In early January, London-based biotech startup Verdiva burst onto the scene with an eye-opening $410 million to develop a new range of pills targeting the global obesity epidemic. Bolstered by one of Europe’s largest-ever biotech funding rounds, Verdiva aims to challenge the dominance of Novo Nordisk’s market-leading injectable weight loss drugs, Ozempic and Wegovy.
Verdiva’s impressive emergence comes amid soaring demand for anti-obesity medications, with global spending exceeding $30 billion in 2024 and the market’s value projected to surpass $200 billion annually by 2031 – meteoric growth driven by rising obesity rates. In the U.S., over 40% of adults are obese, with Europe’s comparatively lower, yet still-high obesity equally fueling rapid sales growth.
In this deteriorating climate, ultra-processed foods (UPFs) have been increasingly dragged through the mud, with vital nuance lost amid media hysteria creating a risk of policy misfires and consumer confusion that hinder Europe’s anti-obesity efforts. Moving forward, decision-makers must cut through the noise and pursue a balanced, scientifically-grounded response that empowers citizens with the information and resources needed to lead healthier lives.
Obesity’s growing hold over Europe
Over the past year, weight-loss drug sensation Wegovy has been catapulted to market dominance through social media buzz and celebrity endorsements. Despite emerging concerns over side effects like nausea and a post-treatment weight gain tendency, Wegovy’s momentum shows no sign of slowing, with its sales skyrocketing five-fold in 2023 and the drug now available in eight European countries, including the UK, France, Spain and Italy.
The rise of anti-obesity drugs mirror growing demand for solutions to what the World Health Organization (WHO) has qualified as Europe’s worsening “obesity epidemic.” The statistics are sobering: one in six EU citizens are now obese, while nearly 60% of the bloc’s adults are overweight – conditions directly linked to life-threatening conditions like diabetes, heart disease and certain cancers. Particularly alarming is the crisis’s impact on younger generations, with one in three children in Europe currently classified as overweight or obese.
Traditionally celebrated for its healthy Mediterranean diet, Southern Europe has found itself at the epicenter of the continent’s obesity epidemic, as underscored by a series of WHO Europe meetings in Athens last June. According to WHO Europe’s Dr. Kremlin Wickramasinghe, nearly half of boys in parts of southern Europe live with overweight or obesity. In Greece, for example, young childhood obesity rates are among the highest in the EU, and the highest for adolescents. As Greek Health Minister Adonis Georgiadis has stressed, these figures demand urgent action to address the region’s shifting health landscape.
WHO muddying the UPF water
Yet, while the WHO has played a crucial role in raising awareness around Europe’s obesity crisis, it is unfortunately contributing to widespread confusion around UPFs – the supposed villain responsible for the continent’s declining dietary health. Last year, the global health body published a report encouraging governments to bolster regulation on “health-harming products,” which notably puts UPFs in the same toxic basket as tobacco, alcohol and fossil fuels.
Yet, as FoodDrinkEurope’s director for food safety, research and innovation, Rebeca Fernández, has rightly noted, the WHO report conspicuously fails to “acknowledge that there is no agreed definition of what ultra-processed foods are – let alone their impact on health,” making their sensationalist association with well-established killers like tobacco “irresponsible and outrageously misleading.” Indeed, research on the NOVA classification for UPFs has revealed marked inconsistencies in its implementation, suggesting that “current NOVA criteria do not allow for robust and functional food assignments.”
Setting the UPF record straight
Injecting much-needed nuance into the UPF debate, the EU-funded food innovation ecosystem, EIT Food, has reminded that while the “negative health impacts” of an imbalanced diet high in UPFs are “well-documented, UPFs are not all inherently harmful.” Take wholegrain bread, a valuable component of a balanced diet that provides vital nutrients, yet very much a UPF – these two facets are not mutually exclusive.
The list of nutritious UPFs goes on: baked beans, wholegrain breakfast cereals and even plant-based meat alternatives – the latter of which have been found to offer “multi-pronged health benefits” in a recent European review of health studies, in addition to being placed at the heart of EU plans for a healthier, more sustainable food system. The erroneous causal association between the degree of food processing and nutritional quality as well as the conflation of UPFs and HFSS (high in fat, salt and sugar) represent two of the major sources of confusion to overcome.
These misunderstandings partially explain why nearly two-thirds of European consumers believe UPFs are “unhealthy” yet greatly underestimate the amount of UPFs at the core of their diets. What’s more, more than half of the bloc’s consumers avoid plant-based meat substitutes over misguided processing fears, underscoring how the woeful shortage of knowledge around UPFs risks leading consumers away from pillars of a healthy, balanced diet as urgency builds behind anti-obesity efforts.
Advancing long-term, root-cause solutions
As Klaus Grunert, Professor at Denmark’s Aarhus University, has emphasised, nutritional education offers the most promising path forward. He adds that “concerns over processed food” must be “considered in the wider context of people’s diets” and that consumer guidance must be informed by the latest science on UPF classification.
Educational initiatives such as ‘Food and Nutrition: The Truth Behind Food Headlines’ teach consumers how to discern credible sources from misinformation, while programs like Food Educators equip young people with the knowledge and tools they need to make informed dietary choices from an early age. Innovative packaging solutions also have a key role to play in bridging the information gap, with platforms like ScanTrust allowing shoppers to scan QR codes for instant access to detailed insights on a product’s origins.
These types of initiatives offer a firm foundation for personalised nutrition, the future of dietary health. Digital Tools like the BeYou platform provide consumers tailored support, combining goal-setting, gamification and community engagement to help users track their health progress and make long-term dietary changes. By combining a comprehensive, education-driven approach with sound policy frameworks, European decision-makers can empower citizens to make better-informed and more conscious dietary choices, effectively addressing its obesity epidemic at the source.
Indeed, with Verdiva’s unprecedented funding reflecting the scale of Europe’s obesity crisis and its excessive reliance on quick-fix pharmaceutical solutions, the bloc must embrace systemic policies that facilitate lasting change in nutritional health.
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