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?

Yup thats why I always knew vegan diets are super unhealthy. They are just pushing a bunch of shit processed crap onto ppl to make big bucks.
Meat is just 100% meat, nothing else. Perfect with some spuds and veg. Maybe one day ppl will wake up to how stupid this vegan push is. I wont hold my breath though.
To answer your question Op. I eat pretty clean except for

bread
pasta
stock cubes
crisps (rare)
sweets (rare)
icecream (not as rare as I would like it to be)

Im not counting yoghurt and cheese as processed, I dont think its processed in a way that makes it a concern.

Oh and when I say Im not concerned by yoghurt, I mean plain yogurt obviously, not the highly processed sweetner laden crap.

I have also stopped eating jame awhile ago because Im very suss as to the quality of the fruit in it.

@LuckyStone LOL! it's a bold claim to say vegan diets are unhealthy and complete bollocks. Same as meat eaters there are those that eat crap and those that don't. If you're a vegan that cooks for yourself and limits UPF it can be one of the healthiest diets out there. Lentils, beans, nuts, tofu, fruits, veg, avocado, spices, curries, stews, salads.... etc etc. Perfectly possible to get your full food groups from these and many vegans eat this way on a daily basis. I'd wager that the average vegan who cooks this way is healthier than your average meat eater.

I hate when people lump all vegans into one group, it's a complete myth to assume all vegans are gorging on UPF just because you might see a load of it in the supermarket. Don't peddle dangerous nonsense about vegan diets that simply isn't true. That said it is perfectly fine to raise queries about UPFs that are marketed at people who eat plant based diets as well as other non-vegans.

Also let's also bear in mind that the UPFs marketed at vegans are also marketed at non-vegans, and consumed by them.

Yes vegan diets done properly are about as healthy as you can get, but none of this fake meat stuff, just Fruit/veg/nuts/pulses etc

@LuckyStone my post above yours demonstrates that actually meat isn’t always just meat - cured meats like bacon, gammon and ham usually have nitrites for example and often other ingredients too (Sainsbury’s gammon for example has dextrose, multiple stabilisers and an antioxidant). Plus so many meat sausages/meatballs/burgers have just as much shite in them as vegan ones, and precooked or flavoured meats like those precooked chickens or premarinated meats often have lots of added ingredients you might not expect. For example, Sainsburys precooked whole roast chicken says on the front 100% British chicken so you assume that it’s only got that one ingredient - but actually it contains sugar, salt, stabiliser and dextrose as well. Birds Eye flavoured (not battered) fish contain emulsifier, dextrose and fish gelatine. Yes plain raw chicken/salmon is just chicken/salmon but I suspect people often don’t realise how processed some meat products are.

I really hate the way people dismiss veganism as "unhealthy" due to the proliferation of foodstuffs like fake meats, which many vegans don't touch. It's bad logic and a cheap excuse to denigrate vegans by meat eaters, farmers etc.

Vegan or veggie diets without fake meat are not unhealthy or monotonous or stupid if you know how to cook.

Ok thank you 😊
Waitrose again! Good job I shop there anyway, they are coming out as the main supplier of non UPF ( amongst the supermarket chains)

Yes and it’s absolutely no different to many meat eaters who just eat processed shite.

Tbf meat sausages aren't in the healthy section.

This post has done a great job of demonstrating the complete ignorance towards other diets. A vegan diet free from UPF is far from unhealthy - the problem is the big companies making substitutes for meat and dairy because so many are conditioned to believe they cannot live without it.

A vegan diet that embraces whole food - vegetables, grains, pulses, nuts, fruits - is about as healthy as you can get. Add in a bunch of UPF masquerading as a substitute for the meat that is supposedly essential (but really isn't) and you have an unhealthy diet.

Have a non-veg diet full of processed meat in the form of burgers, fish fingers, nuggets etc and you are in the same boat.

Demonising a specific diet achieves nothing - there are good and bad eaters in them all.

Re nitrite free meat: try Naked bacon. Tesco do very nice nitrite and additive free cured meats ( in the Spanish deli section) and Ocado's prosciutto san Daniele is fabulous. It all freezes well too.

I am concerned about what I'm giving my children to eat. I would say on the whole, we try to be as healthy as we can but it's hard to stear away from some processed snack and treat type food. E.g. most chocolate seems to have emulsifiers, lecithin and soya. Are there any brands of chocolate without nasties?

Has anyone got some good tips for children's snacks and treats? Not just fruit, veg, etc.
My two like Nairns oat cakes with a little bit of Marmite. I feel like that's an OK snack?

I've got a bit obsessed about all this since thar documentary the other night.

@CrazyDaisy1111 I feel the same and I’ve also seen today a report about UPF baby foods which I thought were ok and are not. Didn’t even occur to me pure fruit purées would be UPF. 🤷‍♀️ Waitrose no 1 49% milk chocolate doesn’t have emulsifiers in. Just that one though. Any of the flavoured ones are.

Snacks are hard. I think the Nairns things aren’t too bad. My middle son has a lot of apple and peanut butter (pip and nut) for snacks and also salted nuts (too much salt is also not ideal but he loves them as much as chocolate!). Toast with hummus (although bread is tricky!) peanut butter, avocado etc. We are trying to cut down but not out…

Also am planning to make some biscuits and freeze dough so at least they’re only made from a few ingredients. It’s time to do it though.

Bourbons
Supermarket bakery sourdough bread, seeded rolls, ciabatta
My muesli has some kind of cereal flakes in it as well as oats

Oh, pasta as well

@CrazyDaisy1111 there are quite a few types of chocolate that are non UPF. A lot of dark chocolate is (Green & Black's etc - loads of choice there). For milk chocolate you have Waitrose No.1 milk chocolate, Divine milk chocolate, or Montezuma's milk chocolate and milk chocolate buttons. This is just the plain milk chocolate - the flavoured versions have emulsifiers. But there are a couple of flavoured ones that don't - Seed & Bean chilli and lime milk chocolate doesn't and tastes amazing, and another recent discovery is Divine dark chocolate with hazelnut truffle - it is dark, yes, but only 41% cocoa solids so not particularly intense, and deliciously truffly.

For "snacks and treats", might it be helpful to separate that into two categories? So you have "snacks" which can be anything at all - fruit, vegetables, non-UPF bread or pancakes with (non-UPF) cheese/cream cheese/jam, homemade muffins, oatcakes with proper peanut butter, plain unsalted nuts with or without dried fruit mixed in, Greek yoghurt with or without honey or jam, etc etc. And then you have "treats" which are probably things higher in fat, sugar or salt - salted nuts, ready salted crisps (the flavoured ones are usually UPF), homemade flapjacks/cake or cake bought from a local bakery, shortbread biscuits (e.g.Waitrose Duchy ones), homemade puddings, ice cream (there's a discussion about this up thread - lots of non UPF vanilla versions or you can make your own, or if you have a local gelateria type place they may well be non UPF), non UPF chocolate. For drinks you could have things like Appletiser (think it's just sparkling apple juice), or San Pellegrino used to do ones that are just fruit juice and sparkling water, though googling suggests that some of them are now diet versions with sweeteners etc.