Tim Spector’s 10 tips for cutting down on ultra-processed food

In The Food for Life Cookbook, ZOE co-founder Tim Spector shares over 100 delicious recipes to help you nurture your gut health and enjoy delicious meals featuring whole, unprocessed foods. Read on for Tim’s helpful definition of ultra-processed foods and actionable advice for incorporating whole foods into your weekly food shop and meal plan.

Our food choices are the most important ones we can make for our overall health and happiness. But we live in a world where convenience and speed often trump quality, and this is evident in our diets – especially when it comes to ultra-processed foods (UPFs).

These foods are not processed in the way that things like cheese or tinned tomatoes are; they are fundamentally altered from their original state, engineered to appeal to our taste buds with unnaturally high levels of fat, sugar and salt, and stripped of essential nutrients.

What are ultra-processed foods?

To make the distinction between processed and ultra-processed foods:

• Processed foods simply make whole foods more convenient to store or cook with

• Ultra-processed foods are fake foods, created in industrial factories using unrecognisable ingredients, that are stuck together to look like food – essentially ‘edible food-like substances’.

UPFs are designed by food chemists to hit the perfect ‘bliss point’, lighting up our brain’s pleasure centres and bypassing our body’s signals for telling us when we’re full. They are also known as hyper-palatable foods – easy to chew and containing three specific combinations of fat and salt, sugar and fat, and sugar and salt that never occur in nature.

They are specifically engineered to make us overeat, with a view to making more profit. Research has now clearly shown that UPFs make us feel hungrier, lead us to eat faster and overeat throughout the day, and are associated with increased health risks.

In an ideal world, we’d expect legislative change, but UPF producers lobby hard against it and we don’t have the luxury of time. So, we must educate ourselves. Here are my tips to help:

1. Read food labels: Familiarise yourself with ingredient lists to spot high-fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated oils, hydrolysed proteins and other additives.

2. Cook more at home: Preparing your own meals allows you to control ingredients and avoid additives commonly found in UPFs.

3. Choose whole foods: Prioritise whole, minimally processed options like fresh fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and lean proteins such as white fish, tofu and beans.

4. Avoid ready-to-eat meals: These are often packed with preservatives and additives to increase shelf life. Opt for freshly prepared dishes instead.

5. Limit snack foods: Snacks are often ultra-processed, so try to replace them with healthier options like nuts or fresh fruit.

6. Understand additives: Be aware of the over 2,000 approved food additives and learn which ones often indicate a UPF.

7. Make gradual changes: Make small, incremental changes to your diet, swapping out one UPF at a time for healthier options.

8. Be sceptical of ‘healthy’ labels: Items marketed as healthy can still be ultra-processed if they artificially add back nutrients after stripping the core ingredients of them.

9. Educate yourself: Learn more about UPFs, their health impacts and better alternatives. The better informed you are, the easier it is to make healthier choices.

10. Plan your meals: Having a meal plan can help resist the temptation of ready-to-eat UPFs.

If you want to learn more about the science behind food and the gut microbiome, dive into Tim Spector’s bestselling books Spoon-Fed and Food for Life. You can also listen to informative expert interviews on the ZOE Science & Nutrition Podcast:

Ready to put what you’ve learned into action? Check out The Food for Life Cookbook by Tim Spector and The Happy Foodie’s selection of UPF-free recipes.