How to Talk to a Teenager About Ultra-Processed Food Without Losing the Argument

An ultra-processed food is one containing ingredients you would not find in a domestic kitchen. That definition is doing a lot of work, and it is the clearest starting point for a conversation most parents are dreading.

Nearly 60 per cent of the calories consumed in Britain come from UPFs. According to a study from Imperial College London, for some children it is closer to 80 per cent.

What the category actually is

These foods are energy-dense, heavy in fat and sugar, and full of chemicals. They are cheap, require no preparation, and do not spoil.

They are also engineered to make you want more of them. They trigger pleasure responses without producing any real sense of fullness, which is not a side effect but the design.

The associated risks are extensive: cardiovascular disease, certain cancers, anxiety, depression, type 2 diabetes and obesity.

Poor diet is the leading cause of early death in this country, and the retail environment is arranged against doing anything about it. Walk into most supermarkets and the shelf space is dominated by crisps, pastries, bread and biscuits.

An industrially produced edible substance, which they are putting into their bodies every day

Why the health argument fails

The difficulty is that consequences arriving in thirty years are not persuasive to somebody who is fourteen.

A teenager who dances, is slender and feels fine has no evidence in front of them that anything is wrong. Telling them otherwise invites the obvious rebuttal, which is that they are demonstrably healthy right now.

There is a second problem, which is that adolescents frequently regard disagreeing with a parent as a matter of principle. The same information delivered by somebody else can land completely differently, and Chris van Tulleken is unusually effective here, partly because a lot of children remember him from Operation Ouch and already trust him.

The line that does work

The framing worth borrowing is Van Tulleken's, and it removes the health argument entirely.

This is not food. It is, in his phrase, an industrially produced edible substance, and it is going into their bodies every day.

That is a different kind of claim. It does not ask a teenager to worry about their arteries. It asks them to look at what they are actually eating, which is a question they can answer immediately.

The practical version is to read labels together and count how many ingredients sound like they came from a laboratory rather than a kitchen. Then keep better snacks in the house, because availability decides most of this.

Make clear it is not their fault

The most important part of the conversation is the one most likely to be skipped.

Children need to understand that this is not a failure of willpower on their part, including when they have eaten an entire packet of something that was not theirs.

They are growing up in an environment where their appetites are being monetised. Substances are being formulated, packaged and marketed specifically to be close to irresistible, by people with considerable resources and no interest in whether the outcome is good for them.

Framed that way, choosing to eat differently stops being a punishment and becomes something closer to refusal. Anybody managing it is functioning as a small-scale resistance movement, running on nuts rather than crisps.

That is a more appealing identity to offer a teenager than a lecture about cholesterol, and it has the advantage of being true.

One caution worth keeping in mind throughout. A household that becomes militant about this produces its own problem, and teenagers who feel policed about food tend to develop a complicated relationship with it. The target is the industry, not the child, and the conversation works best when it stays pointed in that direction.