beans mash and sausages is a healthy meal

[madhurjazz]

Mother in law thinks its junk food. But the beans contain 1 of your 5 a day, mashed potatoes are just veg and a good source of carbs and the sausages are full of essential protein.

We often have ketchup, this has been shown to reduce many cancers like prostate, and a glass of juice.

Seems healthy to me and not junky.

Chili, but conversely if your general diet is low in salt and in processed food, then the occasional sausage does not lift you into the danger bracket

I agree. In fact I said that above.

Rich people get to eat expensive 'junk' and celebrate their quirky rebellion against the food police. Poor people are feckless, ignorant and selfish for eating cheap junk food.

That to me is a very odd reading of that. it's not about poor vs rich, although it might end up being that way in the end, but it's about quality and knowing how to prepare them.

Salt and oil (or sugar) don't make a food junk. We need both those things in our diet. If you take veggies and roast them with salt and olive oil, even a lot of olive oil, that's different from eating a packaged crappy sausage with it's poor quality meat, excessive salt, and huge amounts of sulphites and fat. That's not a statement about class. It's a statement about nutrition.

I think interpreting it (poor vs rich) really runs against facts about nutrition.

For me, the benefit in getting some protein inside DD outweighs the increased risk of cancer (sausages and mince are the only meats she will eat)

I wonder how many people know about gut bacteria and health?

Yes gut bacteria is being eroded by artificial sweetners and contributing to porkiness.

"It seems odd to me dissecting the nutritional value of a single meal, rather than looking at a diet over a day or a week.

We eat sausages, mash and beans occasionally. We always eat fresh fruit at every meal - no puddings. Lunch might be vegetable soup, bread, cheese and salad veg, followed by fruit, breakfast muesli and either milk or yoghurt, with fruit juice. A fruit flapjack for tea.

In that context, I can't get too worked up about the nutritional content of that one single dish - to me, it is the overall diet that counts."

The thing is that we are supposed to eat waaaay more vegetables than most of us currently do. So every lunch and dinner should include them.

Also sounds like your diet is quite fruit heavy which isn't particularly healthy.

Asp don't mix dieticians and nutritionists.

Dieticians are health professionals and the title is protected by law. They are academically qualified and regulated. They advise in proper dietary need S

A dietician may well include sausages in their recommendations for some patients.

However a nutritionist is not the same. Anyone can call themselves a nutritionist. They need no qualifications, medical or otherwise. They are not regulated in the UK. I can imagine serval nutritionists banning all sorts of food including sausages.

I stopped giving fishoil because dd was complaining of fishy burps changed to orange fish oil medicine orangey fishy burps

High BMI yes. High life expectancy too though.

So can't be all that bad as we are now living liger and this is not just down to medical intervention.

First of all, we need to distinguish between different cancers, because the risk factors for one are not the same as the risk factors for another. 'Cancer' isn't just one condition, but a whole group of conditions. Some risk factors have an effect across many of those conditions (alcohol would be an example as consumption increases the risk of lots of different cancers from liver to breast cancer), some are more specific (asbestos might be an example, since it tends to be linked more specifically to lung cancer).

Then we need to put the evidence in context, which is not about certainties but about risks. Some people will eat lots and lots of red meat and never get colorectal cancer, just the same as there are those who have smoked 40 a day for 40 years and never got lung cancer. This does not mean, however, that there is no link statistically between regular consumption of large portions of red meat and colorectal cancer, or large consumption of cigarettes and lung cancer. However, to say that something is a risk factor also does not mean that it is the sole possible cause of a disease. There are people with lung cancer who never smoked at all, and people with colorectal cancer who have not consumed red meat in years.

I think one important thing missing here is the difference between absolute and relative risk. I muddied the waters between the two in my example above, so I'm going to try to straighten that out a bit here. As far as I understand it, all studies try to do is to measure the effects of one variable on another in an 'exposed' group against a 'control' group. So you might measure the colorectal cancer incidence in a group who regularly consumption of large portions of red meat against colorectal cancer incidence in a control group who have a lesser/no degree of exposure. Once you've done all the followup and all the sums, you can come up with a rough measure of the 'relative risk', which is a ratio.

So, in our case, it would be a ratio that showed the probability of colorectal cancer in the high red meat consumption group compared to the probability in a group with lower/no consumption. A relative risk of 1 means there is no difference between the groups. Greater than 1 means it's more likely in the exposed group. (You have to do another bunch of calculations to work out whether the difference is 'significant' or not, because small differences can just be an effect of the sampling you're using).

If you look at the data above, there are relative risk (RR) values presented throughout, and some indication of significance/confidence intervals. Hopefully these are helpful in allowing people to make an informed decision!

hulababy I think that's a very valid point well made and one which lots of people don't know. Some TV programmes are heaving with nutritionists!

As an aside I could kill for a sausage now

Dead, actually, overall, our diet is very vegetable heavy - I'm the one on MN Chicken threads explaining how a chicken does 3 meals for 4 people, or a packet of mince does at least the same, because we combine so many vegetables with our meat. It would just be that on a sausages-and-mash day - perhaps once a month, if that, because we normally eat them with ratatouille and mashed or roasted squash, or slow-roasted tomatoes and baked potatoes - we wouldn't have as many vegetables as usual.

It's definitely not junk because it is nutritious, sausages aren't bad because they contain fat. I thought fat was our friend now and sugar is the enemy. My advice to make it healthier is too change the patato to sweet patato make sure the beans are low sugar.

I could not agree more with MrsDeveres post about this. There is so much snobbery underlying this subject.
Now I know we're on an Internet forum its usual to get carried away with ones view but it excludes and alienates huge parts of society.

Sausages were created to use leftovers. If you're going to kill a pig you should use all of it. That is what sausages (along with pies etc) are FOR.

"Bad" sausages have a low meat content and are bulked out with rusk and water. The people saying meat is bad should consider that. Bad sausages contain smaller portions of meat!
And what's wrong with rusk and water? Nothing massively. It may not taste fantastic, it may not be full of nutrients but as bad as all that?

The diets the nigella/ HFW lovers look up to are, ironically, full of this stuff- the French, Italians and Spanish eat loads of processed meats, fats, starchy carbs. What they do well is add in a variety of vegetables additionally.

I'm agog at this thread.

Do people actually live like this? Stressing over a tin of beans?

Jesus. Well, I suppose we don't have diphtheria to worry about any more...

Food most certainly is a class issue, the Red Bull/Doughnut V Espresso/Muffin is a perfect example.

Its easy to say that cheap cuts of meat taste as good, if not better, than expensive cuts if you pop them in the slow cooker. But in order to do that you need to have the money to buy the slow cooker in the first place. Argos do one for £20 but if you are on a low income then that £20 could be a large portion of your whole food budget.

Portion size too is affected. If you can afford to serve massive portions of veg then eating less carbs is a fine thing to do. But if you are limited by money, time and availability then you will feed your kids whatever fills them up and if that means a pile of mash with a couple of spoons of beans then so be it.

Thankfully I have only seen this utterly ridiculous food snobbery on MN, in RL people seem to have more common sense.

I think people on MN have more common sense they just get carried away with group think and the desire to be right. I agree the red bull/ chocolate and expresso/ muffin is a perfect example (and has made me think- I wouldn't dream of consuming the former but do regularly buy the latter and you're right, it is sold to you as a right that comes with hard work money and a busy life.

Yes. And life expectancy is the highest it's ever been.

The increase in life expectancy is attributed to improvements in public health/medicine, hygiene and nutrition.

At the same time, being overweight makes you more prone to illness such as high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes - the latter takes 5 - 10 years off your life.

Overall, moderate obesity is found to reduce life expectancy by an average of 3 years, while morbid obesity reduces life expectancy by 8 to 10 years.

According the largest ever obesity study from Imperial College, found that the U.K. is on course to be the fattest in Europe by 2025 when 40% of people will be dangerously overweight.

Good eating habits - and the importance of a balanced diet, are established in childhood.

Dontyou after I posted that above I was thinking about how many people pulled this meal to pieces, whilst simultaneously planning chicken dippers and oven chips for tonights dinner!

Actually the red bull/expresso example is 1 that im am going to shamefully steal and use when im having debates about food and eating it is perfect simple and hits the point. Frugality/sourcing/researching is like a hobby for some people and cooking and eating is well thought out pulled apart and stressed over other people just eat so they are not hungry

Eat a balanced diet*