Michelle Darmody: Ireland could lead the way in ultra-processed foods control
We need food policies that help us buy a less processed option at a cheaper cost and help us make informed and healthy choices for ourselves and our families. File photo
Food labels do not tell the whole story. The report titled 'Ultra-processed foods: time to put health before profit', clarifies that ultra processed food, or as they are known, UPFs, are damaging both our mental and physical health, leading to chronic disease and premature death.
Most people can point out junk food — the treats children get at parties, bags of jellies, crisps, fizzy drinks. It is not as easy to classify what a UPF is as they are dotted throughout the modern diet. The term comes from research carried out in Brazil, where a four-part scale was devised to classify food. It is now called the Nova scale.
In group one of the Nova scale are foods such as rice, potatoes, vegetables, fruit, olives, plain nuts, plain milk, natural yogurt, grains such as porridge or flour, eggs, fish, meat that has not been preserved such as a plain raw steak or plain raw chicken, or foods that have been frozen in their natural state. Plain pasta falls into this category as well.
In group two are processed ingredients. Food that has undergone some process or change to make it into a culinary ingredient, for example an olive that has been changed into olive oil, or milk has been changed or processed into butter. Salt and sugar fall into this category, as does vinegar and ground spices.
Group three is foods that have been processed a bit more than the previous section, such as tinned fish, tinned tomatoes, many fermented or canned foods, and some cheeses and breads. This is where it can get tricky. Many cheese and breads are in this category but others that are made in a more industrial way would move into group four.
Group four is the UPFs, or ultra-processed foods. These are foods that are created using methods and technologies not widely available a generation ago. They often have enhanced flavours, emulsifiers to stop them separating and preservatives to make them last longer.
There are lots of breads, flavoured yogurts, and breakfast cereals that fall into this group and are difficult to distinguish from the previous category. The foods contain components and ingredients that we do not have access to in a home kitchen, for example factory produced ready-meals or frozen pizzas.
Other common things are margarines, instant soups, nuggets, and other reconstituted meats such as commercially produced sausages and fish fingers, as well as many sweets, protein bars and crisps.
Food labelling in Ireland does not allow you to see how a manufacturer made a loaf of bread, so it is difficult for us to put it in the correct section of the Nova scale ourselves. Bread can be a soda bread loaf bought from a local bakery who baked it from scratch, or it can be factory produced with a fast-rising agent and preservatives added to keep it from spoiling.
This second bread has slid up the scale to be a UPF. So, to say bread is a UPF is true and untrue. This is the problem.
The UPF bread will be cheaper because the technology, ingredients and method used ensure huge amounts of loaves can be made quickly and in large volumes, and it will last a long time on shop shelves.
We need food policies that help us buy a less processed option at a cheaper cost and help us make informed and healthy choices for ourselves and our families.
When a government talks about reducing salt, fat or sugar in a product, it is quantifiable. It is not so clear for UPFs. There is not a definitive way of asking food companies to change how they make, flavour or enhance our food. UPFs by their very nature are designed to make large profits so it is of interest to keep producing them and keep making money.
In the Isle of Man, the department of education used the Nova scale as a framework to review its school meals and understand how much UPFs children were eating on a daily basis. It looked at every ingredient that went into every school meal, checked if the meat was preserved, and pre-packed, what additives were in the sauces being used, what snacks the children were being fed.
It found a staggering 50% of school food was UPF. Over the course of last summer, the department overhauled its school food menus and managed to reduce that quantity to 5%. It ensured meals were cooked from scratch with fresh ingredients each day, resulting in health benefits for the children and a boost for the local economy.
So far, it has managed to increase the food sourced from local farmers from 6% to 25% and is planning to increase this each year.
Meanwhile, many of the school meals served to Irish children contain a large proportion of UPFs. Chicken can be a fresh chicken you buy and roast at home so it is in group 1, or you can buy chicken that was cooked by a meat processor, chopped and preserved, which will slide it up the scale to a UPF food.
In the majority of Irish hot school meals pre-packed and prepared meat is bought in by companies, a sauce is pre-bought, the sauce is stirred through the meat. The mixture is scooped into take-away packaging and heated within this packaging.
Children then eat out of the take-away container a few hours later, after the meal is driven, often long distances, to their school. A hot meal like this is high on the Nova scale — it lacks nutrition, is not good for the environment and it has brought little or no benefit to the local economy and farming community.
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As all the above shows, food labels do not tell the full story. We need to look beyond the ingredients and nutritional content and look at processing methods when it comes to food manufacturing.
It’s not fair to make the consumer responsible for navigating this complicated terrain, as the report states, relying on behaviour change by individuals is insufficient. We need a different approach to food policy in Ireland, one where public health rather than profit comes first.
According to Ruth Hegarty, director of Food Policy Ireland: “We need strong fiscal policy, such as with the tax on sugar-sweetened drinks, and strict regulation of marketing and availability to begin curbing the consumption of UPF, coupled with policies that make fresh healthy foods more available, accessible and affordable to all. Anywhere public money is spent on food — schools, hospitals, universities, public buildings — are an obvious place to start”.
Who in Ireland could help create and enact such policies? We need to work towards having a Ministry for Food, and a citizen’s assembly on food would be a good place to start - currently our only minister with food in their title is Noel Grealish, whose remit covers food promotion, new markets, research and development. Looking at food as a commodity is part of this problem, not the solution.
As a nation, we should hold our politicians and policy makers to account. Following the report, we further understand that ultra processed foods are damaging. People need to be able to recognise, then reduce these heavily marketed foods, and at the same time we need policy change that improves access to fresh foods.
Ireland led the way in tobacco control. Now let’s lead the way in UPF control.
- Michelle Darmody is a food writer with a PhD in food literacy
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