To ask what highly processed food you eat?

[Lifeswhatyoumakeit73]

I haven’t read the Dr Chris book yet about highly processed food but I have read other stuff & it’s made me super conscious of how much HPF we eat. I cook mainly from scratch but as a family of 3 pescatarians & me who is mainly plant based but eats eggs, I realise I need to look at what we eat & make some changes. I cook from scratch as much as I can but I am a busy mum who works full time so we do reply on some HPF. Looking in my cupboards:

We have:

• baked beans
• veggie sausages
• veggie mince
• oat milk
• vegan cheese
• vegan butter
• Tacos
• crackers, crisps, bread sticks
• shop bought houmous
• shreddies, weetabix
• caramel wafers
• yoyos
• couple tins veggie chilli
• peanut butter (whole earth so just peanuts but still bad apparently)
• jam
• seeded bread sliced
• bagels

How bad is that? How does it compare to others? I use veggie mince to make a spag Bol from scratch but will, for example, use lentils instead.

i feel like most of our food is cooked fresh but judging by this list, we have a lot of processed crap that I hadn’t registered.

Aibu to ask you to share so I can compare?

Sorry UPFs - ultra processed foods!

OP, I think it’s a balance. I went through a big UPF thing last year where I took a long hard look at our diet and made some changes. I bake more for the kids (eg muffins with self easing wholewheat flour and berries) and make bread snd rolls. I also started making our own yoghurt partly to reduce plastic and partly to control what goes into them. The kids have it with stewed fruit. I make our granola and have always made our own baked beans as they just taste so good homemade. But yes we eat sausages, store bought pizzas etc. Where possible I try and choose non UPF options eg tortilla chips which just have 3 ingredients but we still love Pringles! All a good balance. Ps those really good peanut butters have literally just nuts in them.

Another bucketloads answer here.
What bad things is supposed to have happened to me due to eating UPF?
I

most regular UPF = Nutella, Doritos, curry paste, some weird breaded chicken thing DH gets from market, vegan fake meat things DH likes, biscuits, my own home-made brownies, tofu, sweets, chocolates, onion rings, Schnapps

maybe UPF? = flapjacks, biscuits, white basmati rice, ready cooked pasta

Fairly PF = tortillas, bread, American mustard, ham, cheese, mayo, jar pasta sauce, baked beans, boxed lentils, ham, sausages, bacon, jar salsa, tea, DS's home-made sponge cake, Greek yogurt, jam, peanut-butter, olive oil, orange juice,m wine, butter...

I had a banana today. Will have some steamed veg soon.

More than I could list here because even when cooking from scratch I'll add things like a stock pot, oyster sauce, sriracha, olive oil...

I'm so pleased another doctor is making money out of the diet industry... If we all had unlimited time, money and grew our food or foraged for it I'm sure no one would ever get sick or fat 😐

We eat baked beans perhaps once a week, oven chips ditto. I might have some marmalade or jam on toast a couple of times a week - and that's about it - everything else is cooked from scratch - not because I'm trying to be virtuous, I just enjoy cooking and have access to wonderful fresh meat and fish, and we're lucky enough to be able to afford to eat well. If money was tighter, I think we'd probably be eating more UPFs - I'm convinced that cooking from scratch is on the whole more expensive than buying ready-made; pizzas, for example - cost a lot more to make (flour, yeast, oil, tomato puree, mozzarella, peppers, olives, anchovies etc.) than getting a couple of Dr Oetker or similar.

@NewtonsCradle yes, I know what you mean. But I had read stuff before about it too- and as I get older, I do want to try and stay healthy eat well.

Oh god loads. And at home we cook from scratch every evening. As in, no frozen chicken nuggets or shop bought pizzas or chips. Even so, we must consume a load of UPF. we buy things like pasta but make the sauce so not from a jar. But for breakfast ds might have a salmon bagel or toast with marmite.
I have to say, I can’t really get excited about it, we eat a lot of fruit and veg, really good quality meat, and eat as seasonally as we can. But yeah, if we want crisps or as we’ve had today, Mars ice creams then we’ll bloody well have them.

At the moment, none as I’m on a v strict diet due to a medical condition so am making everything from scratch. It’s really made me look at food in a different light and even when/if my condition resolves or stabilises w meds I doubt I’ll go back to eating UPF again (at least at home) and try and eat cleanly as possible out.
I looked at a Heinz low sugar/salt baked bean tin the other day (dh loves them) and it was def UP whereas I’m sure the old ‘full sugar/salt’ variety wasn’t.
@RightWhereYouLeftMe - butter and pasta aren’t upf - butter is churned cream and pasta is just flour. Wholemeal pasta is better, but essentially upf has usually an ingredient that wouldn’t be in your kitchen and is usually wrapped in plastic!
I’m going to buy the book at some point but I have listened to a couple of podcasts with Dr Chris so got the gist.

Bread and crisps. That's it.

We eat most things on your list OP, except for the vegan butter and cheese. We also cook a lot with fresh vegetables, rice, minced beef and so on.
Trying to balance it out over all, but can’t get to stressed over it.

Many more than you've listed. We're a veggie household too and I do worry about the processed nature of the fake meats we love and the snacks my kids moan 24/7 for. I have three kids under 6 and probably only cook from scratch 3 nights of the 7. We live on pasta, pesto, cheese and beans. I limit their lunches to healthy stuff though (as they don't complain in school and nursery as they do at home!).

I KNOW I can't reduce our processed foods, I'm already at breaking point generally. So I'll live with the knowledge that it may impact all of our health in the future. I can't do anything more than I'm already doing.

This is so depressing to read.

Just about everything seems to be UHP.

We work long hours and have young kids who are fussy. I try so hard to get them to eat a varied and healthy diet but it's hard.

Moneywise, we do ok, but (like everyone else) our food shopping has got noticeably more expensive lately. And that's for standard stuff - if we were to buy all whole foods or whatever it would quickly become unaffordable.

It just doesn't seem achievable for most people, both time wise and money wise, and I find that so depressing.

My youngest suffers from constipation. So it's a battle to get him to enough "good foods" to get things moving. Weetabix and Fish fingers and baked beans i take as a win....but according to this they are crap

I just don't know what to do then.

Why is jam/ marmalade on the list? Fruit and sugar, just like granny used to make! I make my own jellies, only the fruit and sugar is in them. Two ingredients.

You can be veggie without eating fake meat. You can just eat vegetables like most veggie cultures do. Fake meat is unknown outside the UK.

I listen to Dr Jamnadas (cardio surgeon) on YT and he advocates avoiding anything with an ingredients list (or barcode, but carrots have a barcode lol).
A lot of it is common sense.

Basically everything. Two kids on restricted diets due to allergies so we need a load of highly processed food to get enough basic vitamins and nutrients into them eg calcium
In oat milk and some vegan cheeses and processed bread

Christ this is depressing. I think we eat really well but I refuse to get too worked up about a Linda McCartney sausage every now and then, or a bag of crisps.

Too many to count. Currently eating a Thai curry with fake chicken, tinned pineapple, tinned coconut milk and ready made past in it. And smothered in sriracha. Addicted to Nakd bars and soreen malt loaf.

I do often make mince out of tofu and chopped walnuts. But I suppose tofu is too processed too? We do get 9-10 portions of fresh fruit and veg a day and are both slim and feel ok even with hectic jobs and three kids. I think cutting out processed food would tip me over the edge of sanity 😅

First sentence...agreed completely. But seitan is fake meat and prolific in Asia. And fake meats are available in nearly every country I've visited.

@HoneyIShrunkThePizza i think tofu ok! Your mince with tofu & walnuts sounds nice! Do you just mice it up in a blender?

*mince

The only UPF we eat with any regularity is ‘fresh’ unpackaged bread from the supermarket. We also eat/drink cheese butter and wine fairly often but they’re processed as opposed to UPF. I could make my own bread I suppose - not sure why I don’t, I used to. Don’t have takeaways more than once every few months largely because I just don’t like them, but sometimes it’s a necessity. We’ve not had a UPF based diet for a long long time as we all went veggie about ten years ago and so that naturally meant a lot of cooking from scratch. So bloody labour intensive though. We didn’t ever eat fake meat types of veggie/vegan food though. DDs will occasionally have a fake meat burger now but I don’t like them. Now both DDs are at Uni DH and I have gone back to eating fish and them on a rare occasion, meat. Makes it a lot easier and much less work in prepping a meal. Hasn’t been a conscious decision, just evolved from when the DDs wanted to go veggie and I thought why not. And I’ve just never liked ready meals or takeaways so had no choice but to cook from scratch. I can’t imagine the hours and hours I’ve spent of my life cooking - and I don’t even enjoy it 😂

Oh God, I really don't want to know!! I like to think I eat healthily but probably consume loads of processed foods.

Yes I stand corrected on seitan. But all of S Asia is not eating fake meat. That's a lot of people.