Dr Chris van Tulleken: Without action on food industry, a public health catastrophe is inevitable

This eye-popping discovery is one of many I’ve made while filming my new BBC documentary, Irresistible: Why We Can’t Stop Eating. It has left me more convinced than ever that our government must hold the food industry to greater account.

Many of you will know that, with my twin brother Dr Xand, I’ve been researching the devastating effects that the ready availability of ultra-processed foods (UPFs) have on our national diet.

We now know those are spiralling obesity levels and increasing cancer rates, particularly in gastrointestinal cancers. Working in a hospital, I see the toll that diet-related diseases have on our patients.

Yet one question has continually bugged me – why is industrially processed food, from frozen pizza to chocolate and sweets, so much more addictive than home-made? I cook with fat, salt and sugar, so it can’t just be down to those.

Well, unlike those chocolate brownies we might make for the kids, UPFs are actively designed to leave us wanting more. Every single ingredient is optimised so that we eat and buy more as soon as possible – all at the lowest possible cost to the manufacturer.

Food companies use MRI scanners to measure the brain waves of food testers consuming ice cream or fizzy drinks before the ingredients are tweaked again and again to get the maximum dopamine hit. Crisp packets are designed to crinkle so that the crisps themselves seem fresh and crunchy, the colour of a cereal box can make us think it tastes sweeter and frozen ice cream doesn’t smell of anything when you open the lid so perfume (usually an artificial waft of chocolate and caramel) is added.

Sounds almost Orwellian, doesn’t it? But these are hard facts revealed by brave whistleblowers and industry insiders, who showed me what lengths manufacturers will go to, to maximise the "moreishness" of their product.

In effect, the public have been part of a vast, ongoing experiment, the data from which is largely hidden from us. All we see is our bathroom scales and the numbers on the blood pressure monitor creeping ever upwards.

Is the food industry to blame? Well, the real problem lies in the failure of governments to regulate the food industry from the top down. As I also learnt while making my film, most of the big food manufacturing companies are not in charge of their own business model. They answer to the pension funds and the hedge funds that own them, and that means their job is to make as much money as possible.

I’d like to see progressive taxation on the worst products, marketing restrictions for children and compulsory warning labels. It seems extraordinary to me that my seven-year-old can go into any shop and buy a can of cola with ten cubes of sugar in it, alongside caffeine – an addictive drug – and phosphoric acid, with not one message on the can that says it’s bad for them.

We know these things work. We’ve done it with tobacco – there is growing research that UPFs are as dangerous as smoking – and the new ban on junk food advertising before the watershed is welcome – but we also need to end the conflicts of interest that dog the committees meant to be looking after us.

In the Government Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition alone, more than half of the members have links to companies like Nestlé and Unilever. It’s plain wrong.

If the government does not start to hold our powerful food industry to account, we will surely continue walking towards a public health catastrophe – one that is not our fault.

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