No, Britain is not a nation of ‘food addicts’

It’s silly season again, and the Daily Express hasn’t let us down. In a frontpage story this week, it claims ‘junk-food addition’ (sic) is now so widespread in the UK that ‘10million suffer from the devastating disease’. Assuming millions of people have not, in fact, developed a compulsion to do maths with their steak bakes, it seems what the Express really means is that we Brits simply cannot help gorging ourselves on fat, salt and sugar.

While the figure of ‘10million’ has a plucked-from-the-air quality, it does have some basis in actual research. In 2023, the BMJ published an article titled ‘Social, clinical and policy implications of ultra-processed-food addiction’. The article summarises that ‘ultra-processed-food addiction is estimated to occur in 14 per cent of adults and 12 per cent of children and is associated with biopsychological mechanisms of addiction and clinically significant problems’. Take 14 per cent of Britain’s 69million population and you have nearly 10million food addicts.

This finding is based on a 25-point questionnaire, the Yale Food Addiction Scale (YFAS). However, it is worth noting that the developers of the YFAS are slightly more circumspect than the Express about what it reveals. They say ‘the YFAS is not sufficient evidence that “food addiction” exists’ at all. And nor does it ‘provide a standardised tool to identify individuals who are the most likely to be experiencing an addictive response to food’.

The Express article does offer one rather lurid example of possible ‘food addiction’, wherein a wife ‘was forced to spray bread with bleach before throwing it in the bin to stop her out-of-control husband gorging in the middle of the night’. Admittedly, if you’re picking bread out of the kitchen bin in the early hours, you might have a problem. But I’d wager that the 10million ‘food addicts’ identified by the Express are not doing anything like this. We might enjoy certain foods a great deal – perhaps even too much – but most of us don’t lose our shit if we can’t get them. And even if we do obsess over food, it is still just food, not crack cocaine. Nobody talks about being ‘a functioning Doritos addict’.

Of course, we might recognise that we need to lose weight, or that we have less-than-ideal snacking habits. But there are no addictive substances to be found in the majority of ‘junk’ food that can’t also be found in ‘good’ foods. The jury is still out on the various additives used in mass-produced food – but they’re not addictive in and of themselves. Fats and sugars, although widely demonised these days, will be found even in the finest home-cooked meals.

The only thing claims like those made in the Express succeed in doing is reinforcing the idea that ‘ultra-processed foods’ (UPFs) are killing us. But what exactly are these wicked UPFs? The idea is pretty nebulous, but one of the more popular definitions says they are ‘foods which contain ingredients that you might not find in your kitchen cupboard (for example, types of additives or emulsifiers or stabilisers)’. Another definition is food that is made through ‘processes’ you couldn’t replicate at home. Which is hardly scientific.

The UPF net is cast wide, extending well beyond cakes, crisps and chocolate or what you might find in the snack aisle. Even things like sliced wholemeal bread, flavoured yogurts and supermarket pasta are deemed to be ultra-processed and therefore deadly. Yet thanks to this catch-all definition, food puritans can now claim that ‘UPF’ makes up a big chunk of our diets.

Meanwhile, mainstream nutritionists generally maintain that excess calories – not ‘UPF addiction’ – are to blame for weight gain. Some think we eat too much fat. Some, like the doctor quoted in the Express article, name carbohydrates as the culprit.

What drives some of us to eat so many calories in the first place remains the big question. A big part of the answer is hunger. Which is presumably why hunger-suppressing jabs like Wegovy and Mounjaro have proven such a hit.

What the fretting over UPFs and ‘food addiction’ really smacks of is snobbery about mass-produced food – a disdain that’s been around for at least a century. In The Intellectuals and the Masses, John Carey describes the contempt with which the Bloomsbury Set looked on those who ate canned foods, the UPFs of their day. Nowadays, if you’re not making your own sourdough bread and eating locally sourced vegetables, then you’re part of the great unwashed. It’s always struck me as apt that Chris van Tulleken’s bestseller about UPFs is called Ultra-Processed People. It’s the people who eat the processed food who the nanny statists are most repulsed by.

The idea that people are ‘addicted’ to junk food implies that getting fat is solely about a weakness of will. To the coterie of food researchers and public-health wonks, those people are not like ‘us’, the chosen ones. Apparently, the truly healthy way to be is to obsess over every morsel you put in your mouth. Maybe if they just enjoyed their food they’d be a bit happier – and might leave the rest of us alone.

Rob Lyons is a spiked columnist.