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Lookup NU author(s): Professor Martin White, Dr Jean Adams
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
© Author(s) (or their employer(s)) 2025. Re-use permitted under CC BY. Published by BMJ Group. While many countries use guidance and policies based on nutrients and food groups to support citizens to consume healthy diets, fewer have explicitly adopted the concept of ultra-processed foods (UPF). UPF consumption is associated with many adverse health outcomes in cohort studies. In the UK, a nutrient profiling model (NPM) is used to identify foods high in fat, salt or sugar (HFSS) and several policies target these. It is not known how well the NPM also captures UPF. We aimed to quantify the proportion of food and drink items consumed in the UK that are HFSS, UPF, both or neither and describe the food groups making the largest contributions to each category. We analysed data from the National Diet and Nutrition Survey, between 2008/2009 and 2018/2019, using descriptive statistics. We used three metrics of food consumption: all foods, percentage of energy in all foods (reflecting that different foods are consumed in different portion sizes and are of different energy densities) and percentage of food weight in all foods (reflecting that some UPFs have few calories but are consumed in large volumes). We found that 33.4% of foods, 47.4% of energy and 16.0% of food weight were HFSS; 36.2%, 59.8% and 32.9%, respectively, were UPFs; 20.1%, 35.1% and 12.6% were both and 50.5%, 27.9% and 63.7% were neither. In total, 55.6% of UPF foods, 58.7% of energy from UPFs and 38.3% of food weight from UPF consumed were also HFSS. The most common food groups contributing to foods that were UPF but not HFSS were low-calorie soft drinks and white bread. The UK NPM captures at best just over half of UPFs consumed in the UK. Expanding the NPM to include ingredients common in UPFs (eg, non-nutritive sweeteners, emulsifiers) would capture a larger percentage of UPFs and could incentivise 'deformulation' of UPF products.
Author(s): Kesaite V, Chavez-Ugalde Y, White M, Adams J
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: BMJ Nutrition, Prevention and Health
Year: 2025
Pages: Epub ahead of print
Online publication date: 28/03/2025
Acceptance date: 11/03/2025
Date deposited: 15/04/2025
ISSN (electronic): 2516-5542
Publisher: BMJ Publishing Group
URL: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjnph-2024-001035
DOI: 10.1136/bmjnph-2024-001035
Data Access Statement: Data are available in a public, open access repository. The National Diet and Nutrition Survey Years 1–11, 2008–2019 data are available in a public, open access repository and can be accessed via the UK Data Service (http://ukdataservice.ac.uk).
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