Europe urged to tax ultra-processed foods before it follows America’s obesity path

A US public health specialist has warned European policymakers against repeating America’s food-system trajectory, as calls grow for taxes on ultra-processed products.

The United States should be treated as a warning for Europe as the region wrestles with the rise of ultra-processed foods, according to Laura Schmidt, a public health specialist at the University of California, San Francisco. Speaking at a Brussels event organised by EuroHealthNet, Schmidt said she did not want Europe to repeat the food-system changes that helped drive America’s obesity crisis. She argued that the sharp rise in obesity in the US since the 1980s could not be explained by genetics or by shifts in individual exercise habits alone, but instead reflected the expanding availability of industrially formulated foods. Recent reporting by Axios showed that more than half of Americans’ daily calories came from ultra-processed foods between 2021 and 2023, even as the CDC said intake fell across age groups between 2017 and 2023.

Schmidt said Europe was already well down the same path. Data cited in the BMJ and by public health researchers suggest ultra-processed foods make up a significant share of diets across the continent, with wide differences between countries. One recent review found that intake ranges from roughly 15% of daily calories in Romania to 57% in the United Kingdom, while the Rapporteur report said the average across Europe is 27%, with consumption particularly high in Sweden. These products, which often contain sugar, fats, salt and additives and are manufactured through processes such as extrusion and pre-frying, are linked in the medical literature to obesity, type 2 diabetes, hypertension and other diet-related diseases.

The debate in Brussels is increasingly turning to taxation. Schmidt said levies could be used in a similar way to tobacco taxes, both to discourage consumption and to fund other public-health measures. She pointed to Berkeley, California, where a sugary-drinks tax has been credited with reducing childhood obesity. According to Rapporteur, EU health commissioner Olivér Várhelyi has also backed the idea of a levy on ultra-processed foods, while the European Commission is waiting for scientific advisers to produce a policy-ready definition of the category by March 2027. Several member states are already testing national measures, including France’s interest in levies on sugary drinks, Hungary’s existing chips tax and Germany’s approved tax on sugary beverages, due to take effect in July 2027.

Schmidt also drew attention to the overlap between the food and tobacco industries. She said tobacco firms owned major food businesses in North America between the 1960s and 2007, just before obesity rates accelerated, and argued that the same commercial logic may have shaped the marketing of ultra-processed foods. Researchers cited by Rapporteur have found that US tobacco companies bought 43 food companies across 25 European countries, mainly in the 1990s, and said this may have helped spread aggressive marketing methods from tobacco into the food sector. Other recent research has described a broader global shift in which ultra-processed products have crowded out minimally processed foods such as fruit, vegetables, legumes and whole grains, deepening concern about the health consequences for both adults and children.