The ultimate guide to spotting ultra processed foods during YOUR weekly shop: Top experts reveal how to identify the unhealthy UPFs lurking in your basket - and be warned, even low-fat items can be pa

What are UPFs – and why are they now considered so harmful? Ultra-processed foods, or UPFs, now include a huge range of everyday foods from packaged bread to dairy products and 'healthy' plant-based meals, making them nigh impossible to avoid Nutritional epidemiologist Dr Carlos Monteiro and his team analysed food-buying patterns to see what had changed: they found that people were buying less salt, cooking oils and raw ingredients such as beans and rice and more processed foods such as fizzy drinks, instant noodles, packaged breads and biscuits. UPFs are designed to make them irresistible to consume using carefully calculated ratios of fat, sugar, salt and additives, says Dr Yanaina Chavez-Ugalde, a research fellow at City St George's, University of London, who has previously worked in the food industry. If you're looking to cut down on UPFs use the label to guide you to a product that's processed, rather than ultra-processed Similarly with 'low sugar': a food has to contain less than 5g of sugar per 100g to be labelled low sugar. 'As a rule of thumb, if you're looking at a packaged food, it contains more than five ingredients and you've never heard of some of them or wouldn't find them in your kitchen, then the chances are it's a UPF,' says Dr Adrian Brown, a senior researcher in nutrition and dietetics at UCL.