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?

What other bad thing is supposed to have happened to me from eating UPF?

UPF can contain high Fructose Corn Syrup, this ingredient has the same affect on the liver as alcohol. The issue is that as whereas with alcohol we stop drinking, with HFCS we can keep ingesting it and end up with liver disease. Sugar the bitter truth is an interesting YouTube video by an endocrinologist on the subject. He also delves into the political reason its used in USA, where its used far more than in UK.

You'll struggle to find an ice cream in the uk that doesn't use this ingredient. I have a couple of easy ice cream recipes that are only 4/5 ingredients without using HFCS

I am all for cooking from scratch and watching ingredients lists but I am getting annoyed with some of the preaching. Make your own bread.... buy organic/ natural etc... these are all great ideas but require time and money, not to mention skills and knowledge.

I don't have a bread maker but I have a nice simple.nigella bread recipe I make sometimes. it's great. It also takes hours and I certainly don't have time to do that everyday. Nor do I have money for the £4 sourdough. Nor can I find money or space for a breadmaker. As just one example. Homemade baked beans are probably better. But baked beans are a quick easy meal for us and I don't have the time or inclination to make my own.

There are cultural shifts that I think have encouraged the development of uhp. Eg we tend to shop weekly and want food to last vs popping in places daily. We have less time to do all this prep work etc. I am not sure what the answer is but guilt tripping people (mostly women) who are just doing their best doesn't feel like the best answer.

And I say that as someone who's family's meals - breakfast lunch and dinner are mostly not particularly filled with uhp foods.

The original article was about Robert Lustig’s book, I think. Will keep looking!

thats the chap that does Sugar the bitter truth on YouTube, that I mention above. The sugar prices in USA where fluctuating to much and the Japanese invented HFCS and it was a political saviour but a disaster for human health

In the 1970s as boring as it was we ate a large amount of meat, vegetables and potato - that was a staple British diet "meat and two veg"

steak, pork chops, fish, all served with veggies and potato - nothing processed and dinner was easy to cook

I have switched out a lot of UPF over the last year. It’s easier if you switch a couple of habitual purchases each week rather than trying to change everything in one go. Some of the things on your list are processed but not ultraprocessed so definitely revisit the definitions. It is often very easy to find a substitute — in some cases the own brand item was processed while the branded product was UPF — it’s just doing it for everything all at once that’s overwhelming. It’s not a religion, you don’t need perfect compliance. Every change is a benefit (and reduces cravings for these foods, making further change easier).

That nova website is very interesting. Some things I’d have thought were UPF are not.

Most of us live in the UK, we don't use much high fructose corn syrup

Ben & Jerry's ingredients:
Water, sugar, cream (MILK) (18%), concentrated skimmed MILK, glucose syrup, coconut fat, free range EGG yolk, vegetable oils (rapeseed, sunflower), cocoa powder, skimmed MILK powder, fat-reduced cocoa powder, butter fat (MILK), whey powder (MILK), modified corn starch, salt, caramelised sugar, stabilisers (guar gum, carrageenan, locust bean gum), emulsifiers (lecithins (contain SOY)), molasses, BARLEY malt extract, sea salt, natural flavourings, acidity regulator (citric acid). > Fairtrade cocoa, sugar, vanilla. Sugar and vanilla with mass balance. Total 53% excluding water and dairyF. FVisit info.fairtrade.net/sourcing. ∆ cocoa sourced via Open Chain total: 100%

Mackie's ingredients:
Whole Milk (60%), Whipping Cream (21%), Sugar, Milk Solids, Glycerine, Emulsifier (Mono- and Diglycerides of Fatty Acids), Pasteurised Free Range Eggs, Stabilisers (Sodium Alginate and Guar Gum)

Wall's ingredients:
Reconstituted skimmed MILK, glucose syrup, sugar, coconut fat, fructose, concentrated skimmed MILK, whey solids (MILK), emulsifier (mono- and diglycerides of fatty acids), stabilisers (guar gum, locust bean gum), colours (annatto norbixin, curcumin), flavourings

Rather variable ingredients, but where the fuck is the high fructose corn syrup? Lots of social media is US concentric, they have a shitter diet than us, but not by much.

Honestly? I don't find it particularly difficult.

I come from a country where processed food is really expensive, fresh food is abundant. As a result most people cook fresh, and young children eat 'kiddie' version of adult meals, maybe with less spice or whatever.

Meat is also expensive and so not used as the centrepiece. Usually to add flavour. A lot of our meals like curries, soups and stews lend themselves well to batch cooking.

I think freshly cooked meals compared to the ready meal equivalent or beige foods are really expensive. But not if you change the way you think about cooking entirely. Of course, if you've been raised eating a lot of meat it naturally tastes better to you, and making veggies taste 'as nice' is hard and too much effort.

I'm not trying to show off, pile more pressure on busy mums or anything (in fact, most people in my country work long hours ... work-life balance is a dirty word). It's just that it is possible. I consider myself lucky to have been taught how to cook as I grew up.. so didn't have to 'learn from scratch'.

Also just to be clear we don't eat 'zero' UPF's! Seasonings like soy sauce etc fall in the category of course.
We just don't have oven meals.

I read an article a few weeks back that said it was good for us now. One cannot live on mass salad & veg alone & expect to be healthy, we need a bit of everything.

Been going through a lazy bitch faze & tried all the Iceland ready meals. They weren’t as bad as I thought they’d be, but not a patch on fresh foods. I’ve rediscovered tins of chopped ham & pork 🤭

Don’t take comfort from other people also eating lots of UPF. Most people do and we all need to change. I am reading the book at the moment and have read lots similar in the past. I do it for a bit and then get busy, tired and lazy and go back to the UPFs. It is so hard when they are the easy, cheap, anvail and tempting option.

Also interesting is this. Heinz tomato ketchup, according to the Nova website- processed but not UPF. The reduced sugar and salt one- UPF. As just one example. Soy sauce (one brand I searched) is also not showing as UPF- just processed.

a lot more than I would like unfortunately. this is due to a fussy child! so

pizza, veggie burgers, veggie sausages, bread (does that count!?) garlic bread, mac and cheese, cereal e.g. weetabix / shreddies, oat milk, vegan margarine, chips etc, packed lunch crisps etc

all paired with lots of fruit and veg... so not all terrible.

sadly my son won't eat anything I cook except for cooked veg, cooked potatoes and cheese on toast so everything else (we are veggie) he eats is either veg, fruit, yoghurt with some sort of plain carb type affair like pizza, chips, veggie sausage rolls etc. As a result I eat a lot more of this stuff than I would if I wasn't cooking for him.

It is miserable and makes me annoyed but I can't do anything about it. I try and try to get him to taste new foods but it gets refused or he gags. So I accept it and be grateful that his tastebuds are now changing a bit at least (he will now eat mint flavoured things - it's a step in the right direction!!! little steps).

I could beat myself up about it but as a single parent I do my best (so hard) and he gets fresh fruit, lots of veg, protein, suitable fats etc (peanut butter) on top of everything else so a lot better than many kids.

The podcasts explain how they use additives to maintain the taste and texture in low fat/sugar/salt versions of products, turning them into UPF.

I had always been wary of reduced fat food and listening to this confirmed my suspicions

Some of these "processed" foods are not. I'm sorry. Someone upthread not using honey. Crazy. Honey...... is just honey. I suppose you could argue the bees are processing it, but come on. Someone making their own mayo, well then you are just processing it yourself. Just buy a good quality one, and it will have the same ingredients to the one you are making at home.

The Oatley shit has ultra processed rapeseed oil and additives in it.

@KnittedCardi most honey you buy in the supermarket is adulterated with sugar syrup unfortunately. And notoriously hard to test to determine if it is adulterated. Bit of a scandal really.

She explained in a later post that it was nothing to do with UPF but that her results from Zoe suggested not to have honey due to effects on her blood sugar

It isn't about processing food - it is the UPF which have additives in them designed to be addictive and make us want to overeat. Humans have processed food since time began, that is not the concern

Well the OP is actually about UPF and as a PP above pointed out these are different from just processed food.
Anything that isn't 'raw' is processed... but things like soy sauce, tofu etc that have been made for 100's of years are hardly lab-grown monstrosities.

Equally, 'natural' doesn't mean healthy. Fruits for example contain natural sugars. It's still sugar and bad for you in large quantities!

Some of the things you mentioned aren’t UFPs, and others needn’t be if you check the ingredients.

So much yogurt is UPF!! Read the ingredients - there should be only one: milk.

But yogurt isn’t by definition a UPF, and it’s easy to find single ingredient yogurt. There’s no point naming things like yogurt and bread when it really depends which bread and which yogurt. It makes a switch that needn’t be hard seem like a huge lifestyle change.

Soy sauce is moderately processed, not ultraprocessed.

yes thanks - been corrected by anmother poster already.
Pleased to see I'm 'healthier' than I thought 😂

Greek yoghurt is one of the healthiest things you can eat. Those sugary kids yoghurt are prob UPF.