Why Do We Have Chemicals In Our Food?

It's a busy morning in London and I'm on my way to the CNBC office but first I'm going to pick up a coffee and probably a cookie too. No worries, thank you. When it comes to food, this is usually how I start my day. Then it's usually a sandwich for lunch and a ready meal I purchased from the supermarket for dinner. And every once in a while, a cheeseburger after a night out. All these food items have something in common. They all fit in the category of ultra-processed foods. A 2021 study found that ultra-processed foods account for more than half of calories consumed in the US and UK and about 20-40% of calories consumed in other high and middle income countries. And the bad news for me, and many others, is that recent studies have linked consumption of UPF to serious diseases like diabetes, obesity and even cancer. So how widespread is this problem and should ultra-processed foods be off the menu? Firstly I'm speaking to Tim Spector, Professor of Genetic Epidemiology at King's College London and the co-founder of ZOE, a personalised nutrition app. I'm showing Tim my lunch menu, a tuna sandwich, a lemonade and a bag of chips. Look at all those carbs, you know, why do you want palm fat in here? Why do you want wheat starch? This one is a diet lemonade. It's made with real lemon juice, no added sugar. To make sure they're not adding sugar, they're adding artificial chemicals, artificial chemical sweeteners. So you're getting this chemical composite which has this health halo of being healthy and source of vitamin C and all this nonsense but it's actually really, really bad for us. More than half of the calories consumed by the average UK household are ultra-processed. It's seen the UK food industry become increasingly lucrative for food companies. The food and beverage industry is the largest manufacturing sector in the country, contributing $34 billion to the economy and employing over 400,000 people. The British Food and Drink Federation, which represents the $128 billion food industry, says there are many benefits to processing food, such as turning raw ingredients into edible food, increasing shelf life, improving texture and offering a variety of options. The first time early humans processed food was about a million years ago, when our ancestors decided to cook meat with fire. Then came other interventions like baking, fermentation and salting of food. The Industrial Revolution brought new techniques like pasteurization. All of this allowed us to consume and store food in a safer way, free of infections. By the 1950s, with growing prosperity around the world, food processing became less about preservation and focused more on convenience, enhancing the taste, colour and texture. There's chemicals, there's brilliant food scientists in these companies that come up with these foods that are just got that right mix of fats and sugars and salt just to really make you want more and more and overeat. Most of the ultra processed food that you found that are higher in salt, fat and sugar, they are designed extremely tasty, they are ready to eat and they are also really aggressively marketed especially to children. Dr. Chiara Chang is the author of an Imperial College London study that links UPF consumption to increased risk of cancer. We follow up almost 200,000 participants who were aged between 40 and 69 years old and we follow them up for about 10 years and we found that for every 10% of their proportion of their diet that's coming from ultra processed food, every 10% of that was associated with higher risk of developing cancer. What's the link between obesity and consumption of ultra processed food in your research? We also found that higher consumption was associated with higher risk of obesity and type 2 diabetes as well. Non-communicable diseases like heart disease, cancer and diabetes which are not spread through infection kill 41 million people each year. That's 74% of all deaths in the world. The World Health Organization says that most of these diseases are the result of four particular behaviors. Tobacco use, harmful use of alcohol, physical inactivity and of course an unhealthy diet. Here in the UK, 1 in 4 people are obese, that's the highest rate in Europe. And rising obesity comes at a time when there is serious food insecurity. According to the Food Foundation, healthier foods are twice as expensive as less healthy options, especially fruits and vegetables. I visited the Food Foundation and spoke to Rebecca Tobey, a nutritionist and business manager. How do you think we can find the balance? Because the problem is most of these ultra processed food items are quite accessible and cheap so it's an important option for a lot of people. I think we need to acknowledge that not everybody has the time or the mental bandwidth to spend on food. If you're working multiple shifts and your food budget is really constrained, we need to make sure that the government and businesses are acting to actually change the food environment people are living in. It mustn't be about individual choice because really choice is severely constrained here when it comes to what people can buy. In recent years, Britain's food system increasingly became a controversial issue. Health campaigners have been calling for the industry and the government to take action to improve access to better food. A group of investors have also joined the conversation. We noticed that investors did not have a seat at the table when it came to advocating for the well-designed regulation really that will be able to support us to build a healthy, sustainable and affordable food system. Sophie Lawrence leads a group of investors called the Investor Coalition for Food Policy. They manage assets worth $7 trillion. What sort of regulation would you like to see? What we specifically are calling for within the mandatory reporting legislation is for food sector companies to report a set of health and sustainability metrics and that would be on a mandatory basis. And what history has told us is that the voluntary reporting standards have really been inadequate in driving the necessary scale of change. But by reporting this data in a consistent way, it means that as investors we can understand the risks that are facing these companies. Last year, another investor coalition called the Healthy Markets Initiative run by ShareAction called on the world's biggest food manufacturers to disclose the health profile of their sales. The investor letter said British supermarkets were flooded with less healthy foods, causing significant harm to population health and creating systemic risks to investor returns. The industry has responded to calls for more transparency. Nestle, the world's largest food company, reported the nutritional value of its products for the first time in 2022. Unilever revealed in its annual report that 64% of its products met World Health Organization-aligned nutritional standards. In a statement to CNBC, Unilever said they now have a new target, making sure 85% of their food portfolio meets the company's nutrition criteria by 2028. However, these steps are voluntary and at the moment, companies mark their own homework. If you're a leading business and you want to invest in healthier food, you're essentially taking a big commercial risk in doing that because it's not a level playing field. So none of your competitors will be doing that. And so that we see as being quite unfair and something that the government needs to act on. There's been some really good research in the last couple of years that says that actually consumers want their retailers and their manufacturers to provide healthier products. They recognize that the cost of kind of healthy food is actually really prohibitive to lots of people. Clearly, many of us want to eat healthier and better, but is it even possible to avoid ultra-processed foods altogether? Now you can do it, but you've got to live a bit like a monk. Food is there to be savored, but just eating these stuff regularly every single day, every meal, accumulating all these chemicals in our body, they make us overeat by 25%. And for people who may not have yet access to a service like ZOE, for example, do you have a few simple tips? Eat for your gut microbes. So I've got five simple rules that most people can follow. Try and eat 30 plants a week. Eat the rainbow, lots of colors, which means you're getting defense chemicals, polyphenols in your food. Have regular fermented foods. Try and leave a gap, i.e. 14 hours overnight where you're not eating, your gut microbes can rest. And finally, cut down way down on the ultra-processed foods. And if everyone did that, the whole country would be a lot healthier.