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.
The ingredients are tightly controlled under the Food Standards Agency and European Food Safety Authority – “one of the strictest systems globally”, she says – but there’s no minimum standard for potency, formulation quality or bioavailability. “The result is low-dose products, formulations padded out with excipients and supermarket own-brand supplements with limited nutritional impact that can still be legally sold,” she lays out. Put bluntly, a supplement can be legally safe and nutritionally useless.
Another layer of complexity also arises because supplements, by their very nature – even the good ones – are a processed entity, something Kat Chan, nutritional therapist and author of newsletter Full Serving, emphasises. “Supplements are made from isolated nutrients that have been extracted, refined and stabilised. This ‘processing’ doesn’t automatically make them bad.” A more useful distinction, she says, is to look at how much they’ve been processed, what’s been added along the way and whether either of these steps was necessary for better absorption, stability or safety in the first place.
“There are three markers of a high-quality supplement,” GP and Deia Health founder Lafina Diamandis sets out. “Third-party testing, a clear – and ideally short – ingredients list and transparency around how these ingredients are sourced.” All of these indicate that a product has been checked independently for purity and accuracy. Filler ingredients – things that help to bulk, stabilise and extend the shelf life of supplements – aren’t inherently bad either. Some are neutral, as Diamandis describes it, and pass through the digestive system without much notice. Others can be problematic, with “artificial colours, sweeteners, hydrogenated oils and high amounts of sugar alcohols” being listed as ones to avoid keenly.
Eleanor Hoath, nutritionist and founder of Well Nourished Nutrition Therapy, tells her clients: if the ingredients or claims are vague, practise caution. Similarly, if it reads like a sweet or flavoured drink, then be prepared to call a spade a (sugar-laden) spade. “Extremely low prices for a product that claims to do a lot are another red flag,” she says.
Another simple way to quality control is to avoid anything in gummy format. “Gummy supplements often contain added sugars, flavourings and sweeteners to make them more palatable, especially for children, which can encourage overconsumption,” Rossi cautions. “In those cases, they align very closely with the definition of ultra-processed foods.”
Ultra-processed foods can be easy to spot. Their ingredients read like modern hieroglyphics and the amount of protein – even when negligible – is plastered all over the packaging. Supplements, on the other hand, are more subtle, wrapped in emotionally enticing promises that quietly draw us in: better sleep, thicker hair, smoother skin, calmer minds, more vim. But if we genuinely want supplements to deliver any of that, they demand more than blind faith. They require the same scrutiny we now apply to food: reading the label, questioning the dosage, checking for third-party testing and unnecessary fillers. Without these, supplements are nothing more than a futile – and expensive – act of optimism.
