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?

Well we know that it's almost impossible to find any significant long-term difference in outcomes between formula fed and breastfed babies that are directly attributable to their diet, so if they are chronically inflamed that doesn't seem to be so bad?

https://www.seriouseats.com/two-minute-mayonnaise

Super easy and quality to make.

I suppose the bottom line is that some people eat food and consider what their body is getting from it, some prioritise convenience and some people don't care or see the difference as long as they like the taste of it.

My partner and I moved in together around a year ago. He's always been overweight and, during our relationship, has had a terrible.diet both in terms of quality and quantity. He didn't eat a lot but everything he ate was UPF. He rarely ate anything fresh and certainly never cooked from scratch.

Over the last year, he has eaten more because we cook proper meals together but his intake of UPF has dropped dramatically. He still eats crisps and biscuits but his meals are better.

He has lost nearly 2 stone without even trying, he has more energy and just feels better generally.

What is the chemical reaction and what effect does the structural change have on the body?

It was a joke.

The Farmington study (from a cursory google) is an important longitudinal study that was one of the first to look at prevention instead of cure in CVD.

It has critics who point out flaws, but calling it ‘infamous’ makes it sound like it’s an Andrew Wakefield style fraud. It isn’t.

It also seems to have sought private funding in its 3rd iteration because the US government decided not to keep funding the research (take note, stupid DOGE as you cancel anything with trans in the title because you’re too thick to understand). I wonder if that had anything to do with Big Meat?

I do concur that Big Agriculture is a powerful beast - but as a huge amount goes to feed animals, I don’t think they are going after Big Meat.

Well people have become desensitized to what some of these chemicals actually are so I think harsher language is needed. 'Crap' is pretty tame. 'Dangerous chemical toxins' is more apt perhaps.

Carboxymethyl Cellulose triggers a flare up of ulcerative colitis in me (along with artificial sweeteners, emulsifiers, monosodium glutamate, preservatives) and is a suspect chemical of the cause of inflammatory bowel disease in the first place.

Carrageenan is actually used to induce ulcerative colitus in rats so that medicines for the disease can be tested. However, we eat it voluntarily in ice cream, yogurts, milkshakes, puddings, cream cheeses etc.

It's no wonder IBD and IBS's are on the rise.

It does both I think, there's certainly a bit about risky ingredients and then you can click on that line for further info and it will say what additives, etc are there. But yes I would take it with a pinch of salt (ha ha) for stuff like jam...obviously eating a whole jar would be bad but a scraping on toast is ok for most people. But guess the info about sugar and calories and protein would be useful if dieting.

I was shocked the app told me the nice expensive thick chicken slices in Waitrose were red and very bad and it was due to texturizing agent - said it was a harmful substance. I had no idea stuff had been added to it to give it a texture of chicken breast, I thought it was nice chicken breast slices. Now I suspect it's reformed shit.

Under their guidance butter is UPF is you didn't make it yourself!

I don't think anyone says butter is UPF. I recommend having a look at the NOVA system, it's not perfect but the 4 levels differentiate between processing and ultra-processed. Butter is definitely not UPF, it's just milk that's been stirred until the two parts of it separate. Even if you then mix salt/herbs/whatever into it, it's still not UPF.

DD is crippled with stomach pain when she is in the UK. When she goes to places like Asia or even Italy she isn't. Gets home and within a day the stomach pain starts again. I'm sure it's additives in food. She's an adult though and needs to sort her own eating habits out.

@Kuretake , Yuka is giving you the overall nutritional value of your food so it is very good at looking at the additives and identifying if there are risky additives or not. However foods that are very high in sugar will also come out with a very high score on Yuka as many people have far too much added sugar in their diets as well as UPF’s Many artificial sweeteners will score highly as well.

That's interesting - I wonder if she's allergic to something that's legal in the UK and not elsewhere. Or does she just eat better/ differently on holiday? Or its stress related maybe. I used to think lots of swimming cleared the bad skin on my arms up then I noticed it also cleared up when I went to Canada for two weeks which involved no swimming. Basically my job stress gives me bad skin 😞

I'd think the place to start with that would be bread see if cutting out processed bread would make a difference.

She has coeliac disease so doesn’t eat bread, not even gf stuff. It’s not a coeliac tummy pain either, she knows the difference. There’s no cross contamination in the house.

dont think it’s stress, she doesn’t work. She lives the life of Riley swanning about on a trust fund and comes back to the uk occasionally to get her hair done and trots off abroad again.

i think she probably eats better when abroad, less processed food.

It wouldn't surprise me if it's something in our food.

We have an annual trip to France they have so much less processed food than we do. And their bread is generally rock solid the next day. So much be something in our bread that prevents it going off.

I was thinking recently.......I find it interesting that a good deal of the ingredients that we demonise in the west seem to be popular in other countries, some of which are known for robust health and diet. For example, Japan. A lot of salt, sesame oil, etc in their daily cooking doesn't appear to have created issues.

Well quite. It's like the fuss over parabens in cosmetics/toiletries and formaldehyde, toluene and DBP in nail polish. They injected a load of parabens into rats, the rats got cancer, ergo parabens cause cancer. In reality the concentrations of parabens in something like face cream are much lower and obviously you're not injecting it. Plus humans are much much bigger than rats!

Bloody hope not. Some of us desperately wanted to breastfeed but our stubborn little oiks weren't having it! One of my friends commented on how formula is full of chemicals (while I was a week or so postpartum and feeling shit about not being able to breastfeed DS) which I know, thanks very much. Breastmilk is also full of chemicals, if you're going to split hairs (as is everything else!). I was formula fed too. As I could barely eat enough to keep a gnat alive while dealing with DS when he was a newborn, it was probably a good thing I couldn't breastfeed or I'd have ended up in hospital.

The problem with most UPF is we just don't know what the things in it do, and most of them have only been in the diet for a short period of time and we just don't know what a safe intake is. I'm sure with time many will prove to be neutral or beneficial and we'll be able to keep those and ban companies from using the more harmful substances. But at the moment it's hard to be more specific than avoiding all UPFs as we don't know what's good and what's bad.

Formula is one of the few UPFs which I feel has been tested thoroughly enough for us to know it's safe, it's tightly regulated and in many cases completely lifesaving.

of course formula can be life saving. No one is suggesting it should not be available. Some women can’t breast feed
The discussion is whether it’s wise to choose formula over bf just because you don’t want to bf.
the issue with formula includes the whole problem with gut health that’s becoming more understood and researched. UPFs negatively affect our gut biomes. So even with all the nutrition measured and balanced etc the fact that it’s a upf could mean it’s causing lifelong gut health issues. These are only now being recognised. So much research going into gut health and the myriad of health problems stemming from poor gut health

They do a pizza base though! I buy it on Ocado.

No, actually I applaud you.

yu have way to much free time on your hands maybe get out more spend more time with the kids give grandparents a day off go back to coffee shops and cocktail bars

I hope Prosecco doesn’t have upfs .. 😂 - we are not super upf avoiders but try to be mindful when we can….

Like anything 'new' or 'currently trending', there will be some who jump on board way too hard and become preachy (I mean, even 'THE book' on UPF says to aim for an 80:20 ration of Non UPF/UPF but some will go on like drinking a Diet Coke once a year will off them).

That said, I find it really interesting that some people will just wave the notion away dismissively and not even take the time to see what it's about because, well, do we REALLY think we can blindly trust huge food companies to put our health over profits?

Reading 'that' book has changed a lot of lives and most. I'd argue, not in a 'preachy' way. I will forever be angry/disgusted about elements of it, I think.

It outs some very uncomfortable and undeniable truths that we would be UTTERLY stupid to ignore as a society, especially in times f such high obesity and a failing NHS.

We can demand better.

It's known for being very 'industrialised'. (but who cares?)