Gen X’s favourite foods might be slowly killing them

Joe Wicks and Dr Chris Van Tulleken, creating the world’s most harmful protein bar in Channel 4’s Licensed to Kill last month, made headlines. The sweeteners, goo, flavouring and other industrially produced edible substances they poured into an innocent-looking and apparently extremely tasty fake chocolate bar, have been linked to diarrhoea, other gut issues, an increased risk of stroke, cancer, and what Van Tulleken describes with alarming confidence as “early death”.

A nation trembled. But who should have been trembling in a very specific way? Generation X. Snagged silently between the gobby social media hoggers of baby boomers and millennials, those of us who’d been paying attention to US medical journals (a very specific subset, admittedly) will have seen just one week previously a paper from the University of Michigan, which has discovered that this is all affected Gen X’s health has suffered in a very unique way.

It’s only the second piece of research in the US looking at the intersection between older age groups and ultra-processed food (UPF), and it points out that Generation X were the first generation to have UPF feature heavily in their diets from an early age. The results are clear. Twenty-one per cent of women and 10 per cent of men in Generation X meet criteria for addiction to UPFs, outweighing other addictions like alcoholism (1.5 per cent) and smoking (4 per cent ).

The term “ultra-processed foods”, just in case you’ve not come across it, was defined by the Nova food classification system, developed by researchers at the University of São Paulo, Brazil. It defines food in four categories depending on what’s been done to it during its production.

Unprocessed or minimally processed foods include fruit, vegetables, milk, fish, eggs and other foods with no added ingredients. Processed ingredients include salt, sugar and oils used to cook with.

Processed foods combining groups one and two in a way you could do at home, like jam, pickles, tinned fruit and vegetables. Ultra-processed foods, however, have more than one ingredient that you’d never find in a kitchen, such as chemical-based preservatives, emulsifiers, sweeteners, artificial colours and flavours.

But that’s only half the story. It doesn’t explain why those Gen Xers got addicted, showing strong cravings, repeated unsuccessful attempts to cut down and withdrawal symptoms. It also doesn’t explain why some of this cohort say they even sometimes avoid social situations because of fear of overeating. Or why they over-index as UPF addicts who are overweight and are isolated and have poor mental health.

Boomers, by the way, not so much. Just 12 per cent of women and 4 per cent of men from the golden generation count as UPF addicts. In case the cheap housing, large pensions and jobs for life weren’t enough of a reward for being born in the 1950s and early 60s, they’d also been taught to cook from scratch — a habit many of them never abandoned.

“Generation X was the first to grow up surrounded by ultra-processed foods,” Dr Karen Mann, medical director for the digital health app Noom. “If you were a child in the 1970s or 1980s like I was, you probably remember being bombarded with ads for brightly packaged snacks, fast food, and “convenience” meals.

“Those foods weren’t just available, they were marketed as normal, fun, and family-friendly. In a sense, Gen X was the first test case for how a diet dominated by engineered, hyperpalatable products affects long-term eating behaviour. And being young when UPF arrived shaped Generation X’s tastes and habits early on, making those foods more difficult to resist later in life.”

This was also a generation when both parents started to work too and a more educated population meant many moved away from extended family as they sought out new work opportunities.

“It created a latchkey generation, with parents leaving us food things like French bread pizzas, Findus Crispy Pancakes and Pop-Tarts to snack on when we got home from school,” adds Rob Hobson, nutritionist and author of Unprocess Your Family Life. “Our teeth have suffered, we have a mouthful of fillings, our diets suffered and now we’re reaching midlife, we have high rates of metabolic issues — weight gain, cardiovascular risk, all that kind of stuff.”

As a card-carrying member of Gen X, I look back on Findus Crispy Pancakes, Vesta Curries, Alphabetty Spaghetti, Mr Kipling Cakes, Dalepak Steaks and Bird’s Eye Potato Waffles with genuine affection. There were no health warnings for us. We were just told that Mr Kipling baked exceedingly good cakes, Bird’s Eye Potato Waffles were waffley versatile and Angel Delight was not only delicious, it was also delovely, right?

Ironically, UPF’s high calorie content and semi-industrial structure — which makes it faster to eat and faster to digest — is thanks to the American biologist Paul Ehrlich who, in 1968, predicted that the US would face widespread famines in the 1980s, with millions dying of starvation. He wrote the then seminal Population Bomb, a grim but entirely incorrect book that saw the post-war surge in the population as unsustainable. There were so many of you, they thought we’d all starve. Instead, between 1980 and 1998, we saw the emergence of Big Food to feed us all and obesity rates treble.