In a new three-paper Series published in The Lancet, my colleagues and I tackle a deceptively simple question: what will it take to move humanity away from ultra-processed diets, and towards food systems that support health and equity rather than undermine them?
The stakes could not be higher. Ultra-processed foods (UPFs) now provide more than half of all calories in some high-income countries, and their consumption is rising rapidly across the rest of the world. A growing body of cohort studies and meta-analyses links high UPF intake to higher risks of obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, depression and premature mortality. This is no longer a story about occasional “junk food”, it is about a structural shift in what people eat, and the health consequences that follow.
The Lancet Series, Ultra-processed foods and human health, brings these strands together. The first paper synthesises evidence on health impacts and mechanisms; the second sets out a menu of policies to halt and reverse the ultra-processed dietary pattern; and the third, which I co-authored, examines corporate power and global governance, asking what kind of coordinated response might realistically change the trajectory we are on.
Why ultra-processed foods are a global health issue
The Series uses the NOVA classification, which distinguishes between minimally processed foods, culinary ingredients, processed foods and ultra-processed foods. UPFs are not just “foods in packets”; they are industrial formulations of ingredients assembled through multiple processing steps and containing additives such as flavourings, colours, emulsifiers and sweeteners that are rarely used in home kitchens.
Across diverse countries, higher dietary shares of UPFs are consistently associated with poorer overall diet quality (more free sugars, unhealthy fats and sodium), and with increased risks of a wide range of chronic conditions and all-cause mortality. These associations remain even when controlling for energy intake or more traditional nutrient indicators, suggesting that how foods are formulated, structured and promoted matters over and above what nutrients they contain.
The Series reviews plausible mechanisms: UPFs tend to be hyper-palatable, energy-dense, aggressively marketed, easy to consume quickly and often stripped of their original food matrix. They displace minimally processed foods and home-cooked meals from the diet and may expose consumers to concerning levels of certain additives and processing-related contaminants.
Importantly, these are not marginal effects. Recent estimates suggest that in several high-income countries, ultra-processed diets may already account for between roughly 4% and 14% of premature deaths. That makes UPFs a population-level risk factor on a par with many of the classical hazards that have long been the focus of public health research.
Ultra-processed diets are built into today’s food systems
One of the most important messages of the Series is that ultra-processed diets are not an unfortunate by-product of individual poor choices, they are a structural outcome of how contemporary food systems are organised.
Over recent decades, global UPF sales have grown to nearly US$2 trillion, with the fastest growth in low and middle-income countries. A small group of transnational manufacturers (household names like Nestlé, PepsiCo, Unilever, Coca-Cola, Danone, Mondelez and Kraft Heinz), now control a large share of the sector’s assets, brands and distribution infrastructure and have a presence in almost every world market.
The Series frames this as a story about profitability and corporate strategy. UPFs are highly profitable: they rely on cheap commodity inputs and processing technologies to minimise production costs and on intensive marketing and product design to maximise consumption. We argue this profitability advantage drives capital towards the ultra-processed sector and, over time, pushes entire food systems in the direction of ultra-processed diets. What looks like a set of individual choices at the checkout is in fact the visible expression of deeper economic and political dynamics.
This perspective strongly resonates with recent work on corporate networks in the food system. In one study, our team conducted a network analysis of interest-group memberships of leading UPF corporations, identifying hundreds of organisations through which these firms (Coca-Cola, Nestle, Unilever, PepsiCo and Danone) coordinate strategies and build influence (Slater et al. 2024). Many are based in Washington DC, Brussels and other political capitals, placing them close to powerful decision-makers in trade, health and food policy. In other words, the globalisation of UPFs has gone hand in hand with the globalisation of the political machinery that supports them.
Corporate power and the politics of ultra-processed diets
The third Lancet paper, Towards unified global action on ultra-processed foods, takes this corporate power perspective as its starting point. We argue that the rise of UPFs is being driven by the growing economic and political power of the UPF industry, not by any sudden collapse in individual willpower.
To understand how this power operates, we combined multiple sources of evidence: original network-mapping work on corporate interest groups and on scientific networks (which I led), detailed case studies, three expert workshops, and 39 semi-structured interviews with researchers, advocates and policy actors from across the world.
This synthesis allowed us to describe a transnational “corporate influence network”, a web of interest groups, partnerships and governance arrangements that coordinate industry political strategies across borders. These strategies include:
- Direct political action: lobbying, political donations and litigation aimed at blocking or weakening regulation (for example, taxes on sugary drinks, marketing restrictions or front-of-pack labelling).
- Corporate-friendly institutions: promoting governance models that give corporations formal roles in setting nutrition agendas (such as certain multi-stakeholder platforms and self-regulatory codes).
- Shaping ideas and evidence: framing policy debates around individual responsibility, funding “friendly” research, and generating doubt about classifications like NOVA and about the strength of the evidence on UPFs.
Recent work on global food governance helps to unpack how this influence operates in practice. A network analysis mapping 45 global food-system “multi-stakeholder” initiatives with UPF corporations on their boards found that almost half of all seats were held by industry executives or closely allied business interests, most by transnational corporations and people based in high-income countries (Slater et al. 2025).
This pattern of “corporate-anchored multi-stakeholderism” raises obvious questions about whose interests prevail when such platforms claim to speak for “the food system” as a whole. It also reinforces a central message of the Lancet Series: debates about ultra-processed foods are taking place on terrain already shaped by powerful commercial interests rather than on a neutral evidentiary playing field.
Governing ultra-processed foods: four fronts for policy action
If ultra-processed diets are structurally produced, then “eat a bit less junk food” campaigns will never be enough. The second Lancet paper sets out a broad policy agenda across four fronts: making UPF products less profitable and less visible; reshaping food environments through measures such as marketing restrictions, front-of-pack warnings and nutrition standards in schools, hospitals and public procurement; tightening the rules that govern corporate conduct and political influence; and redirecting agricultural, trade and investment policies towards supply chains for fresh and minimally processed foods rather than ultra-processed formulations. Taken together, these levers point towards a managed transition of food systems away from dependence on UPFs.
In the third paper, we argue that to make such an agenda politically feasible, progress on any of these fronts depends on confronting the corporate power that currently steers food systems towards UPFs: putting in place robust rules to manage conflicts of interest, limiting industry roles in setting health policy, and strengthening democratic oversight of lobbying and corporate political activity at national and global levels. In that sense, global governance and corporate accountability are not an optional “add-on” to product and environment policies, they are the precondition for those policies to be adopted, implemented and sustained.
Crucially, the Series also emphasises that this transition must be just. Efforts to reduce UPF consumption should be accompanied by measures that protect jobs, support families’ time for cooking and care, and ensure food security and gender equity. The goal is not simply to demonise products but to redesign systems so that healthier, less processed foods become more available, affordable and convenient than ultra-processed options, particularly for low-income households.
Guarding science and governance from corporate interference
Across the evidence synthesised in the Series, a consistent picture emerges: corporate actors do not only sell ultra-processed products, they also help shape the scientific debates and governance arrangements that are supposed to regulate them. Corporate interest groups cluster around key global institutions and policy processes; multi-stakeholder platforms often give UPF manufacturers disproportionate voice and legitimacy; and many prominent critics of frameworks such as NOVA have financial or institutional ties to the food and beverage industry (Mialon et al. 2018). Taken together, these patterns make it harder for independent evidence to be heard and for robust public-health policies to be adopted and defended.
Concerns about conflicts of interest are not confined to debates over NOVA. In related work on the U.S. 2020 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, our team documented extensive financial ties between committee members and food and pharmaceutical companies, raising questions about how “gold-standard” nutrition advice is shaped (Mialon et al. 2022). That study has since been cited in the White House’s Make Our Children Healthy Again (MAHA) report, signalling that the governance of conflicts of interest is now firmly on the policy agenda as well as in academic debate.
That is why, in the Lancet Series, we argue for stronger conflict-of-interest policies in research, guideline development and policy-making; clearer rules on when and how governments and international agencies engage with UPF corporations, drawing lessons from instruments such as the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control; and sustained investment in independent monitoring of corporate political activity and of the implementation and impact of UPF-related policies. These are the basic conditions for being able to act on the evidence we already have.
Take home message…
Our central argument is that ultra-processed diets are shaped primarily by corporate power and policy choices, rather than by individual failure.
The evidence that high UPF consumption harms health is robust and consistent. The economic and political forces driving the expansion of UPFs are increasingly well understood, thanks to network-analytic work on corporate interest groups and multi-stakeholder initiatives. And we have a growing toolbox of policies that can reduce the share of UPFs in diets while strengthening food security and fairness.
For policymakers, the message is that acting on UPFs is both necessary and feasible, but it will require confronting corporate interests and rethinking how we govern food systems. For researchers and students, the Series highlights fertile ground for further work on commercial determinants of health, policy evaluation and the politics of evidence. For the general public, it offers a different way of thinking about those familiar products on supermarket shelves: not just as “choices”, but as the visible tip of a much larger economic and political iceberg.
Read more
- The Lancet Series “Ultra-processed foods and human health”: three papers on evidence, policy and global governance (open access at thelancet.com).
- Slater, S., Lawrence, M., Wood, B., Serôdio, P.M. & Baker, P. (2024) “Corporate interest groups and their implications for global food governance: mapping and analysing the global corporate influence network of the transnational ultra-processed food industry”. Globalization and Health, 20(1), 16. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12992-024-01109-5 2.
- Slater, S., Lawrence, M., Wood, B., Serôdio, P.M., Scott, C. & Baker, P. (2025) “The rise of multi-stakeholderism, the power of ultra-processed food corporations, and the implications for global food governance: a network analysis.” Agriculture and Human Values, 42, 177–192. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-024-10552-3 3.
- Mialon, M., Serôdio, P.M., Scagliusi, F.B. & Bortoletto Martins, A.P. (2018) “Criticism of the NOVA food classification: who are the protagonists when ultra-processed food is under fire?” World Nutrition, 9(3), 176–240. 4.
- Mialon, M., Serôdio, P.M., Crosbie, E., Teicholz, N., Naik, A. & Carriedo, A. (2022) “Conflicts of interest for members of the U.S. 2020 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee.” Public Health Nutrition, 27, e69, 1–13.
- Commission, P., 2025. The MAHA Report: Make Our Children Healthy Again Assessment (Original version), White House. United States of America.
Author
Paulo Serôdio is a Senior Research Officer at the Institute for Social and Economic Research (ISER), University of Essex, working on survey augmentation, data linkage and the commercial determinants of health. He has previously held positions at Northeastern University, the University of Oxford, Sciences Po and the University of Barcelona. His research interests include social network analysis, corporate power in health and nutrition, and the use of generative AI in large-scale survey research.