UPFs should also be heavily taxed due to impact on health and mortality, says scientist who coined term
Ultra-processed foods (UPFs) are displacing healthy diets “all over the world” despite growing evidence of the risks they pose and should be sold with tobacco-style warnings, according to the nutritional scientist who first coined the term.
Prof Carlos Monteiro of the University of São Paulo will highlight the increasing danger UPFs present to children and adults at the International Congress on Obesity this week.
“UPFs are increasing their share in and domination of global diets, despite the risk they represent to health in terms of increasing the risk of multiple chronic diseases,” Monteiro told the Guardian ahead of the conference in São Paulo.
The whole UFP thing is so wishy washy. It’s such a broad category it is essentially meaningless, one of the earlier guardian articles talked about sliced bread being a UPF as it has added vitamins and minerals due to law.
If you closer at the whole topic it just comes across as saying if you are poor and eat food that you can afford you will die earlier. Writing a reminder of this on the food will not help anyone but it will make poor people feel a bit more like shit.
The point of these kinds of efforts is to shift the blame. “It’s easy to know which foods are good and bad with this handy system, so if someone is only eating bad foods, that’s their choice, and the rest of us can blame them for their poor health.”