Do people really not know what to eat?

I'm sorry, but I think the "it's so confusing!" line is a bit of a cop-out.

Trendy, naff pop-science benefits from being contrary and sensational, and always will. But the basic facts told to us by actual experts have remained pretty consistent for decades. Fat is calorie-dense. Too much sugar is bad. Vegetables have good stuff in them. When new worthwhile research comes out it tends to build upon the previous body of knowledge rather than contradicting it.

It's not the indecipherable minefield some people like to say it is. It only looks that way if you can't tell genuine research from lurid tabloid headlines.

For a start TV programmes like this always try to show extremes (the average family who eat a reasonable diet with treats a few times a week just don't pull in the high ratings!)
Also we have a generation (or two) that possibly didn't have great food technology/cookery/home economics lessons at high school. My son rarely did cookery of any sort at school (it was on a rotation with textiles, woodwork, and something else) luckily for him I was taught cookery skills both at school and by my Mum/Grandmas. I got him involved from an early age (preschool age) gradually taught him to cook basics and how to read a recipe, but if someone's parents don't have those skills they can't pass them down to children/grandchildren.
If both parents are working (which in today's world seems to be the majority) they come in from work/picking up children and everyone is hungry so they go for the quickest route to get them all fed which is often UPF that requires no prep and is ready in half an hour (or delivered from the local takeaway)

We also played out a lot more. We had one TV in the house so couldn't do non stop screens. Less snacking and takeaways. Takeaways were a big deal as they happened infrequently. It was a huge treat if we had roses or quality street at Christmas.

Very true. It's absolutely freezing where I am today so I've made a big pot of vegetable soup. All the ingredients cost about £6. I did get some sourdough and cheese to go along with it but still everything was under a tenner for a nourishing meal.

I think people have advice fatigue. If you look and how many flip flops there have been about foods and what’s healthy and what isn’t it’s ridiculous. The generations who grew up on eggs and bacon for breakfast and “go to work on a egg” were then told eggs were terrible for them and must be limited and then told actually they were healthy and it was all a mistake.

Same with butter and margarine, low fat vs full fat, bananas have too may carbs and should be banned…

I think people to some degree have been given so much advice and information they’ve stopped giving a shit.

is there a place for banning the substances in foods that we know are contributing to poor health outcomes or like other countries putting bold on the pack what’s in it and what the risks are?

At the end of the day I believe 90% of people are trying their best. Trying to balance all the information, life, finances and their health.

I find that younger people are a lot more sane and conscious about what they eat, certainly better than I was in my teens and twenties.

My 60-somethinhg parents, on the other hand fed me processed ham and white supermarket bread, and thought their stodgy dinners were healthy as long as there was a serving of boiled vegetables on the side. When I tell them I'm avoiding fast and processed food because of the cancer and other health risks, they say I'm being prissy and ridiculous, and that "if they were dangerous it'd be on the front page of the newspaper!". I've given up.

I agree, the end of the 90’s is when things changed a lot. In the early 90’s I didn’t have access to fast food chains, we lived in a rural village and the only take away was the fish and chip shop, I remember trying my first Burger King whilst on holiday abroad but didn’t really go near a McDonald’s until late 90’s, now there are at least 4 or 5 McDonald’s in a 10 mile radius. My diet growing up was pretty varied, yes we were fed crispy pancakes and Spagetti hoops but it wasn’t every day, we often had home made meals including stews, lasagna and a roast every Sunday. Convenience food and frozen processed meals we pretty new. There are so many options now and when we go out for the day we plan it around ‘where are we going to eat’, it’s become the norm to go out and grab some awful food from McDonald’s, KFC or Subway, because it’s easy and cheap to do so. It’s now been made even easy by the likes of Uber eats etc…, you can just order food to your do.

My kids/teens probably hate me as I am one of those parents that packs food to take out with us as an excuse not to be sucked in by McDonald’s every time we go out. We do eat out occasionally (I am partial to a 5 guys) but I would rather these places didn’t exist 😬.

No. Admittedly I worked as a commis chef many moons ago like a late teen so know how to cook most things at a basic level. A healthy meal composed of veg and fish can all be done in the air fryer and microwave. Tin foil wrapped fish takes 10 minutes, roast root veg the same just chopped and bunged in and steamed broccoli takes one minute in the mic. How the fack is that hard?!

You don’t see aisle after aisle of crisps, cake and snacks foods in the supermarkets abroad.

Um, yeah you do in France. And loads of ready meals.

We are now just territory which is being fought over by big food and big pharma.
Big food wants our money and in order to do this it makes its product as addictive as possible.
Big pharma wants to sell its appetite suppressant drugs.
If all the addictive foods went away so would the need for the appetite suppressant drugs.
The more addictive foods there are the better it is for the profits of the pharmaceutical companies selling the appetite suppressant drugs.
It's a racket.

There’s something which I think many of the people saying “of course they know” or “they don’t want to try” are missing, or at least not giving enough weight to: the power of addiction.

Sugar, and UPF’s more broadly, are addictive. One of the features of addiction is denial. The imperative to consume the substance is so powerful, people will seize on any excuse to indulge - and they do not even know they are doing it.

Take cigarette smoking. Everyone knows that smoking is harmful, literally everyone. Smoking rates in the UK peaked in 1974 at 46% of adults, since which we have had 50 years of increasing pressure to get people to stop. Public information, warnings on packs, a ban on advertising, smoking banned indoors, plain packaging, out of sight, NHS stop smoking programmes, legal age raised to 18. And yet, in 2023, 11.9% of adults still smoke.

Do they not know it’s harmful? And costs them a fortune? Of course they do - but they are addicted, and addictions are hard to kick. And while I don’t have any smokers in my life currently, I imagine that people who continue to smoke are either in denial about JUST how harmful it is, or they are demoralised by their repeated failure to quit and have given up trying. I recognise those responses from my own as a morbidly obese diabetic binge eater ( who has quit bingeing, gone sugar free, lost 8 stone, got off all diabetes meds)

Sugar is addictive - and most of us were first exposed to it before the age of 1. Almost everybody consumes sugar Not everyone is addicted, but an awful lot of people are. Or, are consuming at a level which is potentially damaging to their health. But it tastes sooooo good, it makes me feel calm…. `surely it can’t be that bad, can it? This is the denial which is part of addiction - the reasons the subconscious mind comes up with to make it OK to persist with use, even when experiencing negative consequences.

it has taken to years and a whole series of initiatives to reduce smoking as much as has happened. It will probably take similar legislation to reduce sugar and UPF consumption. And you can guarantee that Big Food will fight it every step of the way. Did you see the report the other day - Greggs saying that the use of GLP-1 injections have hit their sales?

For the most part people know what's healthy and what isn't.
But that knowledge doesn't override the craving for the artificial food-like substances which have been designed to be as addictive as possible!

End of the 90s saw meals like a whole pizza and a full serving of chips; huge glasses of wine; enormous hamburgers also stuffed with large portions of cheese; “Sharing” bags of crisps and sweets but few single portion options;
places like Costa with huge lattes and enormous cakes and pastries; Poundland with almost free sweets and crisps; no lunch hours; giant bottles of fizzy drinks full of sugar ( now full of poisonous sweeteners that cause sugar cravings); more and more ‘ready meals’ and hyper palatable food; and starting from the ‘90s the ‘Food Pyramid’ showing massive amounts of starchy carbohydrates as the basis for health so everyone thought how healthy they were eating pasta for every meal.

I'm in my very early 50's, I learnt how to cook by watching my Mum, who in turn learnt by her Mum. I also did Home Economics at school. I wonder if we have a lot of generations who don't know how to cook, because they've never been set that example?? Ready meals, pizza, chips etc, it's all easy - grab it out the freezer and shove it in the oven. Nothing wrong in eating pizza or chips, just not every day!

We went on holiday abroad last year, which we do most years, usually visit a different country each year. We always go self-catering, rather than AI. This year, I really noticed the amount of overweight children, who were usually with very overweight parents. The sad fact, they were all British. It shocked me, the amount of children I saw who were very clearly overweight.

I don't understand what's different now to in the 80s early 90s. I (and most of my friends) had a diet based on crispy pancakes, egg and chips, hoops on toast and snacks of crisps, angel delight, biscuits, orangeaid that stained your mouth etc. and there was not one obese kid in our class. Maybe it's portions sizes rather than the food itself? Or maybe we were just more active.

The fact it makes it easier and quicker is why it's used daily in my house.

There is really. Some is more or less poison.

It’s just not going to matter once in a while.

@TheGrinchWasHereif you want to look at a larger cross section of the UK diet then you can check out the National Diet and Nutrition Survey. The most recent is 2019-2023.

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/national-diet-and-nutrition-survey-2019-to-2023/national-diet-and-nutrition-survey-2019-to-2023-report

My point was that people are very happy to put in effort when they want to wrt food and cooking.

Yanbu, i also despair of this and of parents saying 'its all they will eat' - kids arent born asking for pizzas and beige food, its all they will eat because its what they were given from a young age. Im not talking about neurodiversity here, im talking about lazy parenting and pandering to neurotypical kids. Yes its judgy but i also think its a form of neglect

Depends how pedantic you want to be on the health train …

Airfyers definitely make it easier and quicker to heat up and cook uhp foods but there is also some concern on teflon and acrylamides…

I couldn’t be bothered and we don’t use it every day.

I used my air fryer to heat up my frozen Iceland kebab meat but it made it go too crispy. I found it heats up much better in the steamer in the microwave.

air fryers can be used to heat up crap, they can also be used to make home made chips, jacket potatoes, roasted vegetables, cooking whole foods. It’s just a device.

Are air fryers usually bought by unhealthy and/or overweight people to heat up crap?

Not as revealing as I thought.

Lots of bread and a fair amount of vegetables, eggs and fresh meat. To be fair I live in a fairly upmarket suburb so it’s probably to be expected. Note that it’s lots of middle age women who I assume are sahm doing the grocery shopping…. Not too many men about so probably not a good sample.

I’ll have to extend my research.

It’s about 60p for a bag of carrots and £1.50 for potatoes but it’s much too much work to chop them up with some potatoes and sling them in the oven or air fryer with a tbs of oil for 15 minutes clearly. Serve with fish fingers, chicken dippers, sausages or whatever, frozen peas or fried egg and done. How’s that harder than opening a bag of crisps. I’ve been properly skint and survived feeding DS veg, beans on toast, soup with bread, veg chucked into oven roasted in the oven. Chopping vegetables seems to be like climbing Everest for some reason. Root veg can be v cheap if you shop sensibly and it’s filling and healthy. One ingredient food is not difficult to make.