The public discourse around diet and nutrition is polarised and heated, even at the best of times. Yet the blowback I got when I inadvertently found myself at the centre of a debate about supermarket bread took me slightly aback.
This all kicked off after I wrote an opinion piece on ‘ultra-processed foods’, or UPFs, for The Guardian. For those of you who have been living under a rock, we are NOT talking about ‘processed food’, which is, aside from eating fruit plucked off a tree, almost everything we eat today – including foods that have been cooked, fermented, pickled, cured and smoked.
UPFs, on the other hand, are the product of industrial processes that are difficult, if not impossible, to replicate in a domestic kitchen. These include sweetened drinks, prepackaged sweet and savoury foods, fresh and frozen ready meals, and most supermarket breads. On average in the UK, we get around 50 per cent of our calories from UPFs.
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So, what is it about UPFs that makes them so apparently bad for us?
First, because of the degree of processing, most UPFs are inherently lower in protein and/or fibre. This makes them calorically available, meaning they are easily digestible and our body can extract a large proportion of the calories.
Second, all that processing strips out much of the flavour. Where does flavour come from? The holy trinity of sugar, salt, and fat. Amen. These are replaced for the foods to be made palatable, thus UPFs often contain higher amounts of sugar, salt, and fat. Amen.
Third, and most controversially, some argue that it is the processing that is inherently bad; the fact that many of the foods are so highly engineered. In my opinion, I think that the evidence supporting this third reason is equivocal at best, and at worst entirely absent.
Regardless of the underlying reasons, there is much evidence that consumption of too much UPF is linked to poorer health outcomes, exemplified by the recent meta-analyses of 45 different studies encompassing nearly 10 million people and published in the British Medical Journal.
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The authors reported direct associations between exposure to UPFs and 32 health parameters spanning mortality, cancer, mental health, respiratory, cardiovascular, gastrointestinal, and metabolic health outcomes.
An open and shut case surely? Hold your horses. The devil is, as always, in the detail.
My main issue with the UPF concept is its imprecision. The term UPF covers a broad spectrum of different foods, from deep-fried nuggets derived from mechanically recovered animal protein (meat is too strong a term here) high in sugar, salt and fat, to otherwise minimally processed foods with a few emulsifiers and other industrial additives.
I can understand how eating too much of the former has contributed to the pandemic of diet-related illnesses we are currently facing. The latter, however, includes mass-produced supermarket bread, where a large proportion of consumed UPF calories come from.
I argued in The Guardian piece, that while the privileged can choose to stroll down our leafy boroughs to purchase fancy artisanal sourdough, the cost of such a luxury is prohibitive to many in our society.
Shockingly, the Food Foundation found that in January 2024, 15 per cent of UK households, or around eight million adults and three million children, were living in food insecurity. Ultimately, bread is primarily made from flour, salt, water and yeast. Taste aside, how is supermarket bread worse for you than fancy bread?
In a letter of response to my op-ed, Chris Young from the Real Bread Campaign asserted that: "Lactic acid bacterial fermentation, fundamental to the process of making genuine sourdough bread, leads to changes in flavour and, as a growing body of evidence suggests, it might have health and nutritional benefits."
In an interview with The Guardian’s Tim Adams, author and broadcaster Dr Chris van Tulleken said: "If we look at a loaf of basic supermarket bread, versus a loaf of real bread… the supermarket bread will be extremely high in salt and generally high in sugar, above the recommended level. It will have high energy density.
"We know energy density, the number of calories per 100 grams of food, is really, really important for weight gain. And then the supermarket bread will be extremely soft meaning you eat it quicker and consume the calories before you become full."
I broadly agree with the points made by each Chris. Traditional sourdough is indeed different from the supermarket loaf, which is easier to eat and may (though not always) have some added sugar. The artisan sourdough, however, is almost always higher in salt… it is one of the reasons it tastes so nice!
The ubiquity of UPFs in our food system does require sober and non-hysterical debate. However, I stand by my assertion that there is little evidence to show that supermarket bread is bad for you.
I am not ‘anti’ fancy bread. But I am against shaming a large section of society that lacks the resources to buy and enjoy it.
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