Patients I’ve spoken to in the east of England were desperate for help, with dangerously low BMIs. On what possible grounds were they discharged?

Last week, I had a long conversation with a woman who is trying desperately to loosen the awful grip of an eating disorder. She wanted to remain anonymous; for the sake of this article, I’ll call her Jane. She is in her 30s and lives in Norfolk. Her illness, first diagnosed when she was a teenager, is known as the restricting type of anorexia, meaning that she has a long history of drastically limiting her food intake to the point of self-starvation.

Over the past 10 years or so, she has spent some of her time as an NHS inpatient. She told me about her first stay in a specialist ward, where there was “a massive turnover of staff. We all knew we needed therapy, and we couldn’t get it.” She was once moved to a residential facility hundreds of miles from home, in Scotland: “You’d hear people screaming and being held down while they were fed.” And again and again, she talked about the impossibility of coping with the repeated switch from this kind of 24/7 care to the woefully inadequate visits she received when she was allowed to go home.

John Harris is a Guardian columnist

Research on UPFs should be a wake-up call – but if people miss out on nutrients in a quest to avoid them, is it really helping?

If you consumed a lot of news last year, you’d be forgiven for thinking that strawberry yoghurt wants to murder you. Since last spring, a new obsession has spread across Britain: have you heard? Don’t you know? UPF is our new food enemy. What is UPF? It is ultra-processed food. What is ultra-processed food? It can include cereal and sausages and fruit-flavoured yoghurts and instant soup. How exactly can I determine if something is ultra-murderous? Anecdotally, my friends don’t seem to know the definition of UPF – but they do know they should be afraid of it.

Another person who, by his own admission, hasn’t quite mastered the definition is Chris van Tulleken, the infectious diseases doctor who wrote the bestselling book Ultra-Processed People: Why Do We All Eat Stuff That Isn’t Food … and Why Can’t We Stop? At the beginning of his book, he forgoes “a long formal scientific definition” of UPF, instead arguing it can be boiled down to this: “If it’s wrapped in plastic and has at least one ingredient that you wouldn’t usually find in a standard home kitchen, it’s UPF.”

It is easy to blame Bollywood and the media for unrealistic expectations of beauty – but there are deeper social factors at work

When Indian actor Aishwarya Rai, once Miss World, walked the runway at Paris fashion week for L’Oréal this month, the online space and many Indian newspapers exploded with comments about her weight.

People took to social media to say she had “let herself go”, that she shouldn’t have worn this or that, that she should have taken better care of herself. She faced similar comments about her “baby weight” soon after giving birth to her daughter 12 years ago.

The playwright and actor’s debut drama about life on an eating disorder unit will have its world premiere at the Arcola theatre in London next summer

The Papatango new writing prize has been awarded to Hull playwright Laura Waldren for a drama about life in an eating disorder unit.

Waldren said that Some Demon, her first full-length script, was “a very difficult, personal but important play to write” about what she described as “still deeply misunderstood illnesses”.

In the UK, Beat can be contacted on 0808-801-0677. In the US, the National Eating Disorders Association is on 800-931-2237. In Australia, the Butterfly Foundation is at 1800 33 4673. Other international helplines can be found at Eating Disorder Hope.

NHS England data shows 84 patients were sent hospitals in Scotland in 2020-23 due to lack of beds near their homes

Vulnerable eating disorder patients from England are being sent hundreds of miles from their homes to Scotland for treatment, as the number of available beds south of the border has dropped in two years.

Data from NHS England, which included the financial years 2020-2021, 2021-22 and 2022-23 and up to the end of May 2023, shows that 84 patients were sent from England to Scotland. The total cost of this was almost £9m. In the financial year 2022-23, 29 patients made this trip, costing more than £3.4m. The Guardian spoke to a young woman who had been sent more than 400 miles from Sussex to Glasgow, an eight-hour drive.

For more resources, Beat has this directory of eating disorder support services in the UK, and also runs helplines across the four UK nations. The RCP also has helpful resources for children and young people and their families. In the US, more resources are available from the National Eating Disorders Association. In Australia, contact Butterfly.