I regret to inform you that the virologist and children’s entertainer Chris van Tulleken has been writing about Coco Pops and sliced bread again. In an op-ed for the Telegraph, optimistically titled “This is how I’d solve the obesity crisis”, ultra-processed food’s fiercest critic takes aim at food labelling:

Our traffic light warnings, which were introduced in 2013 and are voluntary, make no sense; nobody knows what to do at a traffic light showing different colours. Likewise if a product shows differently-coloured labels, is it a healthy or unhealthy food?

Van Tullken is late to the party. I remember when “campaigners” of his ilk were writing op-eds saying how wonderful it would be if Britain had traffic light labelling for food. That campaign followed a now-familiar pattern of blowhard activists making extravagant claims, dodgy studies showing that the policy would work, opinion polls showing it would be terrifically popular and accusations that food industry lobbying had stopped the government going ahead, followed by inevitable capitulation by the government and underwhelming results when the policy was put into practice. When it was first introduced, the British Heart Foundation said that they were “delighted” and called it a “first-class scheme”, but it has been barely mentioned since, presumably because, like all other anti-obesity policies proposed by “public health” academics, it did not lead to a decline in obesity. 

Incidentally, traffic light labelling is only “voluntary” because Britain was a member of the EU at the time. The labels are nevertheless almost universally used in retail.

Van Tulleken finds the traffic light system confusing. He thinks that it is somehow misleading that a ready-meal lasagne gets a green light for sugar and a can of Coca-Cola gets a green light for fat. The fact that lasagne doesn’t contain sugar and Coca-Cola doesn’t contain fat is neither here nor there to him. In contrast to the campaigners who originally proposed this system, he doesn’t think the labels are there to give people information. He thinks they should be actively deterring people from buying the products. As such, he has a better idea:

In the UK we should have stop signs for foods with high levels of calories, salt, saturated fat and sugar. This would mean the lasagne would get three stop signs, which might make you think twice before eating two portions (as I typically do). 

A whole dissertation could be written about those words in parentheses. I have speculated in the past that van Tuelleken does not have a particularly healthy relationship with food. Why is a man who claims to have given up eating ultra-processed food eating ready-meal lasagnes at all, let alone eating two at a time? Are we supposed to believe that he would reduce his intake by half if the labelling system was slightly different?

And it would be only slightly different. Red traffic lights are literally stop signs. The only difference between his system and the existing system is that the calorie information would be colour-coded alongside the figures for fat, sugar and salt. Is such a minor change really likely to “solve the obesity crisis”?

I’d suggest we bring in a South American-style system. Across Chile, Mexico, Brazil, Peru, Uruguay, Argentina and Colombia, there are no traffic lights, just black octagons with simple messages, like ‘high in sodium’, or ‘high in calories’.

In other words, we switch from using red circles and use black octagons instead. If that doesn’t nail it, I don’t know what will.

There is evidence to show this works: one Chilean study showed that between 2015 and 2017, there was a reduction of at least a quarter of high salt and sugar foods being purchased as a result of these labels.

The obesity rate in Chile has risen from 32 per cent to 39 per cent since 2015 and is among the highest in the world. 

There is no reason why companies can’t reformulate existing products so that they’re better for us, and studies in South America have shown that this really works, as the idea of having their products covered in warning labels incentivises companies to create foods that are better for our health.

Two years after they were introduced in Peru, the prevalence of beverages that needed a warning label dropped by 28 per cent, with 20 per cent fewer foods requiring such signs. There’s no reason this wouldn’t happen here too, and the potential impact on our health could be vast.

The obesity rate has also risen steeply in Peru. More steeply than in the UK, in fact. 

Van Tulleken then proposes that children should be banned from buying any food product that is high in calories, fat, sugar or salt. He also thinks that these dastardly products, which include butter, honey, soy sauce and mustard, should be taxed and that they should not be able to make health claims:

At the moment the most harmful products don’t just lack clear warnings, they are often covered in health claims. Coco Pops – which have over a sixth of your daily added sugar intake, yet an amber traffic light on the box – make claims that they support healthy bones and are a source of fibre. This simply shouldn’t be allowed.

It is ironic that he sticks the boot into Coco Pops having just extolled the virtues of food reformulation. Kellogg’s reformulated Coco Pops with 40 per cent less sugar and 10 per cent less salt back in 2018. They went to all this trouble so that Coco Pops would no longer be considered HFSS and would not be hit by the proposed advertising ban. Admittedly, this all happened when van Tulleken was busy filming Operation Ouch and was not the world renowned food policy expert he is today, but it was well reported at the time. Kellogg’s did exactly what van Tulleken says he wants food companies to do.

Coco Pops is a breakfast cereal that only contains a sixth of the amount of sugar that the government’s miserly recommendations suggest. That is why it has an amber traffic light for sugar. It also contains plenty of Vitamin D (good for your bones) and fibre. What exactly is the problem here? 

The problem, it seems, is that van Tulleken doesn’t think people should be eating any sugar at all, at least not if it is an ingredient in an “ultra-processed” food. Salt in any quantity is also to be avoided, judging by what he has to say about bread… 

The HFSS designation fails to label many products which are ultra-processed, and most importantly, it’s not even applied to certain categories of food.

Bread can be among the worst offenders for hidden sugar and salt. Last year, a study from Action on Salt showed that 75 per cent of sliced loaves contain at least as much salt per slice as a packet of ready salted crisps.

People are often surprised by how little salt is in crisps. It turns out that if a food product doesn’t taste of much else, you really notice the salt. A pack of ready salted crisps only contains a third of a gram of salt, which is only 1/18th of the recommended daily amount. A slice of bread contains the same modest amount because, as one cookbook author explains, “you can’t make good bread without salt”. It is in the recipe. Sugar is optional in bread (although Jamie Oliver likes to use it), but salt isn’t. You’d think that an opponent of ultra-processed food who is so keen on cooking everything from scratch would know that.

But there are lots of oddities about the way we regulate food that are very, very inconsistent which means bread, no matter how high its levels of fat, sugar and salt, can’t be considered as HFSS. Why?

This is just nonsense. Any food can be considered HFSS if it has enough fat, sugar or salt. Bread doesn’t and so it is not classified as HFSS. A slice of bread with one third of a gram of salt — which, we should remind ourselves, is a mineral that contains no calories and which you would die if you stopped eating — is not considered excessive by any reasonable person. 

We should ditch HFSS and simply use our national guidance for calories, fat, salt and sugar to label and regulate food.

But that’s literally how it already works! HFSS is defined by the Nutrient Profile Model on the basis of the number of calories and the amount of fat, sugar and salt in 100 grams of any given product. 

Why does van Tulleken care about fat, sugar and salt anyway? His whole thesis is that the ingredients don’t matter and the real problem is the way food is processed. He has a whole chapter in his ridiculous book titled “Why it isn’t about sugar”. He reckons that sugar is healthier than sweeteners. He takes journalists out to eat pizza and ice cream. 

There are signs that he may be retreating from the whole “ultra-processed” thing. In an interview with the Guardian in August he said: “I suspect that most of the harm is from the fat — saturated fat — salt and sugar and energy.” That would bring his thinking in line with that of the vast majority of nutritional scientists, many of whom he has accused of being compromised by links to “Big Food”. If this is where he lands, he will have arrived at the mainstream through a very circuitous route. I can’t see him getting another book out of it.