The food industry has a dirty secret – and it’s making Britain poorer and unhealthier
By Brad Young, Money feature writer
It’s no secret that cheap and convenient supermarket food is often bad for you – but what we’re not told is how large parts of the food industry have been engineered to keep you eating it.
We sat down with numerous experts who explained how food manufacturers are incentivised to exploit your genetics, encourage over-eating and to remove a crucial healthy ingredient from their products.
It’s costing the poorest families their health and the country billions of pounds to deal with the consequences, these experts say.
Adding salt and sugar saves manufacturers money
The way to make food cheaper is to process it, says Thijs van Rens, professor of economics at Warwick University, who leads the institution’s food research.
That means adding preservatives salt and sugar, while removing fibre, which can spoil food. This leads to lower storage, transport and wastage costs.
A recent report by the Food Foundation found products that are higher in sugar, salt and fat cost £4.30 per 1,000 calories on average, while healthier alternatives cost £8.80.
But while it’s helping profit margins, it’s harming our guts – and making us want to eat more, and more, and more.
“Our bodies can’t function without fibre,” says Professor Tim Jackson, an ecological economist at the University of Surrey.
“Our gut complains, we begin to get leaky gut, we begin to get inflammation, we get all the precursors to chronic disease.”
As well as reducing the shelf life of food, fibre also slows down the absorption of sugar and carbohydrates and contributes to people feeling full. Without it, people experience sharper insulin spikes, making them hungry.
This feeling of hunger after eating unhealthy foods is aided by the addition of simple sugars, which speed up absorption compared with more complex carbohydrates.
“When companies process foods, they do that in order to maximise their profit,” Prof Rens says.
“Built into this system is also that the incentives are for companies to try and make people over-eat their products.”
Pump in some salt, and the final product has a “dramatically” longer shelf life and appeals to cravings ingrained in human genetics.
Human desire for these ingredients has been handed down from ancestors who lived in environments where salt, fat and sugar were scarce while fibre was abundant, explains Prof Jackson.
“Our brains evolved to respond to them and the food industry knows this, so it puts those sugar, fat and salt, saturated fats, into the foods that is engineered in order to persuade us to eat it,” he says.
Engineered calories and economic clout
The processing industry also has access to economic strategies typical of highly industrialised sectors to drive down prices that aren’t available to agriculture, which generally produces healthier food, says Jackson.
“The reason we expect [food] to be a cheap commodity is because of something that happened in the development of the food industry,” he explains.
“I’m not saying this was misguided, although it was definitely engineered: The idea that what was needed was to get cheap calories to as many people as possible, as fast as possible, and that led to a kind of processing industry which actually in structure doesn’t look very much like agriculture.”
As such, manufacturers benefit from economies of scale through more readily available mergers and acquisitions; have more financial clout, and therefore more power to lobby against regulations; and can study the impact of food on the brain and alter the ingredients to make it “almost impossible not to eat”.
We put these claims to the Food and Drink Federation (FDF), a trade association that advocates for British food and drink manufacturers, and it pointed to a Government Office for Science expert roundtable in 2023 that concluded there was “little evidence of foods themselves being addictive”.
“The industry is rightly highly regulated to ensure food is safe to eat,” an FDF spokesperson says, adding an ingredients list and nutritional information is available on all packaging.
The FDF says its members contribute a quarter fewer calories, a quarter less sugar, and a third less salt to the British grocery market than they did in 2015.
“Manufacturers are committed to working alongside policymakers to ensure that consumers have a wide range of nutritious food and drink products available, whatever their budget.”
Our case study is not convinced
Amanda Packham, 45, a nurse from Lincoln, isn’t convinced.
She wants to lose one stone, but since trying to eat more heathily, she’s seen her weekly shop increase by £70.
“Which is phenomenal really. And that’s not because I’m eating more, if anything I’m eating less, but it has to be better quality.”
She has had to give up social activities to afford the right fruit, vegetables and yogurts.
“I haven’t got a life because I’m trying to manage everything within a budget,” says Amanda.
“It’s frustrating because part of me thinks why am I putting myself through this?
“And I’m one of the lucky ones. So I really don’t know how a single mum on benefits is supposed to feed their kids properly.”
After housing costs, a fifth of households with children would need to spend 70% of their disposable income on food to afford the government-recommended healthy diet, according to the Food Foundation.
Time poverty
The cost of food is not just measured in terms of money, but time.
Healthier meals using whole ingredients take longer to prepare, whereas processed foods with long shelf lives can be more easily packaged and sold in a way that appeals to convenience.
“Time poverty is quite important. As it turns out, people who are money-poor also tend to be time-poor,” says Prof Rens.
There are a lot more single parents or people working two jobs lower down the income ladder, he says.
Kerry, 45, from Manchester, and her husband have found themselves struggling to find healthy and affordable food for their two children since increasing their work hours to keep up with the cost of living.
Not only do they face an “astronomical” food bill, but Kerry works full-time and her husband puts in seven days a week trying to pay for it, squeezing the hours available to cook.
“When you go to look for quick alternatives at the supermarket, they’re all just really bad for you,” says Kerry, whose household earns approximately £55,000.
“There is nothing that is fresh and healthy that is quick. I feel quite strongly that if you want to eat healthy you need to have the time to cook and, increasingly, we’re having to work more.”
In the office three days a week, she has been exasperated by the drive to end working from home, which had at least allowed her to prep dinner for her children during her lunch break.
The findings of the Food Foundation report are not, however, universal.
Shane Johnson, 43, from Nottinghamshire, says he and his family of four eat healthily and affordably.
“It frustrates me a little bit that you hear people saying that it’s expensive to eat healthy – that’s just not my experience,” the removals surveyor says.
“I make time. I work long hours, but I still come home and cook fresh meals every night from scratch.”
Who suffers?
Prof Rens says the difference in price between healthy and unhealthy food has led to “tremendous nutritional or dietary inequality, which then translates into health inequality”.
By their first year of school, children in the least wealthy 20% of the population are nearly twice as likely to be obese as those in the wealthiest 20%, according to the Food Foundation report.
Year six children in the most deprived areas of the country are more than twice as likely to have tooth decay than those in the least deprived areas.
People in the most deprived fifth are almost three times more likely to experience a lower-limb amputation as a result of type 2 diabetes than the wealthiest fifth, according to the latest statistics, from 2022.
“If poor people can barely afford to eat as it is, they’re going to go for whatever the cheapest option is, and that cheapest option at this point in time is food that is making them ill,” says Prof Jackson.
“It looks cheap on the supermarket shelves, but its costs are enormous and they’re being borne by the healthcare system, by the social care system, by the economy as a whole, and, of course, by the people who are suffering from the diseases that are being caused.”
His analysis for the Food, Farming and Countryside Commission last year found that in cash terms, the cost of chronic diseases caused by Britain’s unhealthy food system amounted to £268bn every year – almost as much as the UK’s entire healthcare budget.
This was broken down into direct costs for healthcare (£67.5bn), social care (£14.3bn) and welfare (£10.1bn), as well as indirect costs of economic inactivity and death to productivity (£116.4bn) and the “human costs” to carers, families and communities (£60bn).
“Those costs are around four times higher each year than it would cost to subsidise everyone in the country to change their diets towards a healthy diet,” he claims.
The government says it is “tackling the obesity crisis head-on”.
A spokesman says the government is giving councils “stronger powers” to block new fast-food outlets near schools and is cracking down on junk food adverts, with restrictions before the 9pm watershed coming into force from October.
“We are encouraging healthy diets for those on low incomes through our Healthy Start programme, helping children and families by rolling out free breakfast clubs in every primary school, and providing free healthy food for millions of children during the holidays.”
The Healthy Start scheme provides assistance to pregnant women and parents of children under four from low-income households to buy fruit, vegetables, pulses, milk and formula.
All children in Reception, year one and year two in England’s state-funded schools, as well as older pupils from low-income families, are also entitled to free school meals.
The Food and Drink Federation adds: “We want to work collaboratively with the government as it develops its food strategy to achieve a healthier and more sustainable food system, whilst ensuring the resilience of the sector and maintaining the UK’s food security.”
