BORIS JOHNSON: It's time for tobacco-style warnings on UPF food, with pictures of the giant pot belly it can give you

Whoa, hold it there. A revolution in taste is under way, a growing consciousness of what we call ultra-processed food — and a growing anxiety that it may be doing incalculable harm to the human race. Up and down the country, people are becoming aware of this distinction — pioneered by a Brazilian scientist called Carlos Monteiro — between normal domestic ingredients and the ingredients used in ultra-processed food. They are reading — in the Mail and elsewhere — the work of Chris van Tulleken, a medical doctor and scientist who has chronicled the way the food industry has filled our shopping baskets with sweeteners, emulsifiers, humectants*, stabilisers, dyes, firming agents and bulking agents, while our calories come increasingly from modified starches and invert sugars, hydrolysed protein isolates and seed oils that have been refined, bleached, deodorised, hydrogenated and interesterified. Their presence should be announced loudly on the front of the packet, preferably with a tobacco-style pictorial warning — of the giant pot belly and the other health consequences that may follow.