I’ll never forget hearing Dr Chris van Tulleken – the renowned physician and author of Ultra-Processed People: Why Do We All Eat Stuff That Isn’t Food… And Why Can’t We Stop? – compare a protein bar to meth. Or, rather, he suggested that eating one was akin to the “first hit” of meth. The comparison forms part of his wider campaign to wake both the public and the government up to the dangers of ultra-processed foods, which he describes as “industrially produced edible substances”, products he argues have no place on British shelves.
The lack of regulation and meaningful quality control now endemic in the wellness industry raises an uncomfortable question too: could similar parallels be drawn to magnesium, ashwagandha, omega-3 and countless other supplements we are enthusiastically mainlining in the name of health? In our pursuit of optimisation, balance and longevity, have supplements quietly become the new ultra-processed foe?
According to Mintel data in 2025, 83 per cent of people under the age of 35 regularly take a vitamin or supplement, with e-tailer W-Wellness reporting that almost 61 per cent of Brits between the ages of 18 and 65 take a supplement every single day. Shake the nation and we’ll rattle, it seems. But do we really know what is inside our special tinctures? And what exactly constitutes an ultra-processed supplement?
“Like food, an ultra-processed supplement is one that’s been stripped down to its cheapest, most shelf-stable form,” Dr Liza Osagie-Clouard, an orthopaedic surgeon and founder of longevity clinic Solice, explains when I badger her with my curiosities. “It’ll rely on synthetic isolates, fillers, stabilisers and manufacturing shortcuts that prioritise scalability over biological integrity.”
Dr Megan Rossi, better known to her half a million Instagram followers as The Gut Health Doctor and founder of Smart Strains, tells me that many of the additives used in supplements were safety tested “decades ago”, before we fully understood the gut microbiome and the role it plays in immunity, brain and hormonal function. A clinical trial Rossi and her team at King’s College London conducted found that removing food additive emulsifiers improved “both inflammation markers
and disease severity” in those susceptible to gut inflammation or Crohn’s disease. These are additives that are often included in supplements.
And they get away with it because what most people don’t realise is that supplements are regulated as foods, not as medicine-adjacent, physiology-altering substances. Hence the brands don’t need to prove that their products work before they ship them out to chemists and health food stores up and down the country. This creates the (high) possibility of products slipping through the net that don’t contain the “right form” or quantity of the active ingredient as proclaimed on the packaging.
This sort of thing would be harder to mask in mainstream food marketing, so why is it allowed to happen with supplements? “In the UK and Europe, the precautionary regulatory framework is focused primarily on safety and consumer protection, not efficacy,” Belle Amatt, W-Wellness’s nutritional therapist, explains.