We are what we eat: How addictive ultra processed foods are making Australian families unhealthier

Grabbing a snack out of a packet, swigging a fizzy drink or microwaving a ready meal have become common practice for many Australians. Our modern diet and how we obtain and prepare our food has changed dramatically over the past 50 years. More of the food we eat today is industrially processed and comes out of a packet or plastic container. Over the same period, rates of obesity and chronic disease have soared. Evidence is mounting that our growing ill health is linked to our increasingly high consumption of “ultra processed foods”, or UPFs. Professor Christina Pollard, from Curtin University, said nutritionists like her have been worried about the consumption of processed foods for many years, but the advent of UPFs has heightened those concerns. “These are foods that are not just modified foods,” she said. “They’re a formulation of different substances with lots of additives and usually they include sugars, fats, salts and oils, along with these other nutrients and non-nutrient products. “They have a really long shelf life and they’re very much associated with chronic disease, and we’re starting to see their role in environmental damage, in mental health and other impacts related to health.” The term “ultra processed food” comes from the NOVA system — which ranks and classifies foods by their level of processing from one (the least processed) to four (UPFs). Professor Carlos Monteiro, from the University of São Paulo who devised the NOVA system in 2009, told the International Congress of Obesity in Brazil in June 2024 that to be competitive, UPFs must be more convenient, tasteful and affordable than whole foods and freshly prepared meals. “To maximise profits, these ultra-processed foods must have lower cost of production and be overconsumed,” he said. He warned UPFs were “pushing aside” all other food groups to dominate global diets and called for them to be regulated with tobacco-style warnings and advertising bans. UPFs typically contain industrially produced ingredients not found in home cooking, such as hydrogenated oils, high-fructose corn syrup, modified starches, flavour enhancers, and emulsifiers, harmful fats, artificial sweeteners, preservatives and additives that the body and organs are not designed to metabolise. UPF consumption is highest in developed Western countries like Australia, the UK and the US. In Australia, almost half of adults’ energy intake is made up of UPFs. Alarmingly, it’s even higher for children at around 55 per cent. Research published by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) last month found that UPF consumption in Australia will increase by 20 per cent and fruit consumption will fall by 10 per cent over the next five years. Another study published by the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute last month estimated that half of Australian children and teenagers will be obese or overweight in 25 years’ time. Last year Deakin University published the biggest analysis yet, with data from 10 million people, of evidence on associations between UPFs and adverse health effects and found it increases the risk of 32 different chronic diseases, including type 2 diabetes, cancer and mental health disorders. Monash University researchers published a study in November showing the more UPFs a person eats, the more their body shows signs of ageing beyond its years. They analysed the health and lifestyle of more than 16,000 American adults and found for every 10 per cent increase in UPF consumption, the gap between biological and chronological age widened by approximately 2.4 months. People who ate the most UPFs (between 68 and 100 per cent of energy intake in their diet) were biologically 0.86 years older than those who ate the least UPFs (39 per cent or less of total energy intake). It begs the question why we can’t stop eating these products. Professor Pollard said UPFs are specifically designed to be “hyper-palatable”. A BBC documentary Irresistible in December revealed some of the tactics used by food manufacturers to drive consumption of their products. Former employees told how UPFs were specifically designed to trigger a reward response in the brain with sugar, fat and carbohydrate combinations not found in natural foods. UPFs are often very soft in texture so they can be consumed at high speed or they have “vanishing caloric density” which means they melt in your mouth, signalling to your brain that you are not eating as much as you are. UPFs are ubiquitous in supermarkets, heavily advertised and often promoted as healthy. Curtin University research published in 2020 found that 54 per cent of Coles and Woolworths own-brand chilled ready meals were deemed unhealthy by the Federal Government’s Australian Guide to Healthy Eating. It also found that 94 per cent of the 291 ready meals analysed, which included quiches, soups, pies and desserts, were ultra processed foods. “That means they contained industrial ingredients, colours, flavours, emulsifiers, stabilisers, and thickeners,” lead researcher Claire Pulker said. A 2021 analysis of food and drinks marketed for toddlers and sold in Australian supermarkets revealed 85 per cent were ultra-processed and 80 per cent of packaged food products were sweetened snacks. Deakin University PhD student Jennifer McCann said only 10 per cent of snack foods aligned with Australian dietary guidelines. “Most of the products in our study were labelled with messages and claims that these foods are healthy and sometimes even necessary,” she said. Kate Yasharoska, who is mother to a four-year-old and 19-month-old twins, said she sometimes felt “tricked” by food manufacturers marketing UPFs as healthy. “My kids graze all day and if you’re not prepared or don’t have the homemade snacks, it’s so easy to reach for the processed snacks,” she said. Mrs Yasharoska said she did buy a lot of packet snacks for her children and tried to pick those with the fewest processed ingredients and additives. “When you’re shopping in a hurry and you’ve got three kids who don’t want to sit in the trolley, you just don’t have time to read the ingredients, so it’s hard,” she said. “You just pick what looks to be healthy, but then sometimes you get home and you read it and you’re like ‘they tricked me’.” Mrs Yasharoska said she had a few go-to snack recipes for her kids and freshly prepared their meals. She said she would like to see more regulations around the marketing of processed foods. “It’s just the confusion of, what’s this, what am I buying? It’s very confusing. It’s not easy to know what’s in each product,” she said. Mrs Yasharoska has taken dietary advice from her sister, Perth nutritionist Jade Harman, who said UPFs had become popular, particularly as snacks for children because of our busy lifestyles. “It’s not so much that kids want those foods, but it’s really easy and convenient for the parents in terms of them popping something into a lunch box,” she said. Ms Harman said UPFs were often energy dense but lacked protein and fibre. “Those two things help you feel full and satisfied and they increase the hormones that tell your body that you’ve had enough to eat,” she said. “Those are pretty much non-existent in ultra processed foods, so you’re still consuming a lot of calories, but then you’re hungry quite quickly after and then that promotes over consumption.” Ms Harman said she educated clients about which UPFs might be better than others so they had a ‘plan B’ if they were unable to serve a homemade healthy snack or meal. Professor Pollard said research now suggested UPFs were addictive for some people. “Given there’s a high level of refined carbohydrates, fats, sugars and salts in these foods, they tend to be the type of foods that people might start to crave,” she said. “The addiction component is really around once you stop having the foods, having withdrawal symptoms.” Professor Pollard called for UPFs to be labelled as addictive to warn people of the dangers of consuming them, following the release of research in 2023 which estimated one in seven adults and one in eight children were hooked on UPFs. She said Australia needed to adopt a comprehensive approach to changing the population’s diet using measures like warning labels, taxes and strong limitations on the advertising and promotion of UPFs. “We can’t fiddle around at the edges. I think we are dealing with this massive commercial vested interest in eating and promoting a diet that is unhealthy.,” she said. “In order to do that, we have to not look to the individual to change their behaviour. We need to change the structures that influence our food choices.”