If you and your children eat a low- UPF diet, what does a typical day or week of meals and snacks look like?

[Uffadoo]

I'm watching a documentary about UPFs (ultra processed foods) and it's made me realise that I think we have far too many in our home. I would really like to cut this down, we have a 9month old, 2 year old, 7 year old and 12 year old. The baby, 7 and 12 year old will eat absolutely anything but the 2 year old can be picky to the point of having lost weight in the past and was referred to a dietician and paediatrician (she has now put on weight and generally eats much better but not always great). I do make a lot of things from scratch but a couple of nights a week, after clubs, I might stick on frozen pizzas or chicken nuggets. Snacks in particular tend to be UPFs (we do have yoghurt and fruit often as snacks too though).

I would love to hear what a day or week of meals and snacks looks like for you and your family to get some inspiration. Is there any tips for foods that you can get that wouldn't be UPFs if you get them elsewhere? For example DD2 loves sausages, if I get sausages made by the butcher would that be better or are they a no go?

Good ideas @Caspianberg

Let them add honey to it or I microwave frozen fruit as a PP says. For a really easy option you could buy some of the Ella's kitchen or similar fruit purée pouches for babies that are just 100% fruit and stir a bit of that in to plain yoghurt to make it a fruit flavour.

I don't claim to be UPF free as I work & find cooking from scratch more than x4 a week impossible but we've made a few switches.

Cereal has been switched for sugar free granola with Greek yoghurt/berries/honey.

Bread for sourdough

Homemade meatballs when we have pasta - the kids love these & they're so easy.

Make our own southern fried chicken & crisp it up in the air fryer

I agree with the other posters that it can end up being expensive. I find Ocado offers the best range of products but it is quite pricey!

@Ivyy I'm a prolific adapter of recipes, so for the carrot cakes I'll just Google and adapt (e.g. lower the sugar content and add some sultanas, leave any icing off).

Here are three that are very easy that I do mostly follow the recipe for though.

Banana oat biscuits

Ingredients
2 bananas
1 egg
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1 1/4 cup oats
1/2 cup plain flour

Method
Mash banana.
Stir in egg and vanilla, then add the oats and flour and mix well.
Place balls of the mixture on a lined baking tray (damp hands are helpful here) and bake at 180 degrees C for 25 minutes.

These freeze well so you can do a double or triple batch to save time if you want.

Cheese biscuits

You need equal amounts of cheese, plain flour and butter or marge. On a floured surface, roll out the dough and cut into rounds (or any shape you like, I have some animal cutters and my kids live it when I do these with those) then bake on a lined baking tray at 180 C for 20 minutes (I think, I can't find the actual recipe for this one so maybe check after 15 the first time you do it!) until they're just getting a little brown.

These don't freeze well once baked but you can freeze them in rounds ready to bake, just layer them with greaseproof paper so they don't stick to each other.

Cheese puffs
This is a Feed Your Family for about £20 a week recipe. I generally find their recipes are good for being simple and practical (they're not always healthy but that's not their USP).

I've found my printed recipe for this one so I'll attach a photo.

These are nicest fresh but they're perfectly nice frozen and defrosted. I have done them with chopped tomatoes added which was also nice.

Do you make your granola ? @BobbysSox

I don't but I buy the Eat Natural and Bio & Me ones. They're low sugar with natural ingredients.

Homemade granola is brilliant - I make mine so it contains at least 15 different types of plant plus egg white for protein and crunchiness, molasses for iron and other nutrients, plus a bit of honey and olive oil so it tastes great. I make a big batch every fortnight and cook in the oven or airfryer. Eaten with 2-3 types of fruit and a mix of kefir and greek yoghurt it is my go to breakfast.

I make granola most the time. We have nut allergies to deal with, and fully nut free granola is often very small bags and expensive. So if time it’s far far cheaper to make our own basic with oats/ seeds. It’s just mix ingredients, bake on tray for 20mins and cool. Lasts a good month (but usually eaten before then)

We make bread and any cage or biscuits, although the latter not often. Snack fruit or nuts, eggs, cheese, peanut butter.

Meals breakfast-peanut butter toast, porridge or muesli, eggs, or yogurt and fruit/nuts or yogurt with oats in. Pancakes on special days.

Lunches-bread, a protein, salad, soup, leftovers, broad beans or chickpea hummus.

Dinners-chicken-lots of recipes, pizza (on bread days!) , fish portions, home made burgers occasionally (easy as anything) , veg curry, home made pasta, pesto and veg (pesto from blending olive oil, Parmesan, nuts and basil or another herb) , pea and prawn risotto, omelettes with mashed potato, quiche, recipes with pulses (bean chilli, tomato dahl, bean curry, refried beans, bean burgers) .

I tend to make a pudding at the weekend but very often crumble, either traditional or with oats or almond flour. Often with a bag of frozen fruit.

For people who have a good processor or a blender, mayonnaise is almost instant.

www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/basic-mayonnaise

I can’t get the knack! I can do mayonnaise excruciatingly slowly with just a hand whisk but have never managed to make it properly with a blender/processor. Do you have any tips?

I just add the oil really slowly through the top. It's at the beginning that this matters most. See also

www.thespruceeats.com/mayonnaise-tips-and-hints-1808082

A lot of people don't realise that bread is still a UPF! Especially if white but tbh all bread besides full whole grain, is UPF

On what are you basing your claim?

Home made bread containing nothing but flour, yeast, salt and water is not a UPF even if the flour is fortified with vitamins.

I'm vegan and live on my own and I deliberately aim for a really wide variety of fruit and veg (as is recommended by gut-health type programmes).

Breakfast almost always is: soya greek yoghurt, big heaped spoonful of ground sunflower, pumpkin and flax seeds, big spoonful of ground almonds, plus frozen cherries, blueberries, raspberries, sometimes other fruits.

Lunches are things like: humous and a microwave baked spud; or baked beans and a spud; or homemade soup with lentil/other beans and lots of different veggies. I batch cook the latter and freeze portions.

Suppers are things like: quick veg stir fry with tofu, ratatouille type mix with some beans thrown in; mix of veggies stirred into some rice or quinoa and a handful of nuts as a sort of risotto. I batch cook things like ratatouille, or cook extra portions of risotto to freeze.

I always have a very big salad daily with either my lunch or supper meal. It has mixes of greens eg. at the moment baby chard, lamb's lettuce, spring onions, sprouted seeds like cress or broccoli, plus tomatoes and any other bits and pieces in the fridge.

If I can I'll try to have additional leafy greens like spinach or cabbage in one of these meals as well, even if they're just blended into soup or stir fried. I keep apples in the fridge in case I want a snack but that doesn't happen very often. I don't bother with vegan marge, the only liquid fat I use is sunflower or olive oil. Olive oil and ground black pepper is lovely on baked potato!

Huh? Homemade or decent bakery bread, black rye bread, soda bread, sourdough bread, simple flatbreads are all UPF? And as such are dangerous to health?

What absolute nonsense!

A whole food, mostly unprocessed diet is great, but some people really have drunk the Kool Aid on this ‘UPF is evil’ bandwagon.

Agreed, just because it's white flour doesn't mean it's UP, just that it has less fiber.

Emulsifiers, stabilizers, e-numbers, soybean flour or oil, palm oil, etc make bread ultra processed. Unfortunately most supermarket bread products do have these, and they can be added to whole wheat ones of course.

Utter nonsense!!

Whilst it is very well documented that a whole grain is better than white flour, this does not make white flour a UPF. The additives, emulsifiers, e-numbers etc make supermarket bread the UPF.
Stop scare-mongering with completely incorrect information

You don't understand the difference between UHP and processed. Lots of foods are processed, like flour, but that's nowhere near the same as UHP.

Tbh a lot of people like to hold forth on why the UPF concept is nonsense or avoiding them is impossible when they haven’t understood the difference between processed and ultra processed. I know it’s not the most straightforward distinction and there are some borderline cases but it’s not like it’s hard to find it explained.

Untrue.