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?

You are definitely overthinking this! I would recommend that you stick to the Nova classification of ultra processed foods, and also inform yourself better about the distinction between processed and ultra processed.

Seed oils are usually classified as simply processed- along with tinned tomatoes, cheese, home made bread and a plethora of other "normal" food. They are fine to consume, but if you're bothered stick with cold pressed varieties, extra virgin olive oil, and/ or butter.

If you want to live a long healthy life, your best bet is to focus on your connections to other people. Don't worry so much. Give to others. Volunteer. Laugh at yourself when you can. Hug your children. Hug your friends! Eat an apple. Go for a walk in the sunshine and don't worry about mayonnaise.

Thanks, you all sound fairly level headed about it!

I used ot love making my own pizza. I would buy a packet of flatbreads and make my healthy toppings from scratch, delicious.
Then a ton of additives appeared in the flatbreads pretty much overnight. Mostly preservatives, which is silly since they go in the freezer.

So I quit making them as was having a variant several times per week, with different toppings. I can't find a decent one anywhere and have failed repeatedly to create my own. I can cook anything, but I can't do breads sadly.

I do find eating less UPF is actually cheaper so I don't have problems there. It's the unavailability of anything without shit in it that annoys me. It wouldnt kill some one like M&S to make a bloody flatbread with olive oil and salt.

This sets out and challenges some of the arguments against seed oils.

https://zoe.com/learn/are-seed-oils-bad-for-you

Some UPFs are worse than others and I would want to avoid the really bad ones such as processed meats, foods containing trans fats (such as frozen pizza, supermarket pies and margarine) and sugary drinks.

I'd be less worried about baked beans or supermarket whole meal bread.

I loved these but gave them up a while ago after more crap got into them:

Deli Kitchen flatbreads:
Wheat Flour (Wheat Flour, Calcium Carbonate, Niacin, Iron, Thiamin), Water, Rapeseed Oil, Yeast, Wheat Gluten, Spirit Vinegar, Raising Agents (Disodium Diphosphate, Sodium Hydrogen Carbonate, Calcium Phosphate), Stabiliser (Sodium Carboxymethyl Cellulose), Salt, Preservative (Calcium Propionate), Acidity Regulator (Citric Acid), Wheat Starch, Wheat Flour

Crosta and Mollica are pricier but good as they rarely have UPF - e.g. their flatbreads contain:

Italian Reground Durum Wheat Semolina (67%), Water, Extra Virgin Olive Oil (8%), Salt

I second the moderation theory.
As an (ex) food scientist, I'm constantly impressed with the creative ways that some manufacturers use technology to produce ever more desirable & cheap foods.
There is some good from this (eg improvements in shelf life & the simple affordability of essential calories) and also some bad (eg high levels of salt, sugar and what used to be called "additives").
There's really no need to exclude all processed food & drink; being selective can make life easier & improve / prevent deterioration in our health. Sadly, price and quality are so closely related here.
I try to exclude super-UPF from my family's diet at home, mostly by not buying these products & by educating my kids - so no cheese strings, highly coloured items, cheap ice cream, shelf-stable mousse-type desserts etc.
We do have crisps, typically minimally processed ones - ie sliced & fried potatoes - rather than wotsits etc (and I really love a bag of wotsits or spicy niknaks!) Luckily my kids don't like fizzy drinks so they're not in the agenda anyway.
But I also use rapeseed, olive & nut oils in order to facilitate me cooking from scratch. We all eat mayonnaise, on salads - if it wasn't there, we'd eat less veg so it's worth it. On Sunday, I served ready made, ambient custard on home made apple crumble, because it was so much easier than making crème anglaise (& equally delicious!)
I don't think there's a realistic, one-size-fits-all right answer to the question of UPFs; it's up to us to do the best we can in this food battle, to manage our budgets, individual preferences, available time, our desire for the best nutrition & least processed or most convenient foods.
(Here endeth my lesson for today - apologies for the lecturing tone!)

Swap to the Crosta and Mollica flatbreads. More expensive but frequently on offer

• Ingredients: Italian Reground Durum Wheat Semolina (67%),
• Water,
• Extra Virgin Olive Oil (8%),
• Salt

My general rule is that if there’s something in the ingredients that I wouldn’t easily be able to find in a home store cupboard then I don’t eat it. But i’m not fixed on that because some stuff just isn’t available in non upf format. Crumpets for example! I’m not about to go baking my own 😆

Cross posted @UnaOfStormhold my apologies!

Hasn't this been posted before? I remember it.

I completely agree with this. I think that eating a mostly highly processed diet is clearly, just common sense bad for you but that this has crept into an obsession and a mindset of seeing UPFs and somehow contaminating - so just a tiny bit 'ruins' an otherwise healthy diet.

I think to be honest that a lot of this stuff is association rather than the actual UPFs being the issue - that people who eat a lot of them eat a generally low nutrition, high sugar and fat diet. I have suspected this ever since I saw an article about 'a study showing that some UPFs are worse than others' - and the 'bad' list was stereotypical crap food (crisps, fizzy drinks, processed meat snacks) whereas the 'not so bad list' was bread, cereal, yoghurt. That's just a list of foods that are bad nutrition-wise vs ones that aren't - they aren't divided by how processed they are.

Have you tried these?https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/311449155/?icid=ghsandapp_ghs_pdp_share

I feel like this is a good example of what I mean about the contaminating language - 'more crap got into them'. It makes it sound like it's rat droppings or something!

@VivaLaSpag great minds :D

Crosta & mollica flatbread only have olive oil in them. I'm sure you could find wholesome gnocchi if you googled, but they will probably be more expensive. Sadly, cheap ingredients make cheaper food which is probably less healthy. (But I wouldn't fret about the odd bit of sunflower oil.)

We try to avoid UPF, but not to the point of obsession. I had a bit of bought mayo last night, probably the first time in a month. I’m not stressing over it.

Sorry cross posted with @VivaLaSpag .

You can go and read the actual research papers by doing Bolean search on Gogle.Scholar
It sucks that we need to verify every claim but that's what we've come to. Dare I say that most online articles from "health experts" and influencers take a study abstract and turn it into a gospel. A quick look at the justsaysinmice on X tells you how many studies are misrepresented in media (and sometimes by scientists themselves) by positioning mice studies as human studies. Aspartame, anyone?
A lot of media also take mechanistic papers and insist they have contextual validity. They often don't as humans, surprisingly, are not petri dishes.
And a lot of the time celebrity doctors don't actually have an expertise in the subject they try so hard to sell. Like what does a nephrologist have to do with autophagy? (I am looking at you, Dr Fung!)

Yes, I moved over to these and now they are getting discontinued in my locality. I try to get them via Ocado and they are often out of stock. It's a good drive to my closest Booths, where even they, too, have low stock.

It's so much hard work tbh.

Unfortunately, avocados are a cause of 1000's of hectares of virgin land being lost to their cultivation each year. As they're a monoculture in these areas, vast quantities of agricultural pesticides are needed to keep them productive.

Ive not stopped buying avocados as a result of recently learning this, but have resolved to cut out consumption down by about 80%, so it's now a treat rather than an everyday purchase.
Likewise, I've never bought avocado oil & never will.
Just a small question on that - won't solvents be needed to extract the oil from avocados just as other seed oil sources?
The solvent issue actually highlights one of the least known areas of the food industry, where "processing aids" don't have to be listed as ingredients. As an example : sugar processing such as caramels that are created without heat 🧐.

You can get cold pressed rapeseed oil from Tesco - we use that and olive oil.

The Zoe link above is a good place to start with seed oils. I feel they are needlessly demonised - if the majority of your cooking is done at home with olive oil/evoo, seed oil in a few pre-prepared items are not going to destroy your health.

As PP have said, look at the overall majority of your diet and where the calories come from. There are too many people who are obsessing over small ingredients which could be UPF but make up a minimal proportion of the meal such as stock cubes, yeast etc

If you have a Eastern European shop near you, they often have flatbreads made of minimal ingredients but with short shelf life

I guess food and morality is never good topic for discussion on an anonymous forum! I love MN for that, but I don't think there are many places online where you can find a measured, unbiased, factual opinion.

Agree that most articles and especially celeb docs are suspect.

I mean, tbh bought bread does have a lot of shite in it, and I wonder if it has a greater effect on people's health because they tend to eat bread in large quantities. For example, I usually make my own bread, but I got these freshly baked Sainsbury's rolls the other day from the village food waste stall for teenage DS who adores his white carbs. You would imagine them to be minimally processed, but they still contain palm oil, palm fat, L- Cysteine (no idea 🙄) and dextrose.

Now, I know you said you don't make bread OP, but I just wanted to tell you how easy it can be. I literally slop a load of sourdough starter in with some flour, salt and pumpkin seeds, fold it all in with a big spoon, leave it overnight, dollop onto a tray in the morning and bake. For pizzas and flatbread I make a slightly looser dough with a good glug of olive oil, knead it lightly and leave for about 4 hours to rise, before rolling and either using as pizza or cooking in a dry frying pan.

I tend to take a dim view of sourdough influencer bros who make the process look like rocket science.