🏆 Ultra-processed Athletes (Part 1)

Friday Fuel August 22

This week we sat down with our nutritionist Katie Schofield to record a series of conversations on the biggest food and fuel topics facing young athletes. One of the big ones we unpacked together? Ultra-Processed Foods (UPFs).

Well Gary, like me you probably opened your lunchbox at school in the 80s and 90s with similar food: a sandwich wrapped in waxy paper, a piece of fruit, and maybe a homemade muffin or cookie if Mum had baked - my mum is amazing and a real foodie so she usually had! It was simple, predominantly whole food.

Fast-forward to what I see now as a teacher and coach: packets of chips, instant noodles, “muesli bars” that look nothing like muesli, what are essentially lollies disguised as food, and sports and energy drinks in bottles bigger than a child’s forearm.

It’s not that we as parents don’t care but convenience is powerful. Marketing is clever. And let’s be honest—UPFs taste good. But when more than half of a child’s energy is coming from these engineered foods, we have to pause and ask: what’s the cost? And what do our youth athletes need to know about them to ensure they remain happy, healthy and successful?

This week, we dive into UPFs. We’ll look at what UPF’s actually are, how youth diets are changing, and how parents can help strike a healthy balance for their athletes.

📌 This week:

• 🧃 What Counts as UPF (and what doesn’t)

• 📊 The Stats: How much UPF are Kiwi kids eating?
  

• 👨‍👧 Strategies for Parents – how to balance without banning
  

• 🥤 Why clean products are so hard to make
  

• 📺 Watch & 📖 Read – Resources to go deeper
  

• 🎯 This Week’s Challenge
  

🧃 What Counts as UPF (and What Doesn’t)

This is actually one of the challenges with UPFs: there isn’t a single “traffic light” test that’s universally adopted, but there is a recognised framework used by researchers and public health bodies worldwide. And Katie simplifies it by saying this:

Watch as she breaks it down here:

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And the framework looks like this:

• Unprocessed or minimally processed foods – fruit, vegetables, meat, eggs, milk, grains.

• Processed culinary ingredients – oils, butter, sugar, salt.
  

• Processed foods – Frozen veg, canned fruit and veg, breads  (made from a few ingredients), cheeses. Foods altered but still recognizable.
  

• Ultra-processed foods (UPFs) – Instant noodles, sports drinks, chips, brightly coloured snack bars. Foods with industrial formulations, with additives and substances never or rarely used in home cooking.

📊 The Stats: How Much UPF Are Kids Eating?

It’s clear that our lives are much different and busier than ever, and that the range of food that we can purchase is incredibly varied compared to that of the last century.

Like Katie says in the video, there is a time and place for UPF’s, especially in sport, and especially in high level sport. Yet this is only in specific moments and for specific reasons. Understanding this is crucial to health and energy, yet somehow it may have got away on us. Check out what the stats are showing:

• By 12 months old, NZ children are already getting ~45% of their daily energy from UPFs. By age five, that number climbs to over 50% (University of Otago).
  

• Almost 70% of supermarket packaged foods in New Zealand are classified as UPFs (RNZ reporting). Experts believe it is over 70% in the USA.
  

• In the U.S. and U.K., it’s similar—60%+ of youth calories are ultra-processed with some research showing up to 80% of youth diets are ultra-processed foods.
  

That means UPFs aren’t the exception. They’re now the default. It’s more than a little scary, right? Just like Fat Bastard…

More and more research is being done but obesity, metabolic disease (think diabetes and the like), an inability to focus and concentrate, reduced energy and andecreased ability to recover from intense exercise are just a few of the negative effects of a diet high in UPF’s.

Next week will really dive deep into all of the effects on our youth athletes and when might be ok to use UPF’s, but for now let’s look look at a few things you can do as a parent to achieve strong outcomes for your kids in a general sense.

👨‍👧 Strategies for Parents: Balance Over Bans

Katie’s advice is clear—there is a time and place for UPFs and you can’t get away from them completely. But they shouldn’t be the main diet. Katies’s not a believer in labeling foods good or bad but rather about educating our youth so that they can make good choices about when and how often to eat ultra-processed foods. As parents we are often in charge of food and we definitely set habits around food when they are young. Here are a few things you can do:

Do:

• Aim for 90-95% whole/minimally processed foods.
  

• Keep UPFs for specific purposes such as quick energy at tournaments, or birthday parties and special celebrations.
  

• Teach kids the “ingredient test”: if you don’t recognise most of them, limit it.
  

• Keep fruit, eggs, and whole-grain snacks handy for grab-and-go.
  

Avoid:

• Labelling foods “good” or “bad”—this can backfire and create shame.
  

• Letting UPFs dominate everyday meals (e.g. noodles for lunch + takeaways for dinner).

• Using UPFs as a default boredom snack.

📺 Watch & 📖 Read – To Go Deeper

Want to explore UPFs further? Here are some resources we recommend:

• 🎥 Chris van Tulleken’s is a UK doctor heavily involved in UPF research, even experienting on himself with a 30 day UPF diet. The results, highlighted in his book and talk are enlightening, entertaining and scary all at the same time.

• 📄 University of Otago Study:

  

🥤 Behind Our Journey – Why Clean Products Are So Hard to Make

One of the reasons we’re building our own nutrition products is exactly this: the world doesn’t need more UPFs—it needs clean, whole-food fuel that young athletes can trust.

But here’s the battle we keep running into: most manufacturers want to load products with anti-caking agents, flow agents, emulsifiers, artificial preservatives and more. Not because athletes need them. Not even because parents want them. But because those additives make their machines run faster and keep costs lower. UPF ingredients are often cheap too. Not healthy, just cheap. And it all comes down to the $ for man of these companies.

We’ve had to push back—hard. Saying no to shortcuts, even when it slows our journey. Because for us, it’s simple:

• If it doesn’t fuel performance, it doesn’t go in.
  
  

• Our mission is to make products parents can hand to their kids without second-guessing.
  

It’s not the easy road, but it’s the right one.

🎯 This Week’s Challenge

Parents – Check your child’s lunchbox and training nutrition one day this week. How much of it is UPF? Could you swap just one packet item for a whole-food option?

Athletes – Try fuelling one training with whole foods instead of UPFs. Notice the difference in how you feel in the last 20 minutes.

💪 Final Whistle

UPFs aren’t evil, but they are everywhere. Awareness is the first step. When we shift the balance back toward whole foods—even just one swap at a time—we see real gains: better energy, sharper focus, stronger recovery, and long-term health.

This is also why we’re so determined to keep fighting for clean products. If we can shift even 10% of what’s on the shelves to real, whole-food fuel, it could change the game for kids everywhere.

Next week we will deep dive into how they affect athletes and students, and when the right time to incorporate UPFs into a diet might be.

Let’s fuel our athletes, our kids, for performance, not just convenience.

Ben & Billinda

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