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Most people know that smoking is bad for your health, but there's actually one type of food that could be even worse, and billions across the globe are none the wiser.
It can be difficult to be entirely on top of your diet, as factors such as cost and time make keeping to a strict and entirely healthy regime more challenging than you'd expect for some.
By far the biggest result of this is an over reliance on convenience food, typically in the form of ready meals or pre-prepared items — but these might actually be more dangerous than they seem according to one doctor, who compares their long-term threat to that of smoking.
Speaking on the Diary of a CEO podcast hosted by Steven Bartlett, Dr Chris van Tulleken revealed that foods falling into the 'ultra processed' category – often referred to as UPFs – pose an worrying threat to your health, especially relating to cancer.
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Studies have already identified how certain types of food, including numerous UPFs, can dramatically raise your risk of developing cancer types such as pancreatic, stomach, and colorectal, and Dr Van Tulleken very much echoes this sentiment.
The so-called 'Junk Food Doctor' explained that "we've called the foods that harm us junk food and processed food — high fat, salt, and sugar food. We've not had a way of labelling food even as a pandemic of disease taken over the world."
He adds that 'poor' diets typically involving high amounts of ultra processed foods have now "overtaken tobacco as the leading cause of early death," adding that the widespread production of such goods actually contributes significantly to carbon emissions and plastic pollution to make matters worse.
"So about 12 years ago, the definition was developed to describe a western industrial American diet," Dr Van Tulleken illustrates, "and it was done by a team in Brazil, and much of the best work on this stuff has been done by teams in Central and South America.
"The only thing that has changed was the influx of, broadly an American diet of industrial processed foods. The definition was invented in 2009/2010 and we've had a decade of evidence now that is very clear that it is ultra processed food that is responsible, not just for pandemic weight gain and obesity, but also for a long list of other health problems, including early death."
The main issue comes with the fact that UPFs are typically far cheaper than whole food alternatives, and also often come with the convenience of being ready-made or ready to eat which people with busy lives and not a lot of time will obviously favor.
It's far more complex than just cutting these foods out completely, but making people aware of the risks might lead to more informed dietary choices and perhaps even regulation on a governmental level going forward.
