Nutrition advisers to the UK Government have said they continue to be concerned by associations between higher consumption of ultra-processed food (UPF) and poor health outcomes, but point to ongoing limitations in the evidence base.
The Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition (SACN) said an ongoing reliance on observational data rather than randomised control trials (RCTs) meant it was still not possible to assess the health impacts of food processing itself as distinct from the poor nutritional characteristics of many types of UPF.
The Committee said further research is needed to refine the commonly used NOVA classification system to better identify foods and food categories where the risk to health is greatest.
Published this month, SACN’s rapid evidence update follows an initial evidence review in 2023 in which the Committee found more research is needed before it could draw any firm conclusions about whether UPF causes poor health, despite finding associations between increased consumption of UPF and an increased risk of health issues such as obesity, chronic diseases like type-2 diabetes, and depression.
The evidence update focused on higher quality evidence from umbrella and systematic reviews of prospective cohort studies. SACN said these consistently reported that increased consumption of UPF was associated with increased risk of a broad range of adverse health outcomes, adding that it continued to find these observations “very concerning”.
It also found evidence that not all categories of UPF may affect health in the same way, with adverse health outcomes consistently associated with meat and animal products but not with other UPF categories including vegetarian meat-alternative products.
However, SACN said the limitations identified in its 2023 review remain, including the fact that available evidence is almost exclusively observational in nature. “The evidence base considered contains limited or no information on the health impacts of processing or ingredients used within foods leading them to be classified as UPFs. It is therefore not possible to assess any effects these have on health separately from the established effects of the poor nutritional characteristics of UPF,” the Committee wrote.
Studies also inconsistently account for important covariates such as socio-economic status, BMI, energy and nutritional intake, all of which may be related to the health outcomes considered, it concluded.
SACN acknowledged that new research, including a number of RCTs, is underway and said it would keep the topic under annual review and consider it again at its next horizon scan meeting in 2026.
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