Consequences We’re Living With
The statistics are sobering. Roughly 4.1 million people in the UK are now treated for Type 2 diabetes, with another million or more undiagnosed. The NHS spends around £8–10 billion a year managing the disease — close to one in ten pounds of its total budget. Add the indirect costs of obesity, heart disease, and related illnesses, and the bill soars far higher.
The science linking ultra-processed foods to this crisis is compelling. Cohort studies from The BMJ, The Lancet Public Health, and others show that the higher the proportion of UPFs in the diet, the greater the risk of diabetes, obesity, and cardiovascular disease — even when total calories are controlled for. The mechanism is now well understood: chronic inflammation, insulin resistance, and microbiome disruption driven by the very ingredients that make these foods so cheap and shelf-stable.
So Why Doesn’t the Government Act?
It seems obvious that a nation overwhelmed by diet-related disease should curb the sale of the substances causing it. Yet successive British governments have done almost nothing beyond the limited sugar tax on soft drinks. The reasons lie not in science but in economics and politics.
1. The Power of the Food Industry
The UK food and drink sector is worth more than £250 billion annually. It employs hundreds of thousands and contributes billions in tax revenue. Multinationals lobby relentlessly against regulation, invoking the rhetoric of “consumer choice” and warning of job losses. Ministers listen.
2. Fear of the “Nanny State”
Politicians dread being accused of paternalism. The notion that adults should be free to choose what they eat — even when that choice is engineered and marketed to them from infancy — provides convenient cover for inaction.
3. Cheap Calories, Expensive Health
Ultra-processed foods are inexpensive to produce and sell. For low-income households struggling with rent and energy bills, they are often the only affordable option. Governments fear that taxing or restricting them would raise living costs and deepen resentment. The long-term health cost is someone else’s problem — namely, the NHS.
4. Regulatory Complexity
UPFs are a category, not a single substance. The NOVA classification used by researchers isn’t embedded in UK food law, so defining what exactly to ban would be administratively difficult. This technical obstacle conveniently delays reform.
5. The Treasury’s Short-Term Lens
Tax receipts from the food industry are visible and immediate. NHS savings from prevention are diffuse and long-term. On the Treasury’s balance sheet, one side of the equation looks like revenue, the other like expenditure. The result is policy paralysis disguised as prudence.
The False Economy
Yet the supposed fiscal logic collapses under scrutiny. The economic loss from ill-health — through NHS costs, lost productivity, and welfare payments — now outweighs the taxes gained from industrial food sales. The state is, in effect, subsidising the business model of chronic disease. Cheap food today means expensive medicine tomorrow.
What Could Be Done
Other countries are showing the way.
- Chile and Mexico have imposed front-of-pack warning labels and sugar taxes, with measurable declines in sugary-drink consumption.
- France and Brazil explicitly warn citizens to avoid ultra-processed foods in their national dietary guidelines.
- The UK could adopt similar steps: clear labelling, limits on advertising to children, incentives for minimally processed food, and targeted bans on harmful additives.
Such policies would not ban the biscuit aisle; they would simply shift the balance of incentives back toward genuine food.
The Choice Ahead
Britain faces a stark question: should public health be governed by evidence or by industry?
The rise of ultra-processed food has been one of the most profitable experiments in history — and one of the most destructive. The science is clear, the human cost undeniable. What is missing is political courage.
Until that changes, the supermarket will remain the front line of a slow, silent epidemic — one paid for in NHS wards and shortened lives.
Wes Streeting
Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, has never to the best of my knowledge discussed banning ultra-processed foods in the interest of reducing the burden to the NHS of Type 2 diabetes. It seems that he has a blind spot or he has made it all a money game while conveniently forgetting about the misery caused by Type 2 diabetes.
