Extracts and a comment from me below. Full text here: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2026/feb/03/public-health...
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UPFs are made to encourage addiction and consumption and should be regulated like tobacco, say researchers
Ultra-processed foods (UPFs) have more in common with cigarettes than with fruit or vegetables, and require far tighter regulation, according to a new report.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-0009.70066
UPFs and cigarettes are engineered to encourage addiction and consumption, researchers from three US universities said, pointing to the parallels in widespread health harms that link both.
UPFs, which are widely available worldwide, are food products that have been industrially manufactured, often using emulsifiers or artificial colouring and flavours. The category includes soft drinks and packaged snacks such as crisps and biscuits...
The authors suggest that marketing claims on the products, such as being “low fat” or “sugar free”, are “health washing” that can stall regulation, akin to the advertising of cigarette filters in the 1950s as protective innovations that “in practice offered little meaningful benefit”.
One of the authors, Prof Ashley Gearhardt of the University of Michigan, a clinical psychologist specialising in addiction, said her patients made the same links: “They would say, ‘I feel addicted to this stuff, I crave it – I used to smoke cigarettes [and] now I have the same habit but it’s with soda and doughnuts. I know it’s killing me; I want to quit, but I can’t.’”...
Dr Githinji Gitahi, chief executive of Amref Health Africa, said: “This journal article reinforces a growing public health alarm sounding across Africa [where] corporates have found a comfortable, and profitable, nexus: weak government regulation on harmful products and a changing pattern of consumption.
“All this places new and preventable pressures on already stretched health systems,” he said. “Without publicly led interventions on the rising burden of non-communicable diseases, we risk health systems’ collapse.”
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COMMENT (NPW): The article does not address the question of knowledge about the harms of UPFs. It is well known (but still very poorly addressed) that knowledge of the physical harms of tobacco remains very poor. Virtually nobody can cite 20 of the 100s of diseases that smoking can cause. A third of smokers in China, for example, did not even know about the link between smoking and lung cancer [ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5654747/ ]. It seems highly likely that knowledge of the harms of UPFs is even more limited. Using a quick Google search, I was unable to find any research on this topic. Can anyone help?
Best wishes, Neil
HIFA profile: Neil Pakenham-Walsh is coordinator of HIFA (Healthcare Information For All), a global health community that brings all stakeholders together around the shared goal of universal access to reliable healthcare information. HIFA has 20,000 members in 180 countries, interacting in four languages and representing all parts of the global evidence ecosystem. HIFA is administered by Global Healthcare Information Network, a UK-based nonprofit in official relations with the World Health Organization. Email: neil@hifa.org