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?

This is the ingredients list of the UK's favourite bread:
Wheat Flour [with Calcium, Iron, Niacin (B3) and Thiamin (B1)], Water, Yeast, Salt, Vegetable Oils (Sunflower, Rapeseed and Sustainable Palm in varying proportions), Soya Flour, Preservative: Calcium Propionate, Emulsifiers: E481, E472e, Flour Treatment Agent: Ascorbic Acid (Vitamin C)

Chorleywood bread - sliced bread in packets with or without brand names is one of the worst.

Feels pretty real to me.

Lunch (had coffee at breakfast time) was stir fried veg to use it up before it went off, with tamari - which is made from fermented soya beans and salt.

Dinner was chicken thighs, swede, broccoli, carrot, peas and boiled potatoes.

Tomorrow, I'll have spicy salmon, rice, tomatoes, cucumber and a banana for lunch, then I think we've got enough tomatoes left to have a mozzarella, red onion, black olive and basil salad with olive oil and probably leftover chicken from today with some lemon juice/olive oil dressing.

I think there are some big prawns in the freezer, so they'll be cooked with chilli, garlic, lemon and pepper on Tuesday and go with rice/peas/red pepper. Lunch will likely be GF pasta salad with tuna, lemon, tomato, cucumber and more olives.

Wednesday for some reason, has become the most likely day for jackets - either potatoes or sweet potatoes, beans and cheese, plus spring onions and assorted salad. If there are GF hotdogs around (haven't seen them for a while, though), they can get added. Probably use the other half of the tuna for a salad with random greenery (spinach or watercress/rocket from a bag) boiled potato, olives, lemon and olive oil dressing and a hardboiled egg.

Good chance that Thursday will be a shedload of cured meat, olives (yes, there is a theme here), preserved peppers, cheese, apple and a wedge of GF bread for lunch and some sort of curry (probably chickpea and spinach, as that's easy) with a homemade sauce of onion, aromatics, spices, tomatoes and oven chips (ingredients: potatoes, vegetable oil).

After that, I haven't a scooby. You can never guarantee what you'll find in the supermarket that's GF and hasn't suddenly leaped 400% in price since last week, except the weekend will usually involve at least one egg breakfast (and bacon and avocado on good weeks) and probably something involved chicken/pork and potatoes.

It's not exactly convenient, as you can't just pick up anything off the shelf - but it's not that hard to avoid most UPFs as soon as you have to because nearly everything has got bloody gluten in it.

I’m glad you are feeling better and your symptoms have reduced.

I just don’t agree that it’s too hard to do this with kids/job though. I do it and it’s really no bother. It’s just as easy to make a quick dinner from scratch as it would be to serve my kids processed foods. How is putting turkey twizzlers or whatever in the oven any different from cooking some chicken or fish with potatoes and a salad? I genuinely don’t get it.

This is the thing, I think lots of people (women) are berating themselves for providing less than perfect food. But I think we need to be balanced, as in all things, do our best, keep things as simple as possible, and buy the best you can afford, to ensure less processing.

I am very lucky to get mine from a farm down the road. It may be an old wives tale, but it seems to help with our Spring allergies! Surrounded by rape seed at the moment so much needed.

However, yo-yos are so concentrated and the level of fructose (without any fibre or other good stuff) so high that frankly you might as well give your kids Haribo.

The marketing on this stuff is so wrong.

This is pretty much what we eat. It really doesn’t take long when you eat like this!

I haven't got the alzheimer's yet. Or any cancers.
I don't like ice cream, I suppose that saves me from HFCS.

My brother has a severe mental illness, lives with HepC, chainsmokes Marlboroughs and probably eats 95% UPF. He is mid 60s now having been like that for 30 years. He continues to live without any cancer or cardio events, to everyone's astonishment. Maybe we just have good genes. He's outlived our mother already.

Is wine UPF? What about Schnapps. How would I know if the alcohol itself or the UPFness of Schnapps caused my dementia or liver failure?

We don’t do fake meat/cheese very often - we just eat more Asian food as that is more commonly meant to be vegetarian. If you eat a lot of Western food you tend to use meat/dairy analogues.

The poster who delivered the po-faced lecture about eating food your granny would recognise made me laugh so hard. That would be bread and dripping, three sugars in every tea, and vegetables boiled to death. Such silly faux nostalgia.

Surely overnight oats isn’t an UPF?

I don’t understand why mince gets classed as highly processed. Why is it different from a lump of meat that I have just chewed. It doesn’t have any additives. Have seen cheese placed in same category.

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

Quite meat heavy which makes it an expensive way to eat if you’re on a budget, many UPFs are a cheap way to fill up your kids especially if you have children with sensory issues around food who may balk at the texture of pork or steak.

So much vegetable can be UPF🤷🏻
If you eat shit yogurts, well yeah. Same like if you eat shit veg.
Normal yogurt is actually important for us since most things people eat nowadays are pasteurized and dead as the sheep my shoes are made off.

So again. You are talking about the flavoured ones🤷🏻

I eat meat but I like to have veggie days during the week. I've looked at trying vegan products and I think so many look extremely processed and contain a lot of soya which I try to avoid where possible. However, I have discovered Strong Roots and although they're still processed, the ingredients are simple and not say.

Pasta once a week or so. We would eat ice cream as a treat - is that highly processed? I actually think that’s it 😳 but only because we live abroad and most people cook from scratch so there is less convenience food (baked beans are imported and cost about £5 for one tin and you have to specially order them from online so I don’t bother!) rather than because we are especially trying!

Loads. Don't most uk families. Unless you knowingly proactively don't. I've seen his programme. I've seen the potatoes and carrots they ate in the 1970's. I cook 30 or so meals regularly, some from scratch, various degrees of processed, don't most mums? : eg chilli, curry, I marinate chicken kebabs. Still tonnes of stuff we eat is processed. I can't see me changing.

I absolutely love cereals and mostly have Oatibix and Oatiflakes in rhe mornings.
Can anyone recommend a cereal that is less processed?

Is Oatibix ultra processed? It only has 3 or 4 ingredients

The main problem with oatabix will be the high glucose spike you will get from it, sugar is the number 2 and 3 ingredient. The processing of the oats will also mean that it is already partially broken down which will lead to the glucose spike being even higher than with porridge oats as it will stay in the stomach for less time.

If you want to eat this without feeling hungry again shortly after and having other negative effects from high glucose you should eat something high fibre before e.g green veg, eat it with high fat e.g full fat greek yoghurt, nuts etc and if possible have a walk or do some other exercise after. All these will lower the spike.

I would say everything on that list bar the peanut butter, jam and possibly the be

Sorry

And possibly the bread, is UPF. I am quite militant about not eating UPFs having read up about the health consequences and three years ago switched to cooking everything from scratch- only exception being oatcakes when I haven't the time to make them, and and occasionally ryvita.

But then I am not a vegan or vegetarian, so have a much wider variety of protein to choose from; as well as living on my own with the time to cook for myself.

Cooking and eating are one of my life's great pleasures. I would imagine a properly healthy vegan diet although probably achievable, needs quite a bit of planning, especially if children are involved.

I agree; it is not the ‘fault’ of the consumer at all. The issue here is large food companies producing the UPF. It needs to lie with the government to regulate this better.

Articles are written by journalists and not peer reviewed.

Why is glucose bad? Unless you're a type 2 diabetic obviously why is the new fad about avoiding glucose spikes?

Because glucose spikes can lead to fairly significant peaks and troughs of energy and appetite, and messes with your metabolism. Which can also fuel over eating.