“It boils down to things with ingredients in them that are really only used in industrial context”, said Chris van Tulleken.<\/p>\n
“If your food has an emulsifier, a stabiliser, a colouring, a flavouring – even a natural flavouring – it’s very likely to be ultra-processed”.<\/p>\n
“They almost always are high in fat, salt, sugar or energy, and they’re engineered so they’re typically very hard to stop eating”, he added. <\/p>\n
A 2024 study published by European Journal of Nutrition found that toddlers in the UK obtain almost half of their calories from ultra-processed foods, rising to 59% by the age of seven.<\/p>\n
A recent report, the World Obesity Federation’s ATLAS 2026, found that 3.8 million children between the ages of 5 and 19 years in the UK have a high BMI, meaning they are either overweight or obese. That’s around twice as high as in France and Italy.<\/p>\n
Chris van Tulleken was in Southampton to speak at the NIHR Southampton Biomedical Research Centre Open Day.<\/p>\n
In his talk he expressed concern over the way many ultra-processed foods were packaged and marketed to target young people.<\/p>\n
But after meeting with the teenagers on the LifeLab project he said he had hope that future generations would put pressure on politicians to bring in stricter regulations for how the products were sold and promoted. <\/p>\n
“What needs to happen is young people saying, ‘we demand change'”, said Chris.<\/p>\n
“When they say that it has such power”.<\/p>\n
“I come away from today feeling incredibly invigorated and I think we’re going to see projects like LifeLab spread throughout the country.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"“It boils down to things with ingredients in them that are really only used in industrial context”, said…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":943162,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4318],"tags":[105,4434,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-943161","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nutrition","8":"tag-health","9":"tag-nutrition","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/116531733215175689","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/943161","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=943161"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/943161\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/943162"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=943161"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=943161"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=943161"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}