Kent Buse seeks tighter rules on ultra-processed food

Kent Buse urged UK ministers on Oct. 13 to regulate ultra-processed food companies, citing a Lancet series that documented more than 200 industry-linked lobby groups, in a Guardian Health letters page.

Evidence grade: Claim (no study cited) for the letters’ policy prescriptions; Hugo Harper of Nesta said the UK government’s proposed healthy food standard could cut adult obesity by about one fifth and child obesity by a quarter.

Buse, chair of the policy and prevention committee at the World Obesity Federation, argued that policy should focus less on obesity itself and more on the commercial food system he said helps produce it. He said Yvette Cooper should treat companies shaping diets “not as partners to consult, but as an industry to regulate.”

The letters followed a Guardian editorial on cancers in people under 50. Buse said ultra-processed foods were replacing traditional diets worldwide and driving chronic disease, attributing that conclusion to The Lancet’s series on ultra-processed foods.

Harper, director of Nesta, said treatment and weight-loss drugs would not be enough to address diet-related illness. He called for mandatory health reporting by food companies and targets for large businesses to improve the health profile of what they sell, saying: “We cannot let our strategy be ‘wait for people to get sick and then put them on the drugs’.”

Pawan Randev, a former Cancer Research UK GP, said cancer had become the greatest cause of death among people with type 2 diabetes in England and argued that annual diabetes checks could be used to discuss cancer prevention and screening participation. Patricia Hampton wrote that healthy choices can be constrained by industrialised food, pollutants and economic stress.

The letters cannot show that any single policy would reduce cancer rates. They present policy arguments and cited research rather than new patient-level data, and the Guardian page did not include responses from government or food companies or methods behind the projected obesity reductions.

The claims apply to population-level food policy, not individual diagnosis or treatment. The clearest next policy marker in the material is whether the UK government advances the proposed healthy food standard and mandatory reporting for large food businesses.

Source: letters page, The Guardian Health, Oct. 13, 2026.

Atlas360 reports health research and does not provide medical advice.