As governments in high-obesity countries ramp up efforts to improve nutritional health, ultra-processed foods (UPFs) are increasingly in the firing line, giving policymakers a highly visible target through which to project resolve.
Leading the global anti-UPF movement, US Health Secretary and ‘MAHA’ architect, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., revealed earlier this month that his administration had drafted a UPF definition, with the ever-elusive criteria, now pending White House approval, expected in the coming months.
While projecting a sense of action, such attempts to define and regulate UPFs face a basic obstacle; namely, that there is still no broadly-agreed scientific definition, with researchers’ classification of foods as UPFs under the NOVA system varying widely. Even FDA nutrition official Claudine Kavanaugh recently conceded that scientists are still trying to determine whether health outcomes stem from a food’s processing levels or nutrient composition, stating that “there’s a lot of gray areas, given the conflicting information that’s out there.”
Given this major informational gap, public policy must resist the blunt, hasty interventions advanced under the MAHA model. As Washington pushes this agenda onto the global stage, and signs emerge that Europe may look to RFK Jr.’s approach for inspiration, Brussels should avoid the trap by pursuing precise, evidence-based regulation while building a multi-faceted prevention strategy for obesity, heart disease and related non-communicable diseases (NCDs).
EU’s urgent search for answers
Europe’s nutritional health challenge has become impossible to ignore. Today, nearly 60% of adults and almost one in three children in the WHO European Region live with overweight or obesity, while cardiovascular disease claims 1.7 million EU lives each year. NCDs sit at the point where individual health, quality of life and strained public finances collide, confronting Europe with a challenge its health systems cannot meet through treatment alone. Prevention must therefore become the organising principle, reshaping the conditions in which people eat, move, work and age, rather than reducing the target to a single convenient villain.
Unveiled in December 2025, the EU’s ‘Safe Hearts Plan’ rightly recognises the scale of the cardiovascular burden and pays lip service to effective prevention. Yet its food agenda risks echoing the RFK approach by putting UPFs in the policy crosshairs before establishing whether such a broad and contested category can support coherent, science-based regulation. Concerningly, Commissioner Várhelyi has praised the RFK Jr.’s anti-UPF, “#eatrealfood,’ campaign, while signaling a will to cooperate with the US on this issue “to turn shared ambition into concrete results.”
However, embarking upon this path of imitation is unlikely to deliver the anticipated benefits, as it lacks not only firm scientific grounding but also broad political buy-in. The Plan’s initial UPF approach quickly proved divisive, with an earlier draft, steered by EU Health Commissioner, Olivér Várhelyi, reportedly exploring EU-wide levies on ultra-processed foods, prompting broad criticism from various DGs primarily centred around the absence of sufficient evidence to back such a policy. This opposition did not fall on deaf ears, with the current version of the bloc’s heart health plan dropping the concrete commitment to a UPF tax and instead vaguely referring to “possible financial actions.”
UPF debate exposes Brussels’ wider policy choice
The Brussels debate over UPFs in the Safe Hearts Plan captures a wider choice now facing the Commission: whether to pursue visible but narrow interventions, or to build a genuinely preventive health agenda rooted in evidence, proportionality and practical support for healthier lives. While certain public health actors have welcomed the plan’s preventive ambition, they have also warned that it still lacks the stronger measures needed to turn that vision into reality, making it all the more vital that Europe’s response delivers prevention in practice rather than in theory.
The first flaw in the current backlash against UPF is that the category is too crude for the certainty now attached to it. A recent Healthy Eating Research report, highlighted by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, points to the same weakness, showing foods grouped as UPFs vary sharply in composition, use and nutritional profile. As Noah Praamsma rightly asserts, “we need to be more nuanced.” In short, when the science remains unsettled, policymakers cannot simply treat UPFs as a self-evident marker of risk.
Secondly, the processing label may be obscuring the real biological mechanisms at work. The authors of a recent Perspectives report argue that many effects attributed to UPFs can be explained by better-established factors such as calorie density, fibre and protein content, texture and eating rate, rather than processing itself. That matters because these are also the variables increasingly identified in research on the microbiome, satiety, metabolic health and how different foods interact with human biology. In other words, the real question is not simply how processed a food is, but what that food actually does in the body.
Moreover, even the classification system underpinning the UPF debate is far less robust than the politics and media headlines would lead one to believe. Crucially, the NOVA system attempts to describe a product’s degree of processing, not its healthiness or potential contribution to diet-related disease, yet even in this regard its limits have become apparent. Indeed, one European Journal of Clinical Nutrition study found low agreement among French food and nutrition specialists assigning foods to NOVA groups. If even experts struggle to apply UPF designations consistently, policymakers should be wary of building labels, taxes or restrictions around it.
High stakes for Europe’s anti-obesity agenda
For Europe, the danger is not only regulatory overreach, but consumer confusion. A recent Food Standards Agency survey found that, among people who had changed their diets for health reasons, eating less processed food had become a higher priority than cutting high-sugar products or eating more fruit and vegetables – findings which should worry public health officials. When processing becomes the dominant health signal, people may make well-intentioned but poorly informed choices, treating a vague industrial marker as more important than a food’s nutritional profile or overall diet quality.
Moving forward, Europe cannot afford to confuse anxiety with effective prevention, nor does it need to choose between complacency and overreach. With obesity still high and governments setting ambitious reduction targets, the evidence gap around UPFs should push EU and national leaders toward smarter regulatory action, not superficial definitions and labels.
If the Commission is serious about reversing the rise of obesity, heart disease and other NCDs, they must instead invest in meaningful prevention measures capable of changing daily lives, from balanced diets, healthier school meals and more active cities to earlier screening, mental health support, less sedentary time and practical help to sustain healthier routines.
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