UPF, poverty, obesity.... children’s healthy eating - an impossible challenge?

It’s so sad to read. I think it’s a mixture of things, mostly parents being time-poor due to both having to work or work more due to COL crisis. Meaning they don’t have time to cook nutritious meals from scratch or take their kids to the park/play football etc and do sports with them.

And secondly fresh food is so much more expensive than UPF, as well as sports clubs out of school etc also costing a small fortune.

Also a lack of education in the UK around cooking and nutrition. My DH’s are Scandinavian and their lifestyle ie constantly outdoors, healthy eating and cooking is so different to ours and much healthier tbh.

Compare the comments on this thread to the comments on this thread

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5100015-to-have-given-her-extra-food

And you might start to see where the issue lies.
I should add that the OP didn't return after the first half hour. Make of that what you will.

In defense of the humble lentil, we all love a lentil curry. But my point is that our brains shouldn't navigate to asparagus and avocados and other expensive, imported items when we think "healthy". Healthy food is unadulterated food. Our grandparents only had local, unadulterated foods. I always recommend introducing baby potatoes with skin on into child's diet as early as possible. They are delicious steamed and zero prep.

I was about to make the same comment so glad someone said this. Lentils are nasty imo. I don't know why they're praised on here as the ultimate cheap healthy food. What happened to mashed potatoes and some cheap mince. With like carrots and frozen peas in the mince. Great childhood meal for me and my kids still eat it now. No use moaning your kids won't eat healthy food when you're serving them some nasty lentil concoction.

No offense meant to anyone who has mastered the delicious lentil recipe, I'm just saying there's other options

Snacking is another thing that wasn't around when I was a kid.
If you were genuinely hungry between meals occasionally you got homemade brown bread with home made butter or homemade jam!
My kid would happily "snack" on a family size bag of doritos and then 30 mins later say he was too full for dinner if he was allowed. He's done it before so now he gets offered a couple of crackers and cheese and if he refuses, well, he's not that hungry!

I agree - I try very hard to keep my UPF consumption down. I'd always preferred to cook stuff from scratch because I'd grown to dislike the ready-made stuff we got served a lot as children and had read about UPFs a while back so was already cutting down. But reading Ultra Processed People shifted that up a gear.

That said, I'm not going to beat myself up if the only UPF I've eaten this week is 1) a couple of teaspoons of stock powder, 2) a tablespoon or so of harissa paste and 3) some crispy chilli stuff in a stirfry.

And you'd have to prise my occasional McDonalds out of my cold, dead hands. The difference being that it's occasional - when we were kids a Wimpey was a huuuuge treat, as was something like a Vienetta or cake. We've lost sight so much of what proper food is that we don't realise that we're eating "occasional treats" all the damn time.

And on top of that, I've had people comment about what I eat and buy: "Oh you're so HEALTHY" (when eating a salad) or "Where's all the proper food" (a comment on my shopping sitting on the conveyor belt, which was mostly fruit and veg and wine ) Why is this seen as weird?

I fully agree with you that home grown - see my post further up.

But I've noticed that I could buy a bag of potatoes and a few days later they are sprouting. Many people would chuck them in the bin, but they are fine. I couldn't buy a big sack because I've nowhere to put them and not enough people to eat them!

Knowing what to do with leftovers is another big skill that looks like it's being lost. I'm doing what I can to educate myself more on that, as well as learning about foraging - I've not bought a pot of jam in over a year - I went out blackberrying last summer with DS and forgot how bloody delicious it is on a fresh scone with proper butter.

I wonder if a disconnect between supermarket foods and what we grow has added to the trend for UPFs?

My dad was from a farming/fishing background. There was rarely anything served that wasn't grown or butchered by them. He was one of the first to see the value in organic farming and the dangers of additives for animal feed or interfering with the natural growth of the animals.

Mum, a city kid, grew up with food poverty and was malnourished as a child. She had some basic cooking skills in time, but it was actually my Dad who taught her a lot of cooking. He taught her how to make butter and bread, how to pluck a chicken and gut a fish, how to make pies and pastry. Drinks available in the house were milk from our cow, water, tea or instant coffee. We never had anything fizzy except on a very rare occasion. He was deeply suspicious of modified foods and ready meals, wondering what shite they add to give it the shelf life. That extended into fertilisers too, he always used organic natural methods to fertilise his crops - I don't think we ate fruit or veg that didn't come from what he grew. We had the kind of food that a rural kid in the 50s might have had, in the 80s. If it was up to mum it would have been tinned pies jars of veg, and freezer meals mostly, interspersed with takeaways because that was her background.

Each of us kids are quite foodie, and so far none of us are overweight (well I'm getting a little menopausal plumpness now.) All of us love cooking from scratch, as 'raw' as we can start with. And I really think that came from how we grew up helping out with the farming.

When DH got unwell and was out of work, the first thing I looked at was cutting back on groceries. But my Lidl receipt has gone from about €70 to well over €100 most weeks and that's with me being more frugal than I was before- the price of food has gone up drastically. It's gotten more difficult to put something healthy on the table and I like cooking lentils!

I can't imagine the added struggle for people who have dietary restrictions or just find cooking a hated chore, as well as not having much money to spare. I can totally understand them reaching for a box from the freezer.

I agree. It's sad that people feel like they've failed when they've made a wonderful, nutritious casserole / stew / soup, and then discover than their stock cube had a small amount of emulsifier and colouring in.

I get that artificial emulsifiers are seen as pretty awful for the gut, but when someone's managed to switch from, say, stopping off at McDs for chucking stuff in a slow cooker and adding a stock cube, they need to be feeling pretty darn happy with that.

I genuinely believe that when we scrutinise and obsess over small things like this, we alienate people and they give up. We can't deny the difference in an anti-caking agent added to salt so it does not stick together in the salt shaker and the long list of emulsifiers, preservatives, gums, sugars etc in a supermarket loaf of bread/cake/ready meal which is designed to be hyper palatable so you eat far more than you need to.

We need to let the small things slide. I cant even begin to express the frustration on a UPF FB group when people say there is no point baking bread because the yeast is a UPF. Less than a teaspoon of yeast goes in an entire home baked loaf. It is still a million times better for you than supermarket alternatives

I think that’s quite a generalisation tbh.
There are many first generation immigrant kids at our school and I’d say the prevalence of obesity is definitely comparable to their British peers.
I’d say it depends on many different factors.

@LadyKenya I don't know what the other minded children had packed up for their lunches. It's probably less work for the childminder if all the mindees turn up with packets of finger food / squeezy pouches. Our child needed a plate/bowl, use of the microwave and, when they were older, cutlery.

Pouches seem to remove a lot of context of food from the experience of consuming it - e.g. a pea puree arrives at the child without them experiencing the colour, sight, smell, texture of the food. I've seen in the past some pouches include things like apple and pear juice (i.e. sugar) in foods that would never contain them normally (e.g. something like a veg chilli or bolognaise). The fruit juice's purpose in those is to ramp up the sugar content. The child then unsurprisingly likes it and eat more of it, and the parent continues to buy it.

Pouches seem to use an awful lot of plastic whilst also being a way of introducing food in way that people tend not to use when they're older (maybe pro cyclists sucking down an energy gel is an adult version of sucky feeding). I get they'll be really convenient, but they also seem to be used as a default way to feed babies when out and about, when there are more sustainable alternatives.

Beating obesity in children doesn't need to involve lentils, avocados or any other imported foods. Potatoes mashed with a knob of butter or a splash of milk saw many of our forefathers live into their 90s in excellent health. Simple food. Pure food. From the ground. And every child I've ever known bloody loves the stuff. I'm not convinced that it's all about poverty. I do believe there's an element of effort-avoidance. A sack of potatoes gets you a lot of meals. As does a large sack of rice. Our slim and fit grandparents had cheap, simple food with the same local veg repeated during the week. Meat once a week only in many cases. Don't get me wrong, I love my Taco Tuesdays and my Carbonaras. My kids don't need those meals to be healthy though. Convincing ourselves that they do is half the problem I feel. People swing the other way entirely when there's a world of simplicity between homemade fish pie and frozen chicken nuggets.

Exactly.

I, somewhat irrationally, hate those squeezy, sucky pouches which are designed to remove any engagement from eating at all other than mindlessly sucking straight from a packet.

Thanks. I will have a look and consign the table salt for makinb playdoh.

This is worth a read - loads of baby products including Ella’s kitchen ones are upf:

https://www.firststepsnutrition.org/upfs-marketed-for-infants-and-young-children

Go for the coarse sea salt (although more expensive) which doesn’t have it.

It’s a processed ingredient according to the Nova classification. I don’t think a substance that is basically still what it always was but with one additive would count as ultra processed.

Have you ever read anything about the obesity crisis? A book, a newspaper article?

I agree. What I often find with threads like this one is that people seem to be comparing extremes as if there were no middle ground.
It’s either a completely clean, all organic, zero UPF diet or frozen pizza, squash and endless snacks.
Somebody will always suggest lentils as the ultimate healthy meal, while someone else will say they can’t afford the spices to cook the lentils with, so frozen pizza it is.
We cook mostly from scratch, sometimes with organic ingredients, but more often with ingredients from Aldi.
We sometimes buy frozen pizza and breakfast cereal, but we also always have fresh fruit and veg at home.
We also buy frozen vegetables.
Some of the products we buy are UPF (bread for instance, definitely no time for home baking), but on balance I’d say we’re doing alright.

I recently discovered table salt is a UPF. It has something added to stop it sticking together.

I know in MN world cooking from scratch is cheaper because you can make a family meal for four with a lentil and a half a tomato but in the real world people don't choose to feed their kids crap because they can't be arsed to cook.

^

Just the tone of this post says it all

It's disapproving of lentils and tomatoes

Hence the obesity crisis

Even when you are using products you think are ok to make a healthy meal from scratch they can be UPF with various preservatives and thickeners eg coconut milk, tins of beans/lentils etc.

when you buy bread you expect it should b bread, not a chemical experiment.
the trouble is once you start looking at labels you realise the horror. And if you try to eradicate them all your food bill increases. Why should I need to pay treble for an artisan loaf when supermarkets are making profit hand over fist, poisoning us all.

if the businesses can’t be relied upon to be ethical then the government must legislate to ban those harmful substances from our food. It’s outrageous how much rubbish is in our food now. It’s a complete corruption made to take ur money for profit. No consequences to these companies.

How do we add a photo?