How to decode food labels to take control of your diet and identify ultra-processed food 

Do you know how much ultra-processed food — UPF — is in your shopping basket? Items like ice cream, cereal bars and wraps are all commonly purchased and consumed foods, but they could be affecting your health

There is still much confusion about what exactly ultra-processed food is.

Mass-produced bread, ready meals, breakfast cereals, reconstituted ham, shop-bought biscuits, fizzy drinks: Almost half the food in Irish shopping baskets falls into the ultra-processed category — and, often, we don’t even realise it or know what it is doing to our health.

Those statistics were initially published in the international research journal Public Health Nutrition in 2018.