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?

@Idontjetwashthefucker By all accounts life is shorter if you're not putting decent food in your body. But you've gotta do what works for you...

Only scientifically illiterate people make arguments against things with ‘chemicals’ in them.

Everything is chemical - even us.

You cannot eat anything chemical free, nor can you wash your hair or exist ‘chemical free’.

Listing the scientific and food industry names for the components of a strawberry doesn’t say anything about chemicals or UPFs.

There's balance to be had.
My daughter has a dairy allergy and I could make her oat milk at home from scratch or I could buy her oatly barista.
Oat milk from home wouldn't be a upf but it also wouldn't be nutritionally equivalent to cows milk and she would be missing out on the added fats, calcium and iodine which are important parts of her diet that due to multiple allergies she needs to get through fortification.

At the same time her allergies have been illuminating. She's allergic to things my grandmother would never have known she was allergic too or not as it wouldn't have been in the food she consumed and they are only really in upf. Pea protein is one, she's fine with peas.

The easiest way to work around her allergens is mostly cooking from whole ingredients although there are upf free from foods that are part of her diet too but a much smaller part.

Well, in Britain anyway. There's a lot of reverse snobbery over wanting to eat fresh, healthy, appealing food. Working class people from Italy, Turkey, India etc would find it baffling.

Very sensible!

Going to extreme limits is just nuts. How much oil or mayo does a person use, anyway?

I think all this UPF stuff is b*llocks. The book written by that twin doctor..wonder if it's him that does all the cooking at home, bet its not and he's just making things harder for women who do most of the cooking.
In the 1980s we ate all manner of processed rubbish, Bernard Matthews chicken kievs (I really fancy some now lol), microwave burgers and chips.and we are all alive.

Well we can conclude opinions are divided

The current evidence is very limited. A recent meta analysis only included 16 studies which fitted the criteria. I would hazard a guess that these studies were epidemiological which explore associations but not direction of causality and cannot isolate individual ingredients of UPF which pose risks. (ETA, there is even a suggestion that it's not what UPF contains but what it lacks i.e. fiber and vitamins, that causes adverse health outcomes).
So in short, there may or may not be any evidence that would support completely eliminating UPFs from one's diet. So, by all means, be mindful of what you eat but I don't think there is any utility in focusing on minute detail like a drop of rapeseed oil in mayonnaise or preservatives in bread.

@Babycatsarenice that is a bat shit response, sure it's an inconvenient truth, but are you saying the response is to bury our heads in the sand to give the poor ladies an easier time in the kitchen?

Yes we ate that shit in the 80s, but that generation is only just middle aged now, hardly at a point to demonstrate safety, and we are seeing a rise in certain cancers and illnesses. UPFs have only increased since that time.

I think we are witnessing a health emergency unfolding in front of our very eyes.

You can choose to make bread without those ingredients (or I assume buy in bakeries!) - the issue is it will go stale much quicker. That is ultimately the trade off. In my house we don’t eat bread very fast so we need it to last a good week. Without those additives it will be stale and mouldy within days. It honestly doesn’t bother me but I understand other people prefer without. I’m not eating loaves of bread daily. I’m a definitely everything in moderation sorta gal.

look at rates of cancer, especially bowel and colon cancers, and tell me again how the 80s diet is fine.

It’s also linked to increased rates of dementia, heart disease and plenty of other stuff that might not kill you straight up, but massively affects your quality of (your much shorter) life.

Saying that you're overthinking it is not 'pathologising' your post. It just means 'No need to go overboard. Avoid UPFs as much as works for you!'

But writing a post about something that I have been thinking about does not mean 'going overboard'. It's just how MN works, we write a post to see what others think, to gain some more info. Some people take it way too deep.

Is there actual evidence that isn't in need of more study?
I was on a thread about heart disease a few weeks ago and everyone blamed cocaine for that!

I don't like upf because I don't think it is necessary in many of the foods that are swamped with it. There ought to be options by accessible brands that offer a simpler version.
In tesco, one pack of flatbreads by a well known brand contained a list as long as a toilet roll, and none of them decipherable. Yet some more obscure brands manage to just use 4 ingredients for the exact same product! Why!!????

Most of us have a freezer, bread will keep and thaw quickly.
I am more irritated by this than any correlation with cancer (the health implications are whole new thread!).

I preferred sweet treats when they contained fat and animal fat, not oil. So many crackers and cakes are mush now.

Yeah I totally agree that most science backed reliable experts in nutrition would advocate something around the 80/20 principle and remember that food is just one healthy habit - we need joy and connection and less stress to be healthy (along with good sleep and movement). Stressing about a spoonful of mayo is counterproductive. You still have to love your food.

I cook with whole ingredients as much as I can but I use stock cubes, herbs, spices, (cheap) wine and stuff like Worcester/soy/chipotle sauce to 'zhuzh up' my cooking. Cooking from only whole ingredients would be boring indeed, and long winded! I love cooking but reserve the more complex stuff like home made breads/pasta for days where I've got nothing better to do - which is about once every 3 to 6 months 😂

I think key is to avoid stuff like shop bought pizzas, premade lasagnes etc. when you can, but the occasional indulgence is fine. Balance is key, no point in making yourself miserable over avoiding UPFs otherwise you're spending your prolonged life worrying and down in the dumps.

I’m quite into UPF free eating and have made lots of improvements in the last couple of years even though our diet wasn’t terrible before either. I adhere to the 80-20 philosophy. Going for 100% is obsessive and sucks the joy out of life - no eating out, nothing ready made or made by people who might have used some UPF (eg no homemade brownies baked with chocolate containing emulsifiers). I honestly think becoming so concerned about the tiniest bit of UPF is not good for mental health, so at that point the negatives start to outweigh the positives.

However, seed oils are not UPF. Some people avoid them because of inflammation or other issues but they are not classed as UPF. I still consume shop bought food with seed oils, but have switched to cold pressed for home cooking. As for mayo, you can easily find avocado oil mayo in supermarkets.

This is really interesting and a good way of looking at the way a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing when it comes to examining packaging! Thanks for posting it.

and remember that food is just one healthy habit - we need joy and connection and less stress to be healthy (along with good sleep and movement). Stressing about a spoonful of mayo is counterproductive.

Agree with this so much.
Life in general is becoming more fraught and with less focus on wellbeing. Profit over everything is not helping. We have been experiencing awful illegal construction issues in our area for 13 months and no authority will touch it. It is becoming harder to access many things that could lower our stress levels, and building sprawling new housing estates with no localised infrastructure is a new health issue to come - we are becoming so car dependent it's scary.

That’s what I use for pizza bases. Flour, water, yeast, spirit vinegar, salt and calcium propionate as a preservative which I can live with as I believe it’s just a salt?

I think it's a bit too catchy and bit facebook-y tbh.
People see posts like that and is serves their own bias.
Such is life.

Have seen recipes for these, if you can find a pitta that isn't stuffed with crap....How would it work though? Do you not 'open' the pitta, just plop the topping on top under the grill?

Cut loaf in half- freeze half- defrost and use when needed.

I eat mostly food cooked from scratch with proper fresh or frozen veg. I don't worry too much about bread or pasta, or slightly processed food like cheese, and frankly, I don't eat much of either anyway.

I don't really like fresh white bread, have not found any fresh wholemeal or granary I like, we have no bakeries nearby, I've tried making it myself and it was ok but not great, and tend to have either Hovis Wholemeal Granary, Warburtons protein bread or Tesco rye sourdough. I have about five slices of bread a week so can't really be arsed about it TBH.

Huh, which way around?! Are you implying you are being classy by fretting over mayonnaise? Or that you are very "street" by doing so...?!

I was sympathetic with you op until this comment.

I am, and I quote in the words of a student I once had, "bare posh" but I have never once troubled my head about whether seed oils are ultra processed.

I come from a line of long-lived women, we have always eaten well, lots of fresh vegetables, meat and rice. Not one of us is overweight.

The men in my family have sometimes died young, but only ever due to alcohol, smoking, or suicide. Not mayonnaise.

The long lived women in my family got that way by eating sensibly, cooking lovely meals, lots of variety and generally living well. Not by scrutinising the back of flatbread packets.