“We are seeing a huge increase of deaths linked to unhealthy diets,” said Arnanz, of the NCD Alliance, an NGO fighting against noncommunicable diseases. Not only are UPFs usually “high in fats and sugar and sodium,” she argued, but there is also “an independent unhealthiness layer of the processing of food.”
Her last point is a controversial one, directly disputed by industry and up for debate among scientists. Where health advocates see cheap junk food that’s chemically engineered to be addictive, the industry can point to innovations that make products more nutritious, less expensive and safer to eat, for longer.
Echoes of the tobacco debate
For all the increasingly tough talk around UPFs from both Kennedy and Várhelyi, concrete regulation remains scarce in both Washington and Brussels.
Latin America has arguably been the trailblazer, with Brazil a leading example. It became one of the first countries to explicitly tell its population to avoid UPFs, and backed this up with rules to limit them in schools. On the international level, the WHO is developing its own global guidance, with plans to present a food profiling tool intended to help governments decide on UPF regulations on Monday at an event in Nuremberg, Germany.
The global health body has come down hard on the UPF industry. It accused it in a 2024 report of using the same playbook as alcohol and tobacco industries “to influence entire systems,” from “political lobbying and spreading misinformation and disinformation in the media, to harmful financial practices, and targeted marketing strategies directed at children and young people.”
Connecting the consumption of processed foods with the tobacco and fossil fuel industries is “irresponsible and outrageously misleading,” said Rafael Sampson, a senior manager for public affairs at the trade association FoodDrinkEurope. The WHO report, he added, “ignores” that the science around UPFs remains contested.