How much of your diet do you think is UPF?

[Neverenoughbiscuits]

Listening to the Zoe podcast tonight and it estimates that the average diet is 50% UPF. I actually think that might be quite conservative but that is only based on my anecdotal observations.

I do try really hard to minimise UPF but it is so easy for it to creep in. Today I have had barely any - probably only some cream cheese with the toast, smoked salmon and spinach I had for lunch. I make my own bread but if I hadn't then 50% of my meal would have been UPF without even thinking about it. Yesterday I ate on the run so probably 85% of my diet was UPF; sandwich and packet of crisps from M & S at lunch and Ramona houmous and crackers for dinner along with some fruit and greek yoghurt.

Working in an office, I'd say the majority of my colleagues have a mostly UPF diet during the day. The office is near a Tesco and so many have a meal deal from there. There is always a constant supply of biscuits or cake around. I find it really scary that actually it's far easier to find and eat "non-foods" than it is to have real food.

What percentage of UPF do you think you have on your diet?

@TheCountessofFitzdotterel said
most [foods] are fairly clear one way or the other [if they are UPF]

Is this bread UPF or not? What makes it "fairly clear" to know ?

Sorry, the link doesn’t work!

What are the ingredients?

This week, none except a can of baked beans. I had beans on toast for one lunch. Other lunches have been hard boiled eggs and salad, home cooked chicken, home made bread. Suppers are all cook from scratch. Ds had pizza & garlic bread one evening

Emulsifier (Mono- and Diacetyl Tartaric Acid Esters of Mono- and Diglycerides of Fatty Acids)

Does that sound like something you generally find in homemade bread? Do you know what it is? What foodstuff it comes from? What its purpose is?

I’ve never thought about it - too much else in the world to worry about and I love the occasionally ham sandwich, crisps and a Diet Coke.

I cook from scratch - I do use tinned tomatoes and stock cubes (not sure if they’re UPF?), but I never use pre made sauces or eat any sort of cereal, ready meal or packeted bread. I do buy fresh pesto from the deli - life’s too short to whiz up my own basil and pin nuts.

Meat comes from the butchers, fish from the fishmongers and bread from the bakers. I’m fortunate to have them all near by.

It is upf. Homemade bread is flour, yeast, water, salt. That bread has 13 ingredients

That specific ingredient is DATEM aka E472e. It’s an emulsifier, so ostensibly used to bind oil and flour in bread, but it’s part of the artificial extension of shelf life and makes bread softer and more palatable (easier to over-eat), hence why packaged UPF bread lasts a strangely long time compared to freshly baked, especially considering it’s been made potentially a few days prior and then transported to the shop.

DATEM has been shown to have an effect on your gut biome and cause inflammation and there’s some very worrying information recently about a link with certain types of cancer, although that’s an early stage of research.

Emulsifiers are in a load of stuff. For example they use it to stop yoghurts separating. Separation is totally normal behaviour, but doesn’t look as nice and means you have to stir it before eating. Bang in some cheap emulsifier and it all stays together, except now there’s an industrially manufactured ingredient that doesn’t actually need to be in there at all. And manufacturers don’t have to disclose how much emulsifier they use either so the volumes we are consuming are anyone’s guess.

Despite what I might sound like on this thread, I’m not particularly militant about it. I’ll eat stuff when out and about, I’ll have a packet of crisps or a chocolate bar and don’t really think of it. I choose not to have UPF generally in the house, bar sauces and some condiments, but I am relaxed about what me and the kids consume out of the house and would never stop them eating crap at a party or something.

But I do think it’s really important that the choice to do that is ours, and by that I mean that we understand what’s going in our bodies and what food labels are telling us. You can’t have the choice if you don’t know about any of it in the first place. What goes into our body is so important, and people deserve to be told the truth about it and for there to be scrutiny and clarity about what goes into our food so any decision we make are educated ones at least.

My main diet - very little.
My after the kids are in bed diet - diet coke, crackers, crisps, ice cream - 100%.

Generally we don't buy bread, ham, flavoured yoghurts etc though so the kids are pretty low-UPF.
Just things like shop bought hummus and pesto though I try to go for the slightly better ingredients.

This is a really interesting subject, but some of the attempts on this thead to define UPFs or to declare a certain food UPF or not show how difficult it is. Number of ingredients alone is not a sensible way to determine whether something is ultra-processed. Many dishes cooked from raw ingredients will include lots of spices and herbs so when you list the ingredients they look like a lot, but none of them are ultra-processed.

I would like to know why (and actually if) ascorbic acid is treated as an unwelcome additive, as I understood this is just Vitamin C. It's added to many foods to prevent oxidation and is used in breadmaking to help with gluten development. It's been used in commercial breadmaking for a long time.

Very low and it's made eating out or grabbing a snack so so hard!

I would like to know why (and actually if) ascorbic acid is treated as an unwelcome additive, as I understood this is just Vitamin C. It's added to many foods to prevent oxidation and is used in breadmaking to help with gluten development. It's been used in commercial breadmaking for a long time

I use it in home baking! I add a half crushed up vitamin c tablet to the mix when making wholemeal. I don't think it makes my loaf UPF but would be interested if anyone disagrees.

Wow as a bit of a side note you have lost and kept off an incredible amount of weight. Care to tell more about that. Maybe even start an AMA thread

Probably less than 10% of my diet is UPF. I've been a fairly militant non-UPF person for 20 years now. Now at 40 my physique has hardly changed since I was 18. I avidly avoid anything artificial, I read the labels, I always cook from scratch using wholefoods, vegetables, olive oil. I'm vegetarian.
There are a few things I do eat like some brands of ready salted crisps where it's just potatoes, salt and sunflower oil. I also eat babybels because they're made of milk and that's it, whereas things like dairylea are full of crap. I eat chocolate if the ingredients are just cocoa, cocoa butter and sugar. I won't eat chocolate with flavourings in them. Ill eat yoghurt but only pure yogurt, not flavoured ones. I avoid all artificial flavourings, colour, emulsifiers, glucose-fructose syrup, and any ingredients that sound like chemicals. Absolutely no fizzy drinks, sweets.

Reading the labels is key. You can't tell if a yoghurt or bread is UPF or not without reading it's label. It's a fine art!!

80%

Do you eat out, have takeaways, eat at the houses of friends and relatives? Presumably if the answer is yes you have to relax your standards then.

I don't buy takeaways and they're expensive anyway. I eat out sometimes but I am picky about where. I try and avoid anywhere where they just microwave the food. I do relax my standards at other people's houses, yes.

I just stopped eating all day, everyday. There is no secret to it. I went from packing away 6,000 calories to only taking in around 1,000 calories of unprocessed food, mainly animal products.

I said upthread, but it was very easy for me as I was diagnosed as coeliac 4 years ago. So I can never, ever eat all that shit again or I will get sick. I won’t eat gluten free alternatives - they cost the earth, taste like death and are full of rubbish. So that’s cut out a huge amount of food - all man made carbs and sugar from cakes and biscuits etc. So that was processed food and UPF out the window in one fell swoop.

And if I was going to cut that out, I thought I might as well stop drinking too, which I did. So I went from alcohol 4/5 nights a week (usually a bottle and a bit of wine a night) to nothing over night, which was obviously a massive reduction in calories too.

Everyone asks me my secret and it’s basically get diagnosed with an autoimmune condition which limits your diet for you, and don’t eat all day long and don’t top it off with drinking half the off licence every week 😂

I used to get people making excuses for me when Inwas large. “Oh, is it your thyroid, have you had it tested?” No, I was just very, very, very greedy and ate far too much. Then I stopped doing that.

Until a few weeks ago I’d say about 70-80% of our diet was UPF (despite not looking awfully unhealthy - lots of supermarket bread products, flavoured yoghurts, breaded meat/fish, fortified cereals…etc)
But we overhauled our diet and now I’d say around 30%. We have an autistic non verbal child so it’s never going to be zero but I’m happy with this.

finding it very hard to find time to make the bread though. I enjoy it but we spend so much time out of the house.

Have you tried a bread machine?

What are we classing as a UPF anyway? I've just done a weekly plan for next week and some of it will be like the hummus, the shop flatbread, mango chutney but I'm not making my own hummus or chutney and the last time I made flatbreads they turned out terribly.

Some of my homemade stuff contains a likely UPF like mayonnaise and mustard in my coleslaw. Not sure on the stance of sun-dried tomatoes but we all need some joy in life.

Are we counting things like soy sauce/teriyaki that comes from the bottle?

I can never be totally UPF free because I can't be arsed to make my own condiments/passata/stock but it is definitely possible to make the main bits of a meal UPF free.

My own diet is pretty UPF-light, maybe 10% UPF?

DC’s not so much - must be majority UPF. One has ASD and very restrictive diet and the other is vegetarian and it is hard to avoid reliance on UPF meat substitutes. Far too much processed white bread, cereal bars as snacks, crisps, pizza etc. I’d love to cut it down but most days I’m happy if they’ve eaten some protein and fresh fruit/veg amongst all the processed carbs.

I'd class UPF as foods that have ingredients like gums, emulsifiers, gelling or foaming additives, preservatives that make products palatable or long lasting - ingredients I wouldn't have in my cupboard.

I do buy hummus though - Cooked Chickpeas (50%) (Chickpeas, Water), Water, Rapeseed Oil, Sesame Seed Paste (13%), Concentrated Lemon Juice (4%), Garlic Purée, Salt, Preservative (Potassium Sorbate).
The preservative is the only thing that I wouldn't have in my cupboard.

Flatbreads - I try to avoid the ones with a million ingredients - Wheat Flour (Wheat Flour, Calcium Carbonate, Niacin, Iron, Thiamin), Water, Rapeseed Oil, Wheat Gluten, Wheat Fibre, Spirit Vinegar, Yeast, Emulsifier (Mono and Diglycerides of Fatty Acids), Preservatives (Potassium Sorbate, Calcium Propionate), Raising Agents (Disodium Diphosphate, Sodium Hydrogen Carbonate, Calcium Phosphate), Salt, Stabiliser (Carboxymethyl Cellulose), Acidity Regulator (Citric Acid), Wheat Starch, Wheat Flour

and go for the Crosta and Mollica ones (expensive though!) or just normal pitta bread which is generally flour, water, yeast and oil and very cheap.

Mayo, soy sauce, teriyaki etc I'm sure are UPF but I still buy them.

Interestingly I noticed with shop bought pesto there's quite a big difference in ingredients between ones that have emulsifiers and lots of different starches and fibres and how much basil they contain but not necessarily a huge difference in price.

Is wine UPF? Otherwise, I’m a sucker for The Collective passion fruit yoghurt once a week, and Coke Zero… The rest is just your standard meat/fish/pasta/rice/potatoes and fruit & veg and cheese. Not sure what percentage that would be.

I have coeliac disease so all the bread, cake, biscuits etc I eat are essentially UPF unless home made with naturally gf floors. The bread I mostly eat is very upf, it stays soft for weeks unopened - that ain't right