This UPF thing is irritating me

[SnowMoss]

I've never eaten much UPF, but it is getting harder and harder to avoid it. I don't go the whole 9 yards or anything, but try to keep myself informed and do my best to eat a healthy balanced diet.

Made a good effort to keep an eye on upf's, so for the past year have been sourcing good poultry, fish, and eating it with vegetables, etc. But I am bored out of my mind at this point! Just so fucking bored.

Then I hear about seed oils, so now even the small things that I added, such as mayo, gnocchi, the occasional flatbread (contains only sunflower oil, salt, wheat) are seen as a UPF too, due to the inclusion of sunflower or rapeseed oil. I am happy with and have the time to cook from scratch, but avoiding oils has basically taken a good whack at my time.
It's one thing trying to get people to eat a good diet, with veg and fruit and less processed meats, which will benefit their health, weight and wellbeing, but I am honest to god fed up of eating meat and a pile of veg, even if my own sauces and seasonings suffice.
And no, nothing substitutes for mayo! And no, I really don't want to make my own! I will make my own pesto, coleslaw, stuff like that, but I am bone bloody weary of avoidance.

Surely just being mindful is enough? I get that the food industry is an unregulated cesspit right now, but I am beginning to wonder just how awful it is, in moderation, to eat a some.
Sadly if I google any kind of additive or seed oil, I get lists of 'side effects' such as bloating, calcium loss and so on, it is so depressing.

If you are mindful of UPF's have you found a good balance?

Okay fair enough. I apologise.

I’m just so used to people butting into what I eat. Family members wince when I eat a steak, start yapping on about how I will have a heart attack (didn’t used to say that was I was 27 stone and out of breath just talking), yet they are ordering a KFC and slinging back wine.

But they would have spent their childhood and teenage years during the age of rationing and before modern food manufacturing processes existed. White bread would have been very different in those days and sugar is processed rather than ultra processed.

You are what you eat, and your family members eat stupidly.

Well done on making the changes - you should be very proud.

I was asking about kefir because I’ve tried to make milk kefir and it was so gross, but I love the shop bought ones. I was going to ask for some advice 😆

Water kefir is really easy and delicious, though, if you ever feel inclined to start fermenting!

If I am really honest, I have lost my taste for a lot of vegetables in recent years, perhaps it's meno, I don't know, but my body seems to know what it wants and feels better when I listen to it.
I used to eat a ton of veg, for most of my life, but by the time the 10 a day thing arrived I had begun to feel somewhat overloaded.

I had eaten very little meat, so veg made up a ginormous proportion of my meals. However, recently I have actually cut down my veg to some extent, often only eating 3 a day or maybe even two. In the space of a week I have had a good variety, just not to the extent I had before. I feel fine, because I haven't replaced it with junk.
I have upped my protein intake to even it out, and now enjoy a wee bit more fruit, which I never much liked previously. I don't think we have to wolf down ridiculous amounts of veg to stay healthy, in fact at one time we would have had to eat it more moderately and only seasonally. I now try to buy local but it isn't easy where I am.

I think the gov promote excessive veg consumption to tackle obesity and its impacts on the health service. I don't think they are aiming that message to those of us who already don't eat crap. To fill up on veg after years of junk will have a profound effect on health and bodyweight.

And much respect to the PP who turned her life around without drowning in vegetables! I'm not a big fan of meat, but there are many healthy ways to eat nutritiously, and they don't all involve mountains of broccoli.

Those posters saying there’s nothing wrong with UPFs how come Americans (in general not all obviously) are so enormous? They’re not just fat/obese like we are over here, they are next level having to be cut out the house size. Their supermarkets are full of packaged foods, very little fresh stuff. It has to be the shite they’re putting in the food, all preservatives and chemical fillers rather than proper nutrients. Their bodies are enormous but at the same time starving and we’re heading that way over here too. It’s frightening.

The tabloids make fun of people who discuss or care about UPF. I think that it is largely a cultural bias, perhaps they think it's 'woke'?

There's likely more to it than meets the eye. Intellectualising food might be perceived as a frippery - "if there's food on the table, that's enough for me!"

Also, many people may feel the need to push such things aside since there are more pressing things in life to think about.

Some of them will have spent time worrying about it in the past and it made them miserable so they turned away from it.

And for some, lack of awareness, education, and perhaps they feel as if the anti-upf crowd are criticising them.
It has often been touted as 'snobbery' on here to discuss concern about upf and nutrition. It isn't the first time I've heard the cry "you're looking down your nose at me" in a food thread.

Perhaps all of these things combined?

But most of that is explained by portion size and sugar.

@Greyexpectations

I keep watching YouTube videos on it. my dh eats the same as me and he’s up for it, so we will give it - try at some point.

I bloody love the taste of plain kefir yogurt though. I buy it from Aldi and a pot of that with a big handful of almonds mixed is my usual breakfast (well, my starter, I usually only eat once a day over an hour).

The tabloids make fun of people who care about UPFs because the owners golf with the people who make money from cheap, industrialised food.

Instead of pointing out a system that encourages obesity in the name of profits, we castigate the people who have very little choice in how they eat.

There are huge areas of America where there are ‘produce deserts’ because the only shops are corner stores which don’t sell fresh food.

Fast food, produced in vast quantities with cheap ingredients is cheaper to buy than fresh ingredients that need time and money to cook.

We can laugh at Americans and their shitty diets - and my god the ‘cooking’ videos of people piling packs of rubbery ‘cheese’ and canned meat into air fryers don’t help - but the real issue is a deliberately orchestrated obesogenic society.

And what better way to distract the masses from the real bad actors than to point out the health freaks and wokerati who are so privileged they can squeeze their own juice and bake their own bread.

You eat once a day over an hour?!

Tell me more…

I don’t think I have your willpower, but I’m intrigued!

Spot on.

It's the Farage approach.

yeah, I typically do OMAD. Probably 5 days out of 7. I tried it a couple of years ago and it made me feel great fasting for 23 hours.

I usually eat around 10am, over about 45 mins to an hour. I eat a lot of protein and fat so I don’t get hungry.

A couple of days a week I might eat at 10am and 4pm. It just depends on my activity levels, how I’m feeling. It seems to work really well for my body, however, OMAD and intermittent fasting doesn’t work for everyone.

I fell into it as I was dying, basically. I was killing my self.

I often find that those who are being shafted by the bad actors seem to look up to them. It's a shit show.

I don’t think it can be. When I was young we had loads of sugar (6 tsp in a cup of tea anyone?) my nan lived off apple pie and cream, my dad was always baking cakes/biscuits etc. Go further back and dinners were so many more calories than we eat now, lunch was beef dripping sandwiches followed by a slice of cake etc but everyone was skinny. Ok they walked more and were more active but that doesn’t account for the HUGE difference in size to nowadays.
Something has gone wrong in the last 40 years and my guess is the lack of fresh basic food. I mean what the hell is Mono- and Diacetyl Tartaric Acid Esters of Mono- and Diglycerides of Fatty Acids and what the fuck is it doing in my bread?

My grandparents were the same, as was my dad who was born in 1936.

Food has really changed for the worst.

But while my grandparents used to eat lots of pies, the apples were from the local farm, my grandmother used to make the pastry.

Nothing wrong with some bacon and eggs cooked in lard, but then along came the 80s and suddenly, we were told that was killing us and that our saviour would be low fat food, packed with additives and fake sugar.

People used to eat real fat. It’s not the devil.

The massive list of ingredients in food are astounding.

And not to forget that the food companies producing UPF shite put a LOT of effort into denigrating anyone who speaks against UPF.

IIRC, van Tulleken references in his book a “scientific group” of some sort who put out statements and rebuttals to anti-UPF research findings etc. All seems very benign except that the organisations behind it are the UPF manufacturers

60% of the average UK diet is UPF. UPF condiments will not make a big impact on your health overall. Choose whole ingredients you know to be healthier where you can, sometimes this won't be possible due to convenience or price and that's ok. It sounds like your diet is already healthy from a no -UPF perspective but if you are bored with what you eat that isn't good. I'd suggest letting go a little bit to start enjoying your food again. I've read the Chris can Tulleken book and I know what the issues are, I aim to cut down on UPFs and look for better alternatives but it doesn't stop me eating mayo or vegetable oil or occasional shop bought pizza or ice cream. I'd suggest taking a step back and putting things into perspective. We know UPFs aren't great for you overall but the issue is where they form a significant minority or a majority of the diet. This is clearly not the case for you.

Apologies earlier in the thread I didn't mean to totally belittle efforts to reduce UPFs. A diet 60% in UPFS is wrong, I don't eat like that, just I thought OP was maybe trying to 100% eliminate which seem unnecessary.

But while my grandparents used to eat lots of pies, the apples were from the local farm, my grandmother used to make the pastry.

Exactly that.
So to make an apple pie ingredients would have been:
apples,
Lemon,
sugar,
flour,
egg,
butter,
salt.

Compare and contrast to a Tesco apple pie ingredients-
Wheat Flour(Wheat Flour, Calcium Carbonate, Niacin, Iron, Calcium Sulphate, Thiamin),
Apple,
Water,
Sugar,
Palm Oil,
Thickener (Modified Maize Starch),
Rapeseed Oil,
Invert Sugar Syrup,
Lemon Juice,
Salt,
Raising Agents (Sodium Bicarbonate, Disodium Diphosphate),
Antioxidant (Ascorbic Acid).

Maybe they’d have it with a bit of custard so:

Eggs
Milk
sugar
cornflour.

Compared to this lot in Ambrosia custard:

Skimmed Milk,
Buttermilk,
Sugar,
Modified Starch,
Sustainable Palm Oil,
Whey (Milk),
Natural Flavouring,
Colours (Curcumin, Annatto Norbixin).

No one will convince me sugar is the problem.

I switched to cold-pressed rapeseed from olive oil because of the price difference. Cold-pressed is just that - pressed seeds - so I don't think it's classed as UPF.

I buy it from Lidl 😁

But still, most people have been lead down the path of demonising animal fats and sugar.

I was watching something on YouTube earlier. It was about how we are now told that eating red meat will cause diabetes. The nutritionalist on it was arguing how? How can it possibly? Unless that red meat is accompanied by a burger bun and a sugary drink in excess, it’s just not possible.

But people believe it all.

I think everything has at some point
Butter was bad then fry light was bad then seed oils were bad
Fruit is too sugary, potatoes have too many carbs, red meat is bad for you, tuna has too much mercury...
if you gave up everything ever listed as not good for you we would be on water. Not tap though as that's bad, and bottled has plastic
Maybe spring water?

I think people have been told things are bad for them to push certain agendas.

I would never have believed that red meat and butter are for example bad for you. Why would something natural be bad for you? I don’t understand how that belief became so mainstream.

I can’t stand it when people back themselves up with research papers either. Often if you follow who paid for the research, you’ll see it’s been heavily pushed to fit a narrative.

only if its treated for bacteria!! Oh and eggs had too much cholesterol!

I think people have been told things are bad for them to push certain agendas.

I agree. I'm still raging about the way we were all bullied off butter to sell margarine in the 1970s. I think it's much more helpful to think about the good nutrition that it's food rather than fear it, and try to eat as wide a variety - not too much or too little of anything - as possible.