Here’s a headline to dwell on for a moment:
“Ultra-processed food linked to nearly 18,000 early deaths a year in England”
(Guardian 28/4/2025).
WOW: 18,000 A YEAR!
You might imagine our Secretary of State for Health Wes Streeting might have had something to say about that. Sadly not.
According to the original research (published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine), ultra-processed foods are implicated in up to one in seven premature deaths.
WOW: ONE IN SEVEN PREMATURE DEATHS!
You might imagine our Secretary of State for Health Wes Streeting might have had something to say about that. Sadly not.
(More technically, what the research identified was “a linear-dose response association between the ultra-process food consumption and all-cause mortality”).
It’s not just Wes Streeting who’s not listening. Rachel Reeves has become pretty adept at turning a deaf ear. Earlier this year, a report from the Food, Farming and Countryside Commission published new research from Professor Tim Jackson at the University of Surrey showing that the UK’s addiction to unhealthy, ultra-processed foods (oozing fatty, salty and sugary ingredients) is costing the country £268 billion a year.
Breaking that figure down, dealing with the direct health impacts of these unhealthy diets costs the NHS around £68 billion, social care around £14 billion, and welfare services around £10 billion. The rest comprises the indirect costs of lost productivity through diet-related illnesses and premature death. As one of the report’s contributing authors put it:
“This £268 billion shows us that we have a food system that privatises the profits and socialises the harms from bad food. It puts a price on the failure of governments stretching back over 30 years to regulate big food”.
I know all these big numbers can lead directly to ‘psychic numbing’– but this one is quite easy to get a handle on. Total spending on the NHS here in the UK comes in at around £220 billion a year – i.e. less than the cost of this vast addictive dietary malfunction!
This is not just a UK problem. With startling candour, the Food and Agriculture Organisation (the UN’s principal agency dealing with food and Agri-businesses, with oversight of the entire global food system) has also laid bare the global costs of dietary habits increasingly dominated by ultra-processed foods. In its 2024 State of Food and Agriculture report, it came up with this astonishing headline:
“Unhealthy dietary patterns drive $8 trillion in annual hidden costs caused by the global agri-food system”.
WOW: $8 TRILLION A YEAR! It’s all about the percentage of total energy that each citizen gets from ultra-processed foods. In England, that’s 53.4%, according to the National Diet and Nutrition Survey. Only in the USA is it higher – at 54.5%.
So there was some hope that something might actually be done about this when President Trump appointed Robert F Kennedy Jr. (RFK) to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, which includes the powerful Food and Drug Administration – urging him to help Trump “Make America Healthy Again”.
So far, this is not working out well. RFK is a deep, wholly bonkers vaccine-sceptic, and US citizens are already dying because of his refusal to do anything about the very serious outbreak of measles in a growing number of States. This is despite decades of research proving that vaccination against measles is safe and reliable – with 97% efficacy in preventing the disease. A recent report from the Journal of American Medical Association estimated that this will lead to thousands of deaths over the next couple of decades.
He’s also falsely claimed that the MMR vaccine contains “aborted foetus debris” and has commissioned David Geier (another notorious vaccine-sceptic) to carry out new research into the possible link between vaccines and autism – despite endless studies that have shown no link.
And he’s been quick to support Elon Musk’s assault on federal agencies through the now infamous Department of Government Efficiency, with more than 25% of staff in key departments under his control made redundant. The implications of all that for US citizens could be horrendous.
But RFK is not a simple man. At the same time as being an anti-vaccine nutter, he’s also got a good record in taking on Big Ag – and the still increasing volumes of chemicals that industrialised farming has come to depend on. In the past, he’s campaigned for rigorous controls on ultra-processed foods, food additives, the use of pesticides and the US food industry’s dependence on corn syrup – all of which are strongly supported by many progressive environmental and health NGOs in the US. Big US food companies have been in a state of panic since he was appointed; if he was to be successful here, this could completely transform the US food system.
RFK has got a particular concern about endocrine disruptors (chemicals in drinking water that can interfere with the body’s hormonal balance), convinced that the ubiquitous and poorly regulated use of these chemicals can affect fertility, sperm counts and reproductive development. More and more mainstream health experts now agree that this ‘chemicalisation’ of our food and environment (reaching right back to the foetus in the womb) have had a major impact on issues like sperm counts and early onset of puberty.
So, here’s a thought: what if RFK and Elon Musk were to become best buds? Amongst the many bots buzzing around in Elon’s fevered brain is the fear that humankind is heading towards extinction – primarily because average fertility is falling around the world, especially in those rich, white nations on which the future of human civilisation so obviously depends (his view, not mine). He’s a passionate pro-natalist and having fathered at least 12 children (with at least three different women), he’s clearly up for putting his sperm where his mouth is. (He has, disappointingly, denied offering sperm to strangers at random dinner parties!).
Musk blames this all-but unstoppable demographic trend on woke, progressive liberal ideas, and particularly on feminism itself. Pronatalism of this kind has some truly scary overlaps not just with ‘incel’ misogyny, but with latter-day eugenics.
So, imagine being a fly/bot on the wall when RFK sits Elon down for a serious talk and tells him that declining fertility is not down to “toxic feminism”, but to falling sperm counts in young (and even middle-aged) men. And that those falling sperm counts are down to toxic chemicals in the air we breathe, the food we eat and the water we drink. Evidence of the chemical assault on human fertility mounts by the month, detailing how male sperm counts have been more than halved over the last 40 years.
RFK could even persuade Musk to give up on his relentless auditioning for a starring role in President Trump’s own special production of the Handmaid’s Tale – allowing women the world over to breathe just a tiny bit more easily.
Infographic, with kind permission, from Statista.com
