Unhealthy diets, outsized profits
By Benjamin Wood
Ultra-processed foods and drinks (UPFs), which are almost exclusively made by business corporations, have come to dominate the diets of many populations worldwide to the detriment of health, equity, and environmental sustainability.
Defined as ‘formulations of ingredients, mostly of exclusive industrial use, that result from a series of industrial processes’, common UPFs include carbonated soft drinks, reconstituted meat products, confectionery, ice creams, many mass-produced fast-food meals and many breakfast cereals.
UPFs comprise a broad range of products. Yet when population diets start to be characterised by a high share of UPFs, their compositional differences matter less than the average quality of the group as a whole. Mounting evidence shows that diets high in UPFs are associated with multiple adverse health outcomes, including increased rates of death from all causes, and various chronic diseases.
Ultra-processed diets also harm the environment. UPF manufacturing is highly energy-intensive and dependent on fossil fuels, not least because of the sector’s extensive use of plastic packaging. Major UPF corporations like Coca-Cola Co, PepsiCo and Nestlé are perennially among the world’s biggest plastic polluters of land and marine ecosystems – Coca-Cola Co alone used nearly three million tonnes of virgin fossil fuel-based plastic in 2022.
UPF manufacturing also relies heavily on large-scale commodity crop production and intensive meat and dairy production, which are leading drivers of climate breakdown, biodiversity loss and soil degradation.
UPFs are designed to nourish investors
The UPF concept was first developed in 2009 by a team of researchers in Brazil seeking to understand the health impacts of the country’s shifting dietary patterns driven, to no small extent, by a handful of powerful transnational food corporations. They came up with the Nova classification system. Unlike most other food classification systems, many of which focus on nutrient profiles, Nova considers the extent and purpose of food processing.
Accordingly, Nova serves as a valuable tool to examine the political economy of population diets. This includes by helping to expose the ways in which just a handful of very large food corporations whose business models centre on ultra-processing technologies have managed to shape diets globally in their pursuit of maximising profits and shareholder value.
Indeed, there can be little doubt that the world’s leading UPF corporations serve, first and foremost, the short-term financial interests of their shareholders. In recent decades, UPF corporations have been funnelling increasing sums of money to their shareholders, both in absolute terms and relative to their total revenues.
Between 2019 and 2021, shareholder payouts made by UPF corporations listed on US stock exchanges exceeded 10 per cent of their entire revenues or approximately US$240 billion in 2021 dollars. Thirty years ago, this percentage was only around three per cent, or approximately US$43 billion in 2021 dollars.
Some may argue that it is possible for dominant UPF corporations to both maximise shareholder value and positively contribute to society. It is true that the financial success of these corporations has come with various food safety benefits, as well as some economic benefits (especially for wealthy investors in the United States and Western Europe). UPFs are also often cheap and convenient, which, understandably, are important considerations for those facing financial and time constraints.
Nevertheless, the reality is that dominant UPF corporations rely heavily on a range of exploitative and harmful practices to fulfil their purpose. Dominant UPF corporations have long used various forms of aggressive marketing practices to drive the consumption of their products (and thus the corresponding health and environmental costs outlined earlier), often by targeting disadvantaged and marginalised communities and social groups,and increasingly in countries in the global South.
Dominant UPF corporations have long been criticised for practices including:
· Profiting from exploitation of farmers and other workers, including human rights abuses in their supply chains, and by opposing unionisation efforts;
· engaging in anti-competitive behaviour at the expense of many small and medium-sized enterprises;
· benefiting, at the expense of local communities, from the takeover of farmland and the extraction of other essential resources like water which feed their supply chains;1
· contributing to widening economic inequities within and between countries via practices such as widespread tax avoidance; or,
· leveraging their extensive political influence to prevent and weaken government and collective action to address the very problems these corporations perpetuate.
What to do about ultra-processed diets
The UPF industry and its political allies typically argue that measures seeking to address diet-related problems should centre on consumer responsibility. For their part, a number of UPF corporations have sought to increase the range of ‘healthier’ options in their portfolios, often by tweaking the quantity or nature of an ingredient in a particular product.
Yet many public health experts and groups are sceptical of policy efforts directed solely at influencing consumer behaviour. It is well recognised that policies designed to disincentivise and restrict some of the harmful practices used by UPF corporations should also be considered. The World Health Organization, for instance, endorses a package of policies including restricting the marketing of infant formula, and limiting the exposure of children to the marketing of unhealthy foods.
Fundamentally, though, protecting and promoting healthy, equitable and sustainable diets means challenging and changing our food systems so that the maximisation of corporate profits and shareholder value are no longer put above all other considerations.
It is hard to go past the work of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food) to find key measures with the potential to drive such transformation, including:
· using fiscal, monetary, agricultural, and public procurement policy to shift public investments away from corporate food systems and into territorial food markets, which are often (but not exclusively) characterised by shorter food supply chains and a diversity of actors;
· using competition policy to prevent further consolidation in the corporate food system, break up existing global oligopolies, and better regulate abuses of market power;
· strengthening social and income protection policies to remove socio-economic barriers that undermine breastfeeding and prevent people from accessing sustainable and healthy diets;
· implementing robust conflict-of-interest mechanisms to protect food governance spaces from undue corporate political influence; and,
· challenging the exploitative aspects of the international economic order (such as debt and tax injustice) so as to protect and strengthen the capacity of governments to implement sustainable and equitable food system policies.
Inspiration can be found in the diverse social and environmental movements already organising and strategising to drive the changes foregrounded above.2 Still, there is an urgent need for these efforts to be scaled, for further resources to be mobilised, and for the voices and realities of marginalised and disadvantaged groups to be elevated and fully integrated into policy decision-making.
An ambitious agenda to say the least – ultimately, though, we cannot afford to take any shortcuts to fix our diets and our food systems.
Benjamin Wood is a post-doctoral research fellow at the Global Centre for Preventive Health and Nutrition, Institute for Health Transformation, Deakin University, Australia.
[1] Vigna A. In the heart of Mexico's battle for water: Le Monde; 2023 [25 October 2025]. Available from: https://www.lemonde.fr/en/economy/article/2023/05/09/in-the-heart-of-mexico-s-battle-for-water_6026062_19.html Perlmutter L. ‘It’s plunder’: Mexico desperate for water while drinks companies use billions of litres: The Guardian; 2022 [25 October 2024]. Available from: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2022/jul/28/water-is-the-real-thing-but-millions-of-mexicans-are-struggling-without-it Ho C, Smith D. Drinks companies are taking water for free in Western Australia, there is a fight with locals over whether they should be: Australian Broadcasting Corporation; 2024. Available from: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-06-04/coca-cola-asahi-taking-water-free-western-australia-drought/103915992 Patil GS. Indian activists wage water war with soft drink companies: Nikkei Asia; 2017. Available from: https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/Indian-activists-wage-water-war-with-soft-drink-companies
[2] Colansa. We are Colansa: Comunidad de Práctica Latinoamérica y Caribe Nutrición y Salud; 2024. Available from: https://colansa.org/en/ Nyéléni. Forum for Food Sovereignty. Sélingué, Mali: 2007. CSIPM. The Civil Society and Indigenous Peoples’ Mechanism for Relations with the UN Committee on World Food Security: About Us; 2024. Available from: https://www.csm4cfs.org/