Does bingeing on UPFs give you hangovers?
Ultra-processed food negatively affects everyone, psychotherapist Milli Hill says, yet hits women harder in many aspects of their health.
A couple of weeks ago, Milli Hill noticed that a healthcare professional on Instagram had instructed her 11,000 followers not to buy any of Hill’s bestselling books on pregnancy and birth because — as the woman put it — she’s “really transphobic”.
“I’m still not welcome in the world of maternity,” says 50-year-old Hill, who reported the worker to her NHS trust for alleged defamation. “I hardly ever get asked to speak at conferences because it’s a massive headache for the organisers. They get petitions asking for me to be removed, even now. It’s all quite toxic.”
The author, psychotherapist and founder of the now-closed Positive Birth Movement support network was cancelled in November 2020 after challenging an Instagram post that referred to “birthing people” and replying that “obstetric violence is violence against women”.
That was mid-morning. By the same evening, she had been called “dangerous” all over the internet, received hate mail and faced boycotts of her books, including Give Birth Like a Feminist — much of it, she says, from her own professional community. She says that the next day she was dropped by Birthrights, a childbirth charity with which she had worked for a decade.
Hill, who denies being transphobic, believes she was “used as an example to tell everybody else they’d better shut up about this”. Terrified by her treatment, she went to ground and spent sleepless nights worrying about losing her livelihood and loved ones.
“I had a lot of good friends in maternity who turned their backs on me,” she says. “One close friend who did try to defend me online was bullied so badly that she never spoke to me again. For their own safety, people had to distance themselves — and that still happens now. Every time it has a resurgence online, I still find it distressing.”
Hill has since found a different way to write about women’s health. Her new book Ultra Processed Women tackles the topic of ultra-processed food (UPF) and how it uniquely impacts the female body.
It was her experience of menopause that led to her interest in UPFs, which Hill describes in her book as “factory made food-like products” with a list of ingredients you don’t recognise (bulking agents, gums, emulsifiers and so on), often in appealing wrapping with health claims. Or, as she puts it now: “crap in plastic packets”. In the UK, almost 60 per cent of the average diet comprises UPFs, compared with just 15 per cent in France.
Looking online for ways to manage symptoms like hot flushes, Hill came across studies linking a lower UPF consumption to improved menopause and discovered that women in countries such as Japan who “have a very different diet to us” often seem to have a milder experience than those living in the West.
This was two years ago, around the time that conversations about UPF were ramping up in the media. Yet Hill noticed a lack of focus on women. “I started to think: could this be another area where women are being told they’re suffering ‘because you’re female’ but where diet could actually make a big difference? It’s just assumed that women have a tough time and that’s that.”
She started to read product labels and noticed strange ingredients, such as a preservative called EDTA in her favourite mayonnaise (it’s also in many of our face creams and condom lubricant, which shows just how far from food we’ve drifted). “A light bulb goes on and you realise a load of stuff in your trolley isn’t technically food — the supermarket bread, breakfast cereals, flavoured yoghurts, ice cream and snack bars.”
Thankfully, she doesn’t take a hardline approach to buying UPF — not least because its mostly women who still do the family food shopping and Hill doesn’t think it’s solely their problem to solve. “I’ve tried to write the book as someone who isn’t a diet guru or living in the woods making their own granola, but a real person who has UPF in the house,” she says. “I have struggled and I’m still struggling.”
Simply, it’s not easy to give up stuff that makes our lives easier and tastes moreish. To motivate readers, Hill exposes how manufacturers and advertisers have long “played” women to sell UPF — from Betty Crocker cake mixes promising to liberate them from the kitchen in the 1920s to modern day “skinny” and “low cal” claims designed to play on traditional female insecurities.
They are addictive too, being packed with fats and carbohydrates that give us a quick mood-boosting dopamine hit. And we know, as do the manufacturers, Hill says, that “women are more likely than men to turn to that sort of food for comfort: chocolate, biscuits, crisps, pizza, ice cream. When was the last time you stress-ate a banana?”
Of course, too much UPF negatively affects everyone. But Hill says it’s hitting women harder in areas such as reproductive health, mental health, autoimmune disorders, obesity (and its associated risks, from cancers to diabetes and heart disease), Alzheimer’s and fertility.
She has scraped thousands of academic studies to make her case. One 2023 study, for instance, found that women who ate the most UPF were 50 per cent more likely to develop depression — which women in the UK are nearly twice as likely to suffer from compared with men — than those who ate the least. Another linked UPF to dementia and suggested that replacing just 10 per cent of UPF in your diet with unprocessed or minimally processed food, could lower the risk by almost 20 per cent.
There are links to rheumatoid arthritis (three times more common in women), chronic insomnia (affects 40 per cent more women), autoimmune disorders (80 per cent of sufferers are female) and PMS — academics found that women who ate high levels of fast food, sodas and processed meats were much more likely to experience symptoms.
What’s going on? “The short answer is, we don’t really know,” Hill says. “Is it to do with inflammation? The way some of the ingredients interact with our gut and vaginal microbiomes? Hormones? Women are still left out of research studies. The male body is treated as default.”
She admits to doing “a massive eye-roll” when she came across a study on the impact of UPF on sperm motility when comparatively little exists around women’s fertility. “There are a lot of unanswered questions, but after all my research I feel certain that a change of diet could have an impact on almost every area of women’s health.”
So what should we be eating? Less UPF, obviously, but it’s just as crucial to replace it with the good stuff we’ve pushed off our plates: plants, whole foods, anything that could be part of a Mediterranean diet.
“Eating more plants would be a really good change that everyone can make, and they are cheap,” Hill says. She experimented with increasing phytoestrogens in her own diet — compounds that have a similar structure to oestrogen, which is depleted during the menopause — like soy, tofu, flax seeds, walnuts and natural yoghurt; swapping her lifelong love of UPF cereal for oats, berries and nuts: “I’m only a sample of one, but within a week or two I started to feel lighter and less sluggish.”
An “all or nothing” approach isn’t realistic for most of us. Hill’s three children — aged 17, 15 and 11 — with her partner George, a web designer, haven’t always been keen. One won’t give up his beloved Bourbon biscuits, which he’s been eating since infancy; Hill now feels “so bad” for giving him them in the first place.
“It’s about compromises,” she says. “There are some products where you might think, there’s only one ingredient I don’t recognise, everyone likes it and it’s going into a homemade chilli. It’s about balance. I still eat buttered white toast sometimes. But once you’ve detoxed from UPF and then you have a binge — say, at a party — you really notice it. It’s almost like a hangover.” Although, breathe a sigh of relief, most alcoholic drinks — alcopops and flavoured spirits aside — aren’t UPF.
The answer, Hill believes, isn’t Ozempic — “one massive industry’s solution to a problem created by another massive industry” — but small changes that can gather momentum: swapping your Coke for a herbal tea, noticing that you feel better and being encouraged to swap your snack bar for a piece of fruit; your supermarket chocolate mousse for frozen fruit; your margarine for real butter; your UPF cereal (almost all of them) for porridge oats, Shredded Wheat or Weetbix.
It’s something Hill believes doctors should be suggesting to women who present with physical and mental health problems, and she’s conscious of placing the burden on us to fix ourselves. But at the same time, “I really think it could be a game-changer for women,” she says. “This is something you can easily try. It cannot harm you to stop eating UPFs for a month and see what happens.”
The Times
Ultra Processed Women by Milli Hill is published by HQ, an imprint of HarperCollins. Available in print and digital formats from July 16.
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