Do people really not know what to eat?

I’m not sure this kind of misleading narrative helps anyone. ‘All morning chopping’ might be a bit extreme but I feed six to seven people most nights. Of those four to five are adults, a couple of them are large men doing very physical work who genuinely need a large meal at the end of the way. I love my slow cooker almost an unhealthy amount and have a worrying dependency upon it but it’s really NOT a 3-5 minute situation. To do enough of a really good meal for that many people does take some time, even with a slow cooker. All morning? No. But not 3-5 minutes either. I’m not complaining - I like cooking and consider it something worth making the time for, but I don’t think it’s helpful to act like it’s always soooo easy and sooo quick as a way to tempt people away from UPFs.

Whatever it is probably didn't exist 30 years ago and everyone managed.

If certain foods are banned, producers will quickly fill any gaps in the market with a similar product that doesn't meet the threshold for being banned.

That’s not the same as not knowing what to eat though. No-one truly believes a family sized bag of Maltesers for a toddler is moderation - the clue is in the name. This person no doubt has reasons that she ended up in this situation and giving in to a toddler meltdown usually does seem to be the path of least resistance but don’t kid yourself she doesn’t know that it’s bad. Unless she actually doesn’t understand the words ‘family sized’, in which case she has bigger problems anyway. She knows.

Absolutely no point in reasoning with OP ,he or she have their own agenda !

@MikeRafone Don’t have 4 dc if you haven’t got time to peel veg! You don’t need to peel everything either! All in one bakes and many roasted veg dishes don’t require peeling.

I cook a healthy meal at least 6 nights out of 7, however when kids hit secondary school, the canteens are packed with rubbish foods, chicken burgers, chips, nachos... Kids are drawn to them and want these foods so will eat them. My daughter will eat nachos every day, but if I sent a pack up I know it wouldn't get eaten.

Friend of mine from years back fed her toddler son Mcdonalds every night as she was in the throws of getting away from an abusive husband. It got so bad with the food, he refused to eat anything other than McDismals. Her parents took over and got the little lad back on track, though to begin with they had to feed normal food from a brown paper McDonalds bag otherwise he refused and kicked off. The mum felt awful but she just needed to survive at the time.

OP, I don't know why people feed kids/eat so bad. Ignorance? Time? The way they were brought up? Lazy? Advertising? Life being hard? Ease of getting it delivered? Am sure there are loads of reasons why. What doesn't seem to work is any government lead healthy eating campaigns, been loads over the years.

We don't eat very well at the moment. My OH is away sorting out his late fathers house and I've been very unwell for a couple of years. He hates cooking and will eat a microwave meal, a takeaway or something with frozen chips chucked into the oven and when he comes here I try and cook if able, like a vegetable chilli. When he's not here, I don't eat dinner, just a sandwich for lunch and an unhealthy snack in the eve, a packet of crisps or something so I can take painkillers.

Good point!

And it may be if more help to people to point them in the direction of frozen soffrito, etc, as easy routes to healthy cooking than ingredients they have never heard of.

I adore Torres crisps. They're £4.95 for 125g.

I can buy quite a lot of Pink Lady apples for that price. Thankfully I prefer Royal Gala. They're £1.80 for a bag of six in Sainsburys at the moment and they're delicious.

It's really sad how skewed peoples perspectives are on this. It's as though a lot of people take it as a personal insult that others don't want to eat unhealthy foods, that they can see "bad foods" do exist and want to better themselves and their families.

You can see it in these threads, too. Everyone starts screaming about others being judgemental; outside of medical reasoning (ARFID or whatever which isn't the debate in these threads no matter what keeps getting pushed, because it's not something most families deal with) there is absolutely no need for people to be consuming so much junk. To say they don't have time just blatantly isn't true; we all have the same time, some people just decide to use it to cook healthy food for their families.

I work full time as does DH; we still cook from scratch. So did my dad. So does my sister, and my brother. It's a choice. I'd have much more respect for people if they admitted it.

I know someone like this she’s a grandmother now, her daughter was obese as a child and lost all the weight through her own will as a teen as soon as she could sort her own food. Her mother now regularly urges her to eat donuts and says “you’re so thin” (she’s literally a normal weight) she’s now moaning she doesn’t get to see her grandkids as much as she used to because her daughter found out she was giving them unnecessary large quantities of sweets.

Just because a toddler loves them doesn't mean they should be getting them every day in vast quantities though? I like cheese but I know if I eat a whole block a day, I'm going to get fat. And I wouldn't let my children gorge on it either.

DD loves homemade cake. I bake one of a weekend. She can scream until she's blue in the face, but she's not getting half of it in one sitting and nor will I be baking one on a Wednesday too.

Frozen peas are yummy! I fed some to DS the other day and he seemed to like them frozen as well (although I cooked the rest.)

I buy frozen and tinned fruit and veg more than I buy fresh because it's just me and DS, and we sometimes don't get round to eating it before it gets manky. When Lidl were selling their veg for 5p at Christmas I got some things then, and cooked it before freezing it in portions.

I have an extensive collection of jars of herbs and spices in my cupboard. I love herby mashed potato, for example.

Depends what kind of things you mean about banning them but please don't forget that some children with SEND including ARFID and other food restrictions/medical reasons heavily rely on some of these UPFs.

I genuinely think that a lot of people just don't understand the link between food and their health, or don't truly believe it.

After all, eating a high calorie meal doesn't make you overweight that day. Eating processed meat doesn't give you cancer straight afterwards. Without a bit of grounding in how bodies work, a lot of people can go about thinking that eating healthy "won't change anything", or that they're overweight/sick for no reason at all.

I've worked with disadvantaged adults, and there's often a disconnect with anything other than the immediate. Long term cause-and-effect doesn't register. They're not stupid, just detached from the kind of decision making capacity that you and I take for granted.

It genuinely wouldn't surprise me in some cases. I have a friend who used to be very overweight, she lost it all through a complete overhaul of diet and eats really well now, cooks from scratch and her kids are very healthy too. Her mum can't stand it. She constantly makes snide comments and tries to sabotage their meals, brings out massive bars of chocolate for them to eat before dinner. Everything revolves around food, and it's not healthy and home cooked stuff either.

This friend says she was the only obese girl in her class growing up, and every time she tried to diet as a teen her mum would do the same sabotaging then.

I also think some people are blind to what being obese looks like. It's so normal these days that it's not worth even a double take. I'm certainly not saying the diet culture of the 90s/early noughties was good either, but now we've spun the other way. Fat acceptance! I'm all for being confident in yourself, but some of the stuff I hear is just dangerous. And it all comes down to lazy cooking and an obsession with UPFs. As though they alone make a day worthwhile.

You're ignoring the insidious addictiveness of the junk food and the lack of clear information about it.

Misinformation led that person to believe that Maltesers were 'ok in moderation' then suddenly they find themselves in a bind because the toddler LOVES them and is throwing a tantrum if they're offered a fruit snack instead.

I struggle with reading some of the excuses sometimes especially “people just don’t know” come on we all know a toddler shouldn’t be eating a family size bags of maltesers. I’m no genius didn’t even go to sixth form or college and I’m of the generation that were supposed to have to stay on till 18. There’s no one on gods green earth who doesn’t know this basic stuff.

Google feeders, they’re people who purposely make their partners fat because it gives them more control over them. I’m convinced some of the people I know are doing this to their own kids

Think the point was you can kiss goodbye to spending your mornings chopping up veg for the slow cooker when you have kids 🤣

Exactly.

It's not exactly rocket science to figure this stuff out, and it's really misleading of people to say stuff like, "oh they just don't know/they haven't been educated about it". Nonsense. It's not bloody hard to figure out homemade Bolognese is healthier than a frozen chips and mini pizzas. It's like saying that the poor are thick or something; well no, because I grew up poor and this sort of eating just wasn't something that was the norm back then.

Penny sweets were a real treat, all the kids in school would talk about getting them towards the end of the week. Now if I walk through the city centre, there are kids under 5 with a bag of crisps in one hand and empty packets of snack biscuits shoved in the hood of the pram. I walked past a maybe 7 year old girl screaming blue murder because she wanted two pasties not one outside Greggs. It was 10am!

I was in an FB group for a little while for a hobby, there's a woman on there with a morbidly obese toddler. She for some reason would post pictures of all of his (adult sized, and I mean working a labour job man sized) meals. It was utterly bizarre and any comment about it would be, "he's big boned and bonny", meanwhile she's on bloody mounjaro herself to lose weight and her older boys are also overweight. It baffled me.

Thinking some more about the issue, I think many people have a level of trust in government, corporations, retailers etc. and assume that if something was REALLY bad for them it would either be banned (like drugs) or have explicit warnings all over it (like tobacco).

They assume that if nobody is stopping or deterring them from buying something, it must be OK.

I think this is a good point. We do know that these foods are designed to appeal in this way, they’re meant to be addictive.

Lifetimes ago after a couple of very promising dates with a new bloke I cooked him dinner. It was a pretty simple meal and included if I remember correctly some form of meat, probably chicken, some form of potatoes and some ratatouille, which didn’t eat and explained he didn’t like it. Fair enough, so I asked if he’d like some salad or another vegetable option instead, which he declined. Apparently he just didn’t like vegetables full stop. I’m not saying I’ve ever been the most virtuous eater but I di find it incredibly immature and unattractive. Instant ick really. I persevered for a few more dates but it tended to feel like trying to eat with a five year old and I was sometimes a bit embarrassed for and by him, especially eating around other people. A grown man going to a dinner at another grown up’s house and declining all the food served and asking if she could do him some chicken nuggets and chips? Or throwing half a bottle of ketchup over his plate to hide any sign of anything healthy? (This at his mother’s as she would still always try to force some veg into him) Just no.

I can’t really see that people don’t know how bad it is for you to eat like this. Maybe they’ve lost sight of the scale of it in their lives, the haven’t realised yet that they’ve lost any control over their diet but I don’t buy that they don’t know. Not these days, when we hear about it all the time and indeed entire programmes are dedicated to it.

I fed my kids a pizza tonight. Not homemade, bought in a shop in a plastic package. It was quick and easy, it suited our purposes for this occasion and it’s not a one off - like many mothers I am nowhere near perfect enough to manage a completely home cooked from scratch, UPF-free diet for every single meal. Frankly even if I could no doubt the bloody kids wouldn’t eat half of it. So yes, it happens as a minimum of once per week that I will rely on something like that to make our lives easier and while I’m pleased I have that option, I’m under no illusions about the quality and nutritional value (or otherwise) of this stuff. I haven’t seen this particular episode but do we really believe that an (apparently) clearly obese family has no idea how they got there? No clue?

Surely they know. We all do. I may not be able to give you the exact nutritional breakdown of 100g of carrot compared to 100g of chocolate but everyone knows which is healthier. No-one is living on UPFs and thinking that’s a healthy diet. Maybe they don’t care, or they have sensory issues around food, or they’ve never been taught how to prepare and cook decent food, or maybe they’re just embarrassed to admit to any of those or other reasons but they still know it’s not a healthy diet. They might struggle to make changes for various reasons and need support and education to make healthy choices but they do still know.

UPF is very deliberately created to be visually attractive, cheap, delicious and moreish. And to light up the happy sensors in your brain. Kids (and most adults) are almost always going to prefer these foods for that reason.

We could all educate ourselves and develop the fortitude to fight against that preference, for ourselves and our whole families, every meal for our whole lives.

Or our governments could be bold enough to stand up to the food industry and actually DO SOMETHING.

Firstly, stop pussy footing around peoples' feelings and be clear about which foods are genuinely not good for you and should be avoided - not eaten 'as part of a balanced diet' or as a 'treat' (making it even more desirable!).

Then, legislate against advertising and packaging that makes false and misleading health claims. In Mexico, for example, food packaging has big alerts on it telling you if it's too high in salt, sugar etc. We could go further with UPF, known carcinogens.

Finally, legislate to get the worst of the poisonous shit off the shelves altogether. Just ban it - 'personal choice' and 'nanny state' be damned, people will get over themselves eventually.

The point she’s making is babies take up a lot of time, then school, homework, clubs - more kids more knackered and thrown in full time work and you can’t think straight.

You can feed your kids al the fruit and veg when they are young and they vote with the feet when they get to teens

Look at the school dinners! We never had chips at school. nor burgers it was a cooked meal or salad.