Children of UPF parents

[Horriblebirth]

Just wondering if anyone else grew up being fed absolute shit by their parents and what their relationship with food or their diet is like now?

Growing up I was given ready meals, frozen meals, sugary snacks, probably over 90% of my diet was UPF. Pasta using a jar of sauce was considered a cooked meal.

I used to get embarrassed when I'd go to a friend's house and their parents cooked a lovely meal and I didn't like any of it. I wasn't being rude, I was just so used to beige crap.

It's been so hard to try and get myself to eat real food as an adult. I'm still terrified of trying new things and have a really limited diet. I'm trying my best to ensure my kids never turn out like me because it's depressing and embarrassing.

Hopefully she learns to manage it, there is much more knowledge about it now but it is so stressful.

My mum wasnt much of a cook , she did cook meat veg and potatoes quite a lot - it was bland , there was also a lot of faggots and boil in the bag fish , frozen fish and chips - that kind of thing . Puddings were either plum crumble with the stones left in (why??) or something out of a packet , but there always was pudding . I ate to survive as a child and didn’t enjoy food . I taught myself to cook at uni - I’ve been veggie since leaving home and like food now !

Also there is a wealth divide with a lot of this, we simply couldnt afford UPF or ready or processed foods to a great degree when I was a child.

All this talk of ready meals and microwave meals and packaged this and that, just wasnt affordable.

Meat and two veg, things on toast, soup, omelette, porridge. Stews, casseroles, offal.

Looking back our diet was quite poor really, my mum was very much in the diet cycle so many of our mums were in the 90s and 00s. We had lots of jarred sources, not so much beige stuff, but lots of UPF. As was normal back then, my mum would have been mostly focussed on calories and she wouldn’t have seen the meals we were having as unhealthy (my mum did the shopping but actually my dad did most of the cooking).

So we weren’t overweight or anything as we didn’t eat anything to excess, but knowing what we know now about UPFs I do worry for my generation. We were the first generation that were raised with so many of these UPFSs around and I don’t think it’s a coincidence we are seeing an uptick in some cancers in our age group. I know MN likes to see the UPF discussion as another way to shame women, calling it the new fad, but I genuinely believe it’s the next global health crisis rearing its head.

Oh I don’t know if I agree with that, I was raised in the 90s and my parents were not well off at all, working class with money issues frequently, we had a lot of UPF. Because of the shifts they worked my dad did most of the cooking and he didn’t know how to cook very much so was very reliant on jarred sauces, things on bread. We didn’t go away or do much so our treats often centred around food like sweets and rubbish food on weekend.

Nobody's criticising you but if the cap fits...

Its a very expensive way to eat though, we simply couldnt afford it.

There are jars of pasta sauce and jars of pasta sauce.

Most have added sugar, thickeners, colours, artificial flavourings. The creamy ones will have emulsifiers.

It’s just as quick to open a pack of Passata and add some herbs, garlic, any protein, warm it through/cook the protein and maybe add some cheese on top. Much better for you.

We definitely didn’t have the microwave rice and that kind of thing, but bread, sugary cereals, ham, squashes, not all UPF was out of reach and disproportionately they are impacting lower income families. We could not afford a lot of fruit for example.

I had a diet very similar to what you describe. I get that it isn't great and has definitely made me feel much more comfortable with beige food than anything else but also am an adult and can see that my mum was doing the best she could with the information she had at the time, upf wasn't a term, and feeding your kids fast on super easy to provide stuff had become much more normal at the time. There's loads of stuff that people did then which just wasn't seen in the same way-smoking in the house, cramming 4 kids into back of a car but times were different.

I think it must have depended on where your parents shopped. We were skint and ate a lot of this stuff, my Dad used to get big damaged boxes of stuff from a frozen cash and carry place. So we'd get a brown cardboard box with loads of grim colored burgers (there'd still be bits of paper stuck on it when cooked) and other similar stuff. He'd also buy stuff off mates who worked for food manufacturers, I suspect it may have been stolen or at best damaged stock that they'd got cheap. We had tons of Birds Mousse one month - I loved those and the fish in butter sauce.

We were the opposite. Being a large FSM family, we lived on the basics, home grown (or scrumped) fruit & veg, eggs, chicken, grilled sardines, liver & bacon, faggots. My dm home-made everything because it was cheaper. We didn't have biscuits, crisps, take aways, chips, frozen meals (no freezer), pizza or pasta. No fizzy drinks. I first saw a big mac when I moved to halls at 18.

A rare treat when I was a child was butterscotch anger delight. 😁

Now in our 60s & 70s, none of us is overweight, all still healthy and active, no dental problems.

As a single mum, I've raised my ds on the same food. No fizzy drinks. At 17yo he's 6'1" and the shape of a french bean.

It really does make a difference.

Do you remember Kwik Save? I felt dirty just being in there 🤣 I remember they had cans of all sorts of grotesque things for pennies.

Oh yes kwik save !now people treat the likes of Aldi as an artisan deli 😂

It's difficult when you have a child with restricted eating. What comes first, the chicken or the egg? As a child, I was "fussy" and my parents were told that I was not to be pandered to so I either choked down my food or threw it out the window into the bushes when no one was watching.

My child is "fussy", in the sense of having eating habits so restricted that I suspect ARFID. And no I don't force-feed him until he vomits, nor do I starve him into compliance. Partly because as an adult I eat almost everything and I have hope that as he gets older, he will also eat a wider range of stuff. So I don't really see the point in worrying overmuch or making his childhood an unpleasant nightmare for him. Instead, I give him what he'll eat (which does include a fair amount of UPF protein such as fish fingers, but tbh I'm just pleased he's getting protein), and try to cram as many nutrients as I can into him within the range of what he'll eat. I also cook varied meals alongside this for the rest of us including my other DC so it's not easy.

If he turns round at age 18 and says "You fed me crap", he'll get short shift. The offer is always on the table to try whatever foods he wants - lobster, fillet steak, I'd cook him anything - and he's reminded of that frequently.

People are giving examples of food that are not UPFs though, certainly from the 70s.

I don’t think that’s true necessarily or what has been shown on here. That UPF in childhood = overweight adult. I was a very skinny child and have never been overweight in my life.

I had a bit of a rubbish diet as a kid but I was still as thin as a rake. I started eating more healthily when I left home.

Of course it’s healthier all round to bring your children up with home
cooked food. But in terms of being overweight - genetics come in to it a lot more.

True. Foods these days are actually full of much more crap than back then. Even McDonald’s were healthier and had fewer crappy ingredients in them..

I ate lots of processed stuff as a kid and I remember my parents shopping at Kwik Save! I ate at my grandparents a lot and I think they liked the novelty of processed food after years of meat and two veg. I remember by grandad being amazed by the ready meal dinners served in a big Yorkshire pudding! I was never a fussy eater though, I'd always eat anything.

I'm the opposite now, I love cooking and eat mostly from scratch meals with the odd pizza here and there.

It does worry me how much bad food I used to eat and even now when I cook from scratch I'm aware that lots of ingredients are still processed. We still eat bread and things like coconut milk are processed.

Always fed homemade food and was so jealous of people who had the fun ready meals. I do a mix

Like what? I don’t consider the 70s as being the UPF era, it started in the 80s but really took off in the 90s (in my entirely uneducated opinion!)

We had a fairly stand diet for the 80s, but leaning towards more UPF and sugar.

Breakfast was rice krispies or corn flakes with sugar, maybe a slice of toast with spreadable butter.

Lunch was a cheese or ham sandwich, or jacket potato or mug of tinned soup

Dinners would have been mainly meat and 2 veg, spag bol, chicken dippers and chips, pork stir fry... never plant based as that wasn't the done thing

Maybe custard or ice cream for dessert

Drinks were juice, milk, squash or sometimes fizzy pop

And we had a treat cupboard with lots of crap we could eat as much of as we liked- mars bars, crisps, chocolate biscuits...

As an adult I have a strong desire to eat a varied and healthy diet and manage it about 70% of the time

Unfortunately I do have a sweet tooth and eat too much chocolate.

I went through a phase of resenting my parents for not restricting sugary food, but ultimately, I need to be accountable for ny actions. They did their best and healthy food wasn't a priority with 6 kids, they just wanted us fed and happy

Food science is absolutely fascinating, and not something I was even aware of until my mid 30s.

My DM did cook (always something with potatoes and two veg) but the something could have been Brain’s faggots (wtf were they??), Findus crispy pancakes, chicken kievs or something. Other UPFs in plentiful supply were slimy square ham (on our white bread sandwiches every single day), Toast Toppers (a small tin of chemicals and emulsifiers), sausage rolls, Ski yogurts, etc. We never had ready meals (they were too posh).

My DH could’ve written this! Unfortunately, although the verity of food he can eat has increased dramatically, he still relies on sad beige food a lot of the time.

PILS are terrible cooks, god love them, it’s like food from the depression. The words Irish stew make me shudder even now.

I might share the eat with the eyes, ignore the ingredients strategy. I’m very glad you’re able to have a healthy relationship with food as an adult.