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Step into any of the UK hospitals and you’ll find vendors like Greggs, WHSmith and M&S selling ultra-processed, cancer-causing meal deals – sometimes only a corridor away from an oncology ward. The contradiction is stark: WHO-classified carcinogens are packed into meals that spike blood sugar, inflame the gut and encourage overeating. By their side are “zero-sugar” energy drinks laced with corrosive, acidic additives, in a building where health should always come first.
Hospitals may have agreed to cut sales of sugary drinks to <10% of beverages, but they’ve been replaced by “diet” cans that hit teeth, sleep and blood pressure harder than ever. If the place we go to get better actually sells the same products tied to diseases it treats, you have to ask: is the system protecting your health, or quietly fuelling a return journey?
They’re Selling You Sickness, Not a Sandwich
Let’s look at a standard chicken & bacon sandwich – the classic £3-5 hospital meal deal main. Ingredients listed include sodium nitrate as a bacon preservative, maltodextrin as a filler, emulsifiers to bind texture, plus palm oil, rapeseed oil, and yeast extract for flavouring. Here’s how they’re making you sick:
- Sodium nitrate: found in processed meats, which WHO’s cancer agency, IARC, classifies as a Group 1 carcinogen, increasing risk of colon cancer by 18% for every 50g/day eaten. Cancer Research UK attributes 1 in 6 bowel cancer cases in the UK to processed meat.
- Maltodextrin: high-GI carbohydrate that spikes blood sugar faster than table sugar. Experimental and mechanistic studies show this disrupts gut defences and promote adhesion of E Coli, associated with Crohn’s Disease. Several clinical guidance pieces advise patients to avoid maltodextrin.
- Carboxymethylcellulose (CMC) emulsifier: CMC unsettles the gut microbiome, reduces beneficial metabolites, and increases GI discomfort according to randomised human trials. Animal and cell work shows these emulsifiers promote chronic intestinal inflammation.
- Rapeseed & palm oils: Overuse in ultra-processed foods generate toxic aldehydes and oxidation products in the body, linked to cellular damage, memory decline and heart disease
- Yeast extract & flavourings: Included to make UPFs more palatable and increase their consumption, encouraging overeating as backed by NIH trials, but also causing migraines and linked to neurotoxicity.
In short: you eat more than you think, glucose levels are destabilised, and you risk gut irritation. Long-term risks of Crohn’s disease, bowel cancer, heart disease, chronic inflammation and others are backed by mainstream studies. Yet here they are, pedalled in the same building cancer patients are being treated.
Sugar Free Has Not Solved The Problem
Forced to meet <10% targets, hospitals replaced sugary drinks with “zero” and “diet” versions that are even worse:
- Caffeine content remains astronomical (200mg in a can of Monster that litters the shelves) raising blood pressure, disrupts sleep as found by EFSA, and extending symptoms already felt by cardiovascular patients or pregnant women
- Acidity sits between pH 2.3-3.4 for these drinks, way below the enamel erosion threshold of 5.5. Even without the sugar, dental risks are critical.
- Artificial sweeteners like aspartame are listed as Group 2B “possibly carcinogenic” and are used in place of the original sugar content
- Taurine in energy drinks is completely synthetic, made from petrochemical precursors – it is not the original ingredient that it’s marketed to be
Incredibly, the NHS itself warns that carbonated drinks cause dental erosion regardless of sugar content, instead pointing to the acidic levels. Hospitals selling bundles of these, technically meeting the “sugary drinks” target, are in fact not solving the problem. They’re just rerouting it.
Seven Dead From Ultra-Processed Sandwiches in Hospitals
In 2019, contaminated pre-packaged sandwiches supplied to NHS hospitals were linked to nine confirmed cases of listeriosis, resulting in seven deaths despite the government’s original report stating six. Listeria monocytogenes is deadly for the elderly or immunocompromised and pregnant women; the very people served in hospitals.
Listeriosis is an infection from L. monocytogenes, found in chilled “ready-to-eat” foods like the pre-packed sandwiches found on hospital shelves. Symptoms range from meningitis to sepsis to flu-like illness, with a high fatality rate in vulnerable groups. Aren’t hospitals supposed to be the safest link in the chain?
Why It’s Not “Just a Sandwich”
The best human trial we have, conducted by NIH on randomised in-patients, found people over-ate and gained extra weight on ultra-processed diets even when calories, sugar, salt, fat, and fibre were matched to a minimally processed diet. The processing of the foods encourages higher intake, thanks to ingredients mentioned above, rather than the content alone causing weight gain. BMJ studies link higher UPF intake to cardiovascular disease, higher mortality, cardiometabolic disease and common mental disorders across large populations. The food available in hospitals causes the outcomes that send patients right back again. The disease conveyor belt.
Another study, centred around the emulsifier CMC, used a controlled-feeding trial and found that gut microbes and metabolites were altered by their consumption, matching up with previous studies done on animals that pointed to gut inflammation. Maltodextrin carries a high glycaemic index, meaning blood sugar is artificially spiked – not good news for a building treating diabetes and metabolic disease.
Normalising Unhealthy Habits: The Perpetual Patient
The UK Parliament’s own science sums it up: regular UPF consumption causes type-2 diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular disease, cancers, and deteriorates mental health. If hospitals normalise these eating patterns at the front door, they entrench the same disease they fund clinics to treat. It’s an endless cycle, and it’s paying out for the vendors every day.
While all 227 NHS trusts agreed to the <10% sugary drinks target, backed also by the on-site retailers like Subway, Greggs, WHSmith. It sounds like progress, but it’s not removal, and the broader retail mix of sandwiches, pastries and snacks are largely ultra-processed. It’s cheap, shelf-stable, profitable and contract-friendly.
CQUIN guidance presses hospitals to stop promotions of foods high in fat, sugar or salt (HFSS) and to keep them away from check-outs. In practice, though, customers and patients are still faced by rows of packaged, processed products engineered for speed and margin, not nutrient density. Clinicians themselves recommend fresh, minimally processed foods – hospitals continue pedalling financially beneficial items instead.
Final Thought
If hospitals are happy selling foods that the WHO and NIH say cause cancer and encourage overeating, what message does that send to patients walking out of cardiac rehab, or chemotherapy? Most full-sugar drinks have been removed, but they continue to sell acidic stimulants and shelf-stable UPFs to exhausted nurses and cancer patients. The system, then, has not changed its mind – only its food labels.
The listeriosis outbreak has already warned us how deadly convenience can be in a hospital. These are either places of recovery, or a captive market, and right now the concourse looks too much like the latter. But when retail partners and procurement targets set the menu, there’s only one outcome: the system wins, and patients lose.
Join the Conversation
Have you noticed what your local hospital sells to staff, visitors and patients at the entrance? Should NHS shops drop processed meats and HFSS meal deals entirely, or should people be able to make their own choices? How do you view the system? Tell us where you draw the line, and what you’d put on the shelves instead.
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Categories: Uncategorised
Control allows no choice. Freedom needs choice available. So both UPF and fresh apples, bananas, etc available. But, non-genetically engineered increasingly rare.
Balanced meals home-made from raw basic ingredients, home-grown or from small independent organic farms, do not ‘snack’ between. Price/kg higher but less quantity satisfies as nutritional value higher; UPF is higher total cost.
Hi Myme,
I agree there’s a fine balance to discuss here. Removing everything except what is deemed healthy is also not a great outcome (because then we’re vulnerable to being told what is good and bad), but the issue I see with their current retail environments is that it simply perpetuates the same poor eating habits that lead to an early grave.
I don’t know why it can’t be more common to cook in-house, using fresh foods and raw basic ingredients as you mentioned, and made to order (or at least made the same day). Could the increased costs be subsidised with the money inevitably saved by the NHS by improving eating habits?
You’re also totally right that UPF is higher cost in the end, but if hospitals aren’t pedalling the message, then who should? For me, hospitals should be the first place that healthy eating is encouraged, and people are educated in how different foods function, instead of just selling cheap, pre-packaged rubbish that will leave them hungry again in another hour or so.
Appreciate your insights,
G Calder
Thank you.
However, my stance is that deciding for oneself what oneself will do should be upheld. I find relentless dictatorial standardisation abolishing variety, therefore life itself, insupportable
Сами же врачи и разрешили пищевые добавки, как они теперь их могут запретить? В чипсах я насчитал 28 ингредиентов! В жареной картошке, 28! На законодательном уровне должны быть запрещены все ароматизаторы, красители, заменители, наполнители, усилители вкуса и прочее. Зачем это все нужно? Зачем обязательно колбаса должна быть розовая? Почему в колбасе мяса не 99,9%, а 60? Можно оставить при необходимости только консерванты, но не для хранения в течении года.
Surely, it’s cheaper to do inhouse cooking, from whole natural foods and ingredients. I thought the hospitals were focused on profits and bottom lines?