Do people really not know what to eat?

Yep.

I love UPFs. They keep my child out of hospital.

In fact, I probably would judge a parent who refused to give their child Birdseye chicken nuggets if the alternative was them starving!

You wouldn't care about UPFs if the alternative was a starving child withering away in front of you which clearly isn't your friends case but can happen due to various reasons such as ARFID.

NHS dietary advice is usually quite poor and inconsistent between advisors

But, these threads always bring out examples of outlier situations, this is not about children or families with food difficulties, the vast majority of the population dont have these issues.

This is simply the most middle class comment 😂😂. Pure mumsnet.

I didn’t believe it was something I’d do either, until my child was literally nearly starving. You deal with the circumstances in front of you.

I certainly wasn't judging - I was asking a question. I have someone close to me who has never turned to UPFs and her DD has a very restricted diet. I can't pass comment from personal experience so all I can do is let others speak on this particular subject. I don't believe it's something I would do, but I've never been in this position so I can't claim to hold knowledge.

Haven’t RTFT or seen the programme.

Have an interest - although not a parent, I was an overweight child (and we did mostly eat home cooked food, but I am a sugar addict and got extra whenever I could), an obese teenager, and mostly a morbidly obese adult, with occasional brief interruptions aka yo-yo dieting.

Once upon a time, everyone ate minimally processed food, because there wasn’t anything else. And while clearly some people are better cooks than others, and some people can afford better ingredients than others, everyone who cooked knew how to cook, and could rustle meals up from basic ingredients.

So, how did we get to the point where a significant proposition of the population either don’t know how to cook, or prefer UPF to real food? Or to put it another way: why did the first generation exposed to UPF’s take to it, when real food is so much better for you?

Convenience and novelty, for sure. Maybe cost - were UPF’s cheaper than real food when first introduced? I don’t know. Also, no-one knew then just how harmful they were to our health. It’s not just obesity, UPF’s cause metabolic havoc and disease even in people who are not overweight.

But the clincher, IMO, is that UPF’s have been engineered to light up the pleasure centres of our brains like a Christmas tree. They are addictive.

I believe the authorities need to go much further in informing the public just how harmful UPF’s are. Food in hospitals and schools needs to be reformulated.

But will this happen, when food manufacturers have so much power? I doubt it. So what were left with is grassroots action.

PS - I am no longer morbidly obese, have got off two medications for type 2 diabetes (after having it for nearly 30 years) and now sit in the pre diabetic range. All by eating real food rather than UPF’s, moderately low carb and intermittent fasting.

Thank you for getting it and explaining it so well.

I wish that was the case. My child with ARFID started off with a really good, varied diet. He’d eat anything. Gradually, at around 2, he started rejecting things. Every day something else would be rejected, until literally the only thing he would eat was Greek yoghurt. Nothing else. In desperation we arranged an appointment with a private dietician, who basically said to offer him anything. Offer him something alongside his Greek yoghurt every day. We did this for months… every food he’d ever eaten in the past and anything new we could think of. One day he nibbled a block of cheese. That also became a safe food (bear in mind that while this is going on we’re in absolute despair because he’s now showing signs of malnutrition).
One day he leaned over at a party and took a (processed) chicken nugget off someone’s plate. Can you imagine the joy at your child trying a ‘new’ food after nearly a year of Greek yoghurt and cheese? Damn sure we then continued to feed him chicken nuggets. Birdseye, as that’s all he would eat. Then it was a French fry.
Having spent £1000s on dieticians over the years, we now have a decent range of ‘safe’ foods. He was actually weighed today and for the first time in his 8 years he’s not underweight.
Until you’ve been through the agony of dealing with a child you love more than anything in the world going through something like this, I don’t think you can judge them for resorting to Birdseye chicken nuggets.

It’s sugar, salt and fat, it sets off all the bells in our bodies and is addictive. I used to eat lots of that stuff but can’t anymore as once your taste buds adapt it is gross.

No. We have an extra fridge due to my son's medication which has to be stored separately and that takes up any extra space we had.

The child was on a food replacement diet - actual food was a bonus. It was important that we got them eating and the hospital just wanted them to eat. Anything.

I was a single parent to 3 kids. Working full time. With a child who was incredibly unwell. I made home made stuff for the rest of us and it bloody broke me that the child wouldn’t eat what I made. Even if it didn’t have an allergy food in it.

But. I just needed to feed the child in question. That was the orders from the dietician and I did as I was told.

Well mum had a hot chocolate for breakfast and a brownie for lunch and dad had pot noodle every day so obviously either don't know what healthy food is or don't care. Also who the hell eats 2 BIG bars of chocolate every night? Then they act amazed when they are told they are overweight with various health problems.

They said in the evenings it was either takeaway or ready meals.

I don't tend to take NHS dietician advice strongly. They told my coeliac son he'd be okay with a bit of regular wheat pasta! Another told me to feed him shop bought biscuits rather than homemade for the milk ladder because, "well they'll be tastier won't they?"

I tried to make things but as I said I couldn’t guarantee to make them so they tasted exactly the same all the time.

the dietician wasn’t concerned so why are you questioning their expertise?

Right okay, fair enough. I have a friend and her DD has ARFID, she cooks everything from scratch so it obviously varies. I can absolutely see why it was worrying!

Yes my step-son did food tech. He’s about 30. It was nothing like the O level in Nutrition & Cookery I did in the 80’s. This was meant to be my non- academic subject but there was actually a lot to it. We had to cook a meal from scratch every week, had to do a theory paper on nutrition etc and the practical was preparing a 3 course meal in a set time. where you had to demonstrate various different culinary skills and create a written plan and finish everything within the set time.

Even pre O level we still cooked whole dishes from scratch every week, starting simply and getting more complex.

Step-son’s food tech in comparison was a bit like the English exams where it’s not required to read the whole book.

It depends. Muscovado, Jaggery, Demerara etc are less refined. Cheap supermarket brown is indeed refined sugar with molasses added back.

And I can’t guarantee that my home made chicken nuggets (bad example - child couldn’t have those but for the sake of the discussion) would always taste exactly the same. Birds Eye always would. Until they change the recipe and then we were back to square 1.

Neither of my parents knew how to cook and I was raised on UPF. Literally every meal in our house came out of a can or a packet of some sort. From the age of about 13 I stared to hate it and would request my parents buy bags of frozen veg so I could at least have some vegetables with the crap coming out of the kitchen.
In our case it was laziness and selfishness of parents. They would rather spend the time doing things that interested them more than learning to cook and preparing decent meals for their children.

I loved going to other people's houses as a kid because the food was normally a lot fresher than anything served up at home.

I was overweight as a child and struggle to control my weight as an adult which I am sure is partially related to the bad habits I learnt as a child. Anyway I always try to cook as fresh as possible for my family although time constraints sometimes make it difficult.

I think its normal and not a terrible thing for people to eat UPF and pre prepared food but there is no need to take it to the extreme like some families do.

Ah, okay. So you tried making the safe foods as home made first and they were rejected?

Because the child was literally starving and on the verge of being tube fed and the dietician at the hospital said any calories and any food was a win. So we tried everything.

In terms of ARFID and safe foods, and this is a genuine question; how can they make a UPF a safe food if they're not given it? If you make chicken nuggets or whatever from scratch to begin with, then it's the food they'll learn to like?

I appreciate it's much harder and I can see the difficulties, absolutely. But if those foods aren't available as ready made then they don't know they exist. They're things that can be made healthily.

I’m really sorry to hear that.

Mine are similar in that I always cooked from scratch (still do) so they grew up with next to no UPFs, aside from the occasional treat like McDonalds or a takeaway, something I’m very relieved about! However, they see it as a type of deprivation and now they’re adults they all live on beige crap and takeaways.

They all know how to cook, I taught them. They just can’t be arsed. None of them have DCs yet but I dread to think what they will feed them when they do!