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?

https://www.waitrose.com/ecom/products/duchy-organic-highland-all-butter-shortbread-fingers/532723-75326-75327

Think these would be ok @ostentatiousocelot ? Also thanks re chocolate- I was pleased to find a cheaper one than I had been buying!

Biscoff are rated as Nova 3 on the app. Likewise several shortbreads, doves farm fruity oat, duchy organic stem ginger. Bizarrely a Sains TTD choc chunk cookie is a 3 as well!

All of which make me deeply suspicious of the app’s reliability in all honesty.

100% agree with all of this!

@lljkk your brother has severe mental illness. Huge link between the gut microbiome and mental illness. Gut dysbiosis manifests differently in different people. This is likely how his is presenting.

https://www.verywellhealth.com/defining-ultra-processed-foods-is-debated-5509462

That’s interesting re Nova- I have noticed some very odd anomalies so it’s definitely a case of using judgement, looking carefully at ingredients and not obsessing about it I think.

I have been gluten free for 10 years, I haven’t got a diagnosis of coeliac, but after severe reactions in terms of joint pain and exhaustion after having gluten, my doctor felt there was no merit in going back on gluten to be tested.

I have started reading Dr Chris’ book and have been horrified how much gluten free food is ultra processed. I was already careful about checking labels but feel I now need to steer clear of bread, cakes and pastries unless I bake them myself. We should all be angrier than we are about our food being adulterated, I think it is especially upsetting that “free from” food which is catering for those who may already have severe medical issues is full of these additives.

mmmm... I tend to agree with the docs that years of tweaking (crystal meth) fried his brain. Tweakers tend not to eat at all.

@lljkk it's all connected. Very interesting. Give it a google

@Evenstar I agree re being angrier and think we’ve all sleep walked into this too led by big corps.

But re gluten free - my guess is it needs more processing to be made into something it’s not? I’ve been coeliac for 20+ years now and the alternatives when I was first diagnosed were truly disgusting. I think it’s probably the processing that’s allowed them to produce what they do and then taste pretty good.

I’d say you’re fine with malted barley. It is a fermented grain. it os essentially barley left to soak and start to ferment, making sugar yes but also yeast to make the bread rise and give it flavour like a soughdough dough. Barley flour is a traditional bread ingredient and definitely not an UPF. Using malted grains is a traditional way of getting additional yeast and is something you could do at home if you so wished, sort of like making a sourdough starter yourself but with grains not flour.

After all yeast only works with sugar - if you don’t add sugar to bread (and you don’t need to) it uses the sugar in the wheat flour (flour is a carb, so it’s lots of glucose bits joined together on a chemical level). Bread therefore contains sugar, agree no added sugar is needed but claiming bread has no sugar is like saying fruit has no sugar.

Also big plea to those going to home made oat milk and also giving this to children under 5 as one of their main calorie sources, please check with a dietician first. I’m out of date but it was alpro growing up or oatly barista were the only nondairy milks that had enough calories for littles, you can’t match that with home made oat milks.

Also remember all white flour/bread by law in the uk has added calcium, iron, niacin, and thiamin so you’re going to find that on the ingredients list of flour/bread whatever you do. Not sure if that makes all white bread/baking UPF containing by default - guess it depends on how the vitamins are made!

Agree somethings are worse than others and I’m struggling to wrap my head around how things can still have a decent nutrional value but be UPF. 🤯

Any ideas of non-UPF snacks for kids?

We do carrot sticks, fruit etc. But like to keep some snacks in my changing bag and also to throw at whinging kids when it gets too much in the afternoon!

Atm it’s usually a biscuit! I’ve realised that most of the UPF in my cupboard is supplied by MIL..! She just stuffs the kids full of absolute junk. It’s frustrating as it’s not just the odd biscuit she chases them around with bags of food praising them for stuffing their faces 😂 it was such a point of contention with my ex SIL that my MIL accused her of malnourishing her kids…

@RedRosette2023 I think that’s why some kind of scale is needed, I think it’s crazy that, for example, a seeded, wholemeal bread is UPF but so is a doughnut or a crunchie or a dairylea lunchable- and this is what I mean about a scale of risk and what PP have mentioned. I’m much less concerned about using some supermarket seeded bread with a shorter ingredients list- I’ll link the one I use when not using bakery- than I am about any of the examples of junk UPF food I’ve given! So I think like I said before I’m not going to be obsessive about it.

Re kids snacks out and about- I guess if you have time to bake some cake or biscuits in the evening and then freeze and just take out what you need. Yo yo fruit bears are not UPF although obviously a lot of fruit (and therefore sugar) packed into a condensed form. I also cut of chunks of cheese from a block for snacks, also the usual fruit and veg sticks, plain crisps with just potatoes and oil, some popcorn maybe is ok.

https://www.waitrose.com/ecom/products/duchy-organic-wholemeal-seeded-bloomer/653557-92785-92786

I agree with not being obsessive about it.

I disagree with only worrying about doughnuts and crunchies. It's obvious that those should only be eaten in moderation.

But you could have a breakfast and lunch of eating cereal, supermarket bread, margarine, cheap peanut butter or low fat cream cheese or cheap ham, and it would seem fairly healthy and yet be 80% upf. I think the jury's still out on how harmful those products are, but if they are worse than their natural alternatives, the insiduous way upf can take over the "healthy" parts of our diets worries me.

Probably nearly everything we eat. I only buy things at the supermarket due to convenience/cost, never at a local butchers etc.

Cereals (weetabix, shreddies etc), overnight oats made with yoghurts like Skyr, frozen fruit. Oat and soya milks.

All types of bread (sliced, pitta breads, bagels)

Condiments, spreads (Lurpak), jam, sandwich fillings like ham, Philadelphia.

Never buy things like pasta sauces but use chopped tomatoes for those. Sometimes use normal rice but often the pouches of rice/grains for convenience. Pasta, noodles. Oven food like fish fingers, fish cakes, sausages, chips or wedges. Baked beans.

Yoghurts, biscuits, chocolate bars, crisps, sweet and salty popcorn, cereal bars, kiddie fruit bars/snacks. Rice cakes, crackers. Ice cream, ice lollies. Sugar free fizzy drinks, juice, squash.

We eat fairly healthily as a family, I think, lots of fruit and veg, lean meat proteins/fish, always wholegrain bread, pasta (not rice, can’t stand brown so always basmati or long grain white), very rare takeaways, don’t drink much alcohol. But loads of UP. I really can’t lose sleep over it I have to say.

@MMMarmite sorry those weren’t great examples, I totally agree- it’s very easy to think you’re eating ‘healthily’ but actually eating mostly UPF, in the examples you’ve given but also in things that on first glance look like a better option, than a chocolate bar, for example, but are actually worse.

Even Philadelphia cream cheese is UPF I think- it certainly had an ingredient in I wasn’t sure about!

What I find a bit weird is that often you can get basically the same product, taste and price wise - but one will be UPF/have various additives and the other won't be. So for e.g. Philadelphia (UPF) vs Waitrose Essentials cream cheese (non UPF, and often much cheaper). Lindt/Green and Blacks/most other brands of milk chocolate (contain emulsifiers and sometimes other things) vs Waitrose No. 1 milk chocolate (no emulsifiers, similar price point). Sainsbury's organic tinned tomatoes (contain tomatoes + citric acid) vs Suma organic (5p more per tin, contain only tomatoes). So in many cases it can't be THAT difficult to manufacture without all the additives.

The additives are for things like shelf life, consistency of product in varied environments (an own brand product is only sold in the same stores so a more controlled space), how well they travel (again a bigger brand will be shipped further) etc. Hardly any of it will be about taste.

@AtomicBlondeRose that’s a very interesting point- hadn’t thought of that!

@ostentatiousocelot thanks for the tip on essential cream cheese- great to know!

@AtomicBlondeRose yes, that's interesting and would make sense of certain supermarket brands/small brands bring less UP than the huge global brands (though obviously loads of them are still UP too).

Wheat fibre being listed as a separate ingredient suggests UPF to me. I’ve just started reading the book and he talks about nutrients and other components being removed during processing and added back in, and that’s what this sounds like.

I made mayonnaise today, it took me just 2 minutes

I used a pickle jar as they are slightly larger, poured in boiling water to make sure very clean and let it dry after pouring water awayway

pour in 1 cup of olive oil and crack in one large egg, add salt and pepper and juice of one small lemon or half of a large lemon - then with a stick wand - start at the bottom and slowly pull up. The mixture turns white, - then keep in fridge any remaining mayo. I also added garlic granules but next time may add mustard powder.

Yes! I make my own mayonnaise all the time using the same method. I'd been led to believe making mayonnaise was notoriously tricky with careful dribbling of oil etc, but it's actually very simple. The key is to use a receptacle just a little wider than the stick blender (I use a nutribullet cup with its own lid) and to kind of trap the egg yolk in the end of the blender before you turn it on.

It tastes much nicer than shop bought mayonnaise.