Ultra-Highly Processed Foods

[TheRealMBJ]

At risk of sounding defensive here but I almost always cook from scratch and very seldom resort to pre-prepared or oven dinners (,maybe once a month)

However, all of this talk recently that demonises Ultra-processed foods is another stick to beat working mothers with.

Sometimes I feel something has to give and I can't always plan, shop, execute a fully cooked from scratch meal every night of the week.

YABU - Get your Arese into Gear woman and organise your life

YANBU - this is just another way to make woman feel guilty. Get the fish fingers out!

I forgot to say that there seems to be a thread about these UPFs every second day and on each of the threads people demonstrate they dont know the difference between processed foods and UPF.

They aren't forcing you to buy from them.

They aren't forcing you to buy from them.

That's unfair and naïve imo. No they are not literally forcing you, but nobody is immune to the effects of: their food environment, the eating habits they were brought up with, the influence of what it's seen as normal to eat, what's readily available and convenient to cook, and most of all what they can afford. In today's society, avoiding UPF is very inconvenient and takes a lot of effort. We shouldn't be in a situation where it takes a lot of effort to eat real, relatively natural food.

The binders and Emulsifier must make the food cheaper and more profitable. Water is cheap.
I’m making my own mayonnaise, easy as pie.
But I’m just aiming for about 70/30. Still eating salted crisps etc. But I’m not making my own fish fingers.

I know this latest book written by a middle class infectious diseases doctor

Who is that, which doctor wrote what book, I mean?
Why does being MC matter?

I understand why not being a nutritionist matters (that never stopped Tim Spector or Michael Moseley, mind)

I’m making my own mayonnaise, easy as pie.

Does it last outside the fridge for months as well as store-mayo does?

@Raggletagglegypsy what do you do when your kids go to parties? Do you not let them eat the food for fear of them being poisoned? I'm an everything in moderation person.

I've made mayonnaise occasionally. It's good but one egg yolk takes up an enormous amount of oil so I find I have a vast amount, far more than I can use within a day or two of making, and it doesn't freeze. As @lljkk says, the commercial stuff keeps for ages in the fridge. Here are the ingredients of Hellmann's Real Mayonnaise: Rapeseed oil (78%), water, pasteurised EGG & EGG Yolk (7.9%), spirit vinegar, salt, sugar, flavourings, lemon juice concentrate, antioxidant (calcium disodium EDTA), paprika extract. Presumably the reason it lasts so long is because of the antioxidant.

I agree Those of us who have been around a few decades have got so tired of being told we shouldn't eat this, that, or the other - only to have that advice retracted, and then another round of what we should/shouldn't be eating. We now just eat what we want. I refuse to spend any time obsessing over food and whether it is good/bad.

One very interesting part of the book is where he talked about his daughters ice cre not melting in the sun as it was really not proper ice cream. I’m on holiday and kids grabbed ice cream from the snack bar - one didn’t get eaten and still didn’t melt despite the 30 degree heat.

What on earth is ice cream made from where you are??? I can assure you than ice cream here in NZ melts - I had one yesterday, in mid winter, and it was melting by the time I got home!

It's true, though. When real ice cream melts, what you see is cream or custard, and it still looks appetising. When cheap soft scoop or the old-fashioned block ice cream melts, it looks awful.

But the pp said it didn't melt at all, which is not the same thing. Any ice cream I've eaten doesn't look "awful" when it melts, I like to let it melt before eating.

My “rule” is, I don’t buy anything with more than one ingredient. And I wouldn’t touch seed oils.

I make my own bread and cake for the children.

But I don’t eat anything with sugar (and I steer clear from fake sugars).

Dh does most of the cooking, does it all from scratch, he makes amazing, fresh Indian food. Our diets are far from boring or limited. We batch cook too.

I almost died of something two years ago, and I don’t want it to come back so I’m doing all I can to stay healthy. I actually enjoy it now and I feel better than ever.

A few years ago, I was totally different. “Life’s too short to not eat pizza and have a beer!” Only, it almost was.

So I turned it all around and we are all so much healthier for it.

There's very little harm in the "ultra processed foods" (whatever that means)

The main problems are that they are very rich, very tasty and very easy to buy and prepare.
So, people eat more of them.

Whether you cook a curry from scratch or pop a tray in the microwave - I seriously doubt it will result in significantly different macro/micro nutrient intake.

Another example is fish fingers which were mentioned: I just had a look in some that I have in my freezer and they are absolutely fine, nothing toxic or scientifically proven to be unhealthy.

There are no "special enteral life" vitamins in fish. Cooking them is going to destroy those anyway, whether they were £50/kg fillets or "reconstituted fish protein" - it's the same.
Our stomach doesn't even know the difference.

It's just that people get a mental health benefit from cooking and they eat less because cooking takes time and takes attention away from hunger, whereas almost-ready-to-eat meals feel like they are over much before we feel full.

That's all.

There is an ingredient in ice cream called Castoreum which is made from beaver's anal secretions. Apologies.

We are not well off. Our last holiday was a decade ago!

Our food budget is £100 a week for three adults and two children. We do far better making food from scratch with lentils, vegetables, chickpeas, chicken, rice. We have a fabulous Indian supermarket a ten min walk away for spices, coconut oil etc.

We used to spend far more buying processed food.

You're very unlikely to find castoreum in ice cream now.
It can be used to make vanilla-like flavouring, so for a while it was used in various foods. But now synthetic vanilla flavouring can be made much more cheaply in a lab (and much more easily than sourcing beaver anal glands) so they don't bother with the castoreum.

The only place it might be used is in some expensive perfumes.

Just looked at Johanna Blythman as was recommended earlier- she is a journalist with a slant and her books look like she has an agenda - I'm not saying the food industry is squeaky clean but it's more nuanced that the scaremongerey book titles imply. I wouldn't read!

As someone posted earlier - a healthy diet for most adults should include a decent amount of fruit and veg, whole grains, protein from plant or animal sources less salt and sugary foods, calcium rich foods and a variety with some regular activity thrown in etc - if you eat a bit of UPF so what?? If you can't afford to feed yourself then UPF is fine. Some people can't choose. I honestly have such a problem with all these insta people posting their food etc - you never see them with a hangover fancying a cheeky Mc Donald's!! It's those people who stress others out!

Well that’s got to be super expensive or super rare. Because there’s lots of ice cream in the world and beaver farms aren’t a thing.

But it highlights the problem with UPF. Beaver secretions relations are natural and unprocessed .

Opened supermarket mayonnaise keeps very well outside the fridge, too.

They aren't forcing you to buy from them.

Try eating normal processed food, as opposed to UPF on the move in this country particularly at night! We have to travel regularly on the motorways for family reasons. If we have to attend a meeting in the morning, we travel up the night before and stay in a hotel. While we could take a packed lunch, if we go there and back in one day, it’s hard to keep food cool enough to eat the next day.

When we go to the motorway service stations at night, the only places open with hot food tend to be fast food outlets like Burgerking, KFC, etc. Apart from a side salad, what non UPF is there? DH has coronary artery disease. There’s any amount of vegan food; but nothing for those, who are supposed to be on a low fat diet on the move - it’s tends to be mainly pies, burgers, deep fried chicken and chips!

I’ve seen another study / Zoe’s man Timothy Spector, who has found that not only will different foods affect different people, the same person can eat the same food at 8am and 4 pm and it’ll have a different effect on blood sugar ( not just the sleep and exercise in the Israeli study)

Not in the ice cream I eat (unless it's hidden under another name!!)

I make mayonnaise in a jam jar with 1 cup oil and one whole egg, lemon juice, salt pepper and half a teaspoon of Dijon mustard - use a stick blender to mix from the bottom. It literally takes two minutes. As long as the eggs are lion marked they’re fine raw. Keep in fridge for up to two weeks & it’s fine in a sealed jar. It tastes so much better than ready made