To ask for your recipes which reduce or don't use ultra processed foods?

[nutbrownhare15]

The recent coverage of UPFs has been a bit of a wake up call for me in terms of the family diet. Read this report today https://www.firststepsnutrition.org/upfs-marketed-for-infants-and-young-children 😱Convenience is a big factor, but it's become habit as well and we tend to eat the same sort of dishes on rotation, the freezer is stocked with UPFs and my kids are used to having UPFs for snacks. I'm not looking to exclude them from our diet completely just ways to reduce them or reduce the amount of processing in the foods we do eat. So I'm asking if people could share quick and easy recipes that their kids find palatable to expand our repertoire including for snacks. One thing I'll be doing is getting the bread maker back out to make more fresh bread. We are a vegetarian household but I'm not asking for exclusively vege recipes in case this thread helps others.

Yes. We make instant hot choc powder with cocoa powder, dried milk and sugar. Still not great, but better

I've posted it before but this Jamie Oliver pesto recipe is brilliant and freezes really well if you portion it up. You can defrost it gently in a small milk pan and stir it through pasta. I sometimes roast a tray of tomatoes, red onion, courgette, red pepper garlic cloves still in their skins (you can squirt them out when they are cooked and they are yummy) and I stir them through through the pasta at the end. pesto www.jamieoliver.com/recipes/cheese-recipes/super-quick-batch-pesto/

We make this regularly and it has completely replaced jarred pesto.

It does require a magimix though... or similar food processor.

I think you are deliberately misunderstanding too. Literally no-one has said that Quorn is not ultra processed or better than lamb. You're creating a strawman to argue with.

Processed food is fine in lots of instances. Ultra processed is a different beast altogether. If you're not interested in learning or reading then why contribute to keep arguing a point that no-one has made?

The ultra processing bit is often additives introduced to prolong shelf life, make it cheaper or add back in palatability when things like fat or sugar have been reduced.

So it is better IMO to eat a smaller amount of full fat yoghurt than eat lots of reduced fat diet yoghurts that will have all sorts of additives to try and replicate the traste and mouth feel of full fat yoghurt.

Have to agree with @IhearyouClemFandango here. One poster mentioned substituting chicken with quorn - and I am pretty sure that was to make the recipe veggie rather than anything to do with UPF.

@DataNotLore you seem to deliberately not want to understand. If it is not for you then you can easily just not comment. However, it does seem your dietary choices are very similar to the majority on this thread. Nothing to do with eating 'clean' and everything with avoiding emulsifiers, E numbers, stablilisers and preservatives. Making own stock, getting local veg/meat are exactly the way forward here. Maybe re-read the excellent post @WinterDeWinter posted yesterday - she phrased it perfectly

Thankyou all for the recipes and links, I will look through them all. In terms of what we eat, I think I've got into a bit of a rut recently which is why I posted the thread. Beans on supermarket bought toast or supermarket pizza with beans and chips for kids tea, pasta sometimes with a shop bought sauce but I'm going to be more consistent about making my own as it actually tastes really nice especially with lentils. Occasionally veg sausages with mashed potato. I always add in veg. We often have store bought wraps with various fillings in including quorn so will look into making our own wraps. Jacket potatoes are tricky as eldest seems to have one every day at school and youngest won't eat them. Freezer has veg sausages, burgers, Quorn pieces, sliced bread, pizza and ice cream. I did make some of our own ice creams last year so will look into this again. Cereal is a default breakfast but we do also have porridge often and overnight oats occasionally so will up.the frequency of these. I don't think our diet is horrendous but have noticed the UPFs creeping up. Have used oaty bars and yo yos as default snacks for a while now alongside fruit. Again nothing wrong on moderation but they seem to have yos yos once a day now plus ice cream after school.

Me and DH switched to oatly barista from cows milk during lockdown so will need to have a think about that. Last night I did a mushroom risotto sprinkled with almonds where one child picked out all the onion and the other all the mushroom but counted that as a success. I do actually enjoy cooking from scratch I've just been a bit distracted recently and focussing on convenience more especially as my children are fussy so I need to think of options palatable to them. They eat a lot of baked beans. Which I recognise actually isn't the end of the world. I'm really not coming to this from a puritan standpoint of 'must cut out all UPF/processed foods'. It's more recognising that they've been creeping up in volume in our diet, there are potential health risks, and looking for ways to reduce the quantity of processing in our food.

But that’s not what it’s about at all. Lamb is fine. Quorn is at least processed, if not ultra. But that was one poster mentioning it as a veggie alternative to a recipe she uses chicken in.
And another poster who doesn’t eat lamb due to fat content.

Gah, that was meant to be a reply to @DataNotLore but it didn’t work

Quorn gives me horrendous gut problems as does Linda McCartney burgers unfortunately

@DataNotLore I’m not sure if you’re wilfully misunderstanding?

Yes, avoiding UPF is just cooking with real ingredients.

Of course almost all food is processed. Humans have been processing foods for a very, very long time. That’s not what this thread is about. We’re not talking about processed food, we’re taking about ultra processed food.

You are right that Quorn is UPF. But only one poster thought that was an unprocessed food - they were quickly corrected by other posters. That you use that one incorrect suggestion as evidence that avoiding UPF is disordered eating and faddish is just weird.

It really wouldn’t take you very long to learn the difference between UPF and traditional food processing. It might also be worth spending time learning about the growing evidence linking consumption of UPF to obesity and metabolic diseases.

It sounds like you’re a confident cook, who has the knowledge to cook from scratch. There are so many people who don’t have that knowledge, and maybe this lack of knowledge is exacerbated by a lack of money and time. These people want to know how to avoid UPF. Good for them.

i think you are confused. Pretty much anything you cook from raw/basic ingredients will not include UPFs. Things like tinned beans/chickpeas, cooked lentils, pasta etc are processed and this is very different and not unhealthy. UPFs in cooking would be for example Quorn products so avoid those

Try cottage pie made with lentils, lentil ragu, black bean burritos, you could make your own pizza dough with own toppings, vegetarian chilli with beans in, chickpea curry. Don’t buy any products targeted at children they’re all overpriced and full of crap. Focus on fruit and veg including tinned and frozen. I got a yogurt maker which is great and you could freeze the yoghurt instead of ice cream, as no sugar then.

Traditional Italian pasta dishes can be really good and quick - I love crab linguine:
Spaghetti/linguine (making your own is super easy if you want to go really back to basics!)
Tin of crab meat
Handful of cherry tomatoes, halved
Onion, finely chopped
Clove of garlic, sliced
Lemon zest & juice

Cook your spaghetti in salted water
Heat onion and garlic gently in olive oil, with a pinch of salt. When softened (not browned), add your cherry tomatoes. Once these start to break down slightly, add your crab meat. Warm through. Zest in some lemon zest.
Add a small amount of pasta water.
Drain your spaghetti, add to pan with crab meat etc. Stir together. Serve with a squeeze of lemon juice, freshly ground black pepper and a drizzle of olive oil.
Delicious (serves 2, just double for more). Tin of crab is about £4 but the rest of the ingredients are pennies so works.out a cheap and quick meal (under 10mins!)

I think your approach is good - recognition and reduction rather than complete exclusion.

On the Zoe podcast about UPF, one of the contributors recommended starting starting with breakfast and bread. He said breakfast is a great place to start because you are at home so have complete control of what you eat. People often eat the same foods for breakfast each day, so a successful switch is less taxing than thinking about lunches and evening meals.

My teen ds recently started eating meat after 5 years of being a vegetarian. He’s eating so much less processed food as we had got in the habit of giving him veg sausages and burgers quite a bit. He’s not a fan of pulses, which didn’t help. The rest of us (meat eaters) will happily eat all beans, legumes etc.

Home made baked beans are super easy. There’s a gusto recipe. I’ll see if I can find it. It’s really nice and can be batch cooked and frozen.

Processed is fine. Cheese, peanut butter (made
from just peanuts), even white rice - processed but not ultra processed.
ultra processed is food that’s full of chemicals and things created to make it last longer/cheaper to produce because capitalism and profit. I really don’t think it’s rocket science. If you look at the ingredients and she wouldn’t be able to buy the ingredients from your local town centre, then it’s ultra processed. It’s being aware of how certain oils are produced. For me, it’s just about educating myself as to what i am eating to make better choices.

An anyone explain why people are avoiding seed oils? They are in group 2 on Nova scale, which I thought was ok?
I'm specifically looking to see if sunflower oil can stay, I use it for eggs and homemade chips. Not the same with olive oil!

Is there a good version, searchable, big catalog, version of NOVA food app now? When I had one before on phone, it only worked on barcodes & a very limited inventory / list of options.

ultra processed is food that’s full of chemicals and things created to make it last longer/cheaper to produce because capitalism and profit

Salt and sugar then, right? And hot spices. Sugar & salt are especially there because they are cheap & act as preservatives. So they must be ultra UPF.

Oh wait, it's fine to have as much sugar & salt as you like and still say you're eating low UPF. Sugar and salt aren't UPF after all. <shrug> And you wonder why the word "confusing" comes up a lot.

Someone posted up thread saying sunflower oil was problematic because of the omega 6 content and they're right. In a Western diet our omega 3:6 ratios are completely unbalanced and we have about 6 times more omega 6 than we need.

I use rapeseed oil as it's a veggie source of omega 3. People get very angsty about seed oils as there are variations that use a lot of chemicals in the extraction and refining process (although they are mostly processing aids and get left behind), however, cold pressed rapeseed oil is a very good option. You can also get stuff made in the UK, which is an added bonus IMO

The scientists behind NOVA agree that’s it’s not the most useful tool for assessing individual foods. You’re right, this can make it confusing if you’re not confident.

But just because sugar and salt are preservatives, doesn’t mean their inclusion makes a food UPF.

Likewise, just because duets low is sugar and salt tend to be healthier than diets high in them, doesn’t mean their inclusion makes a food UPF.

A hundred times over, I would give my family foods with sugar rather than a sugar substitute.

Sugar and salt are not ultraprocessed, they're in group 2.

Ingredients are mostly in group 2/3 depending on what they are.

It's when you mix fat, sugar, starches, proteins, emulsifiers, antioxidants, preserving agents and other shit together that you end up with an ultrprocessed food.

It's kind of clean label on steroids

Vitamin C is an antioxidant and often added in home-made bread.

Flour = starch.
Most home=made bread has some sugar in it.

So basically home-=bread is definitely UPF, right? Because it has antioxidant, starch, sugar, protein & fat. Even more so if you add egg white to the recipe (an emulsifier).

With respect you are talking absolute rubbish!
It's pretty obvious homemade bread is going to be better for you than Warburtons crap

This is what I use, extra virgin rapeseed oil. I stock up when they're on offer at £3ish for a 500ml bottle. I don't deep fry anything, so don't use too much oil.

Contents of hovis white; cheap white even worse

I mean, if you think there's no health difference between eating home made bread and eating bread made with industrial emulsifiers then go ahead. No one is going to stop you.