To think it's impossible to eat a UPF free diet as an ordinary person?

[MyHealthyMission]

I mean ordinary as in, works full time, earns a decent but not huge wage, has free time but not entire days at a time to dedicate to cooking etc.

I'm on a bit of a health kick, and have turned my attention to eating whole foods and ensuring I'm eating as healthy as possible as we come into winter.

I've had a sourdough starter on the go for a while and decided I'd knock up some bread rolls and soup to have for lunch in the coming week because it's turned cold. Figured it would be a great, low UPF meal. Until I googled the beef stock, which is apparently a really bad UPF! Even the super expensive all natural concentrates are UPF. So unless you can afford to buy and boil a load of beef bones, it seems you're out of luck.

Obviously you can do the normal things like avoiding crisps, protein shakes etc. as they're all full of UPF, but when even things like stock cubes are stuffed full of them, it just seems impossible! AIBU to think it's just become impossible to eat a UPF free diet?

Yes it’s really hard - you can buy beef brone broth (freja etc) but of course it pushes soup etc up from a cheap meal to a pricy one…

I was looking at secondhand cookbooks today - nearly the save money ones overly relied on either sausages, or chicken - appreciate chicken’s not upf but it’s not a diverse range of protein and we eat too much of it.

It's a nightmare. It shouldn't be this expensive to eat real food!

So don’t make it 🤷‍♀️ plenty of store-bought loaves are very low UPF now (we use the spelt toasting loaf from M&S)

As others have said you don’t need to be perfect and make everything from scratch eliminating every UPF - just make healthy changes that work for you.

Buy the m&s liquid stock, ingredients for the beef one are "Water · Beef Bones · Chicken Bones · Salt · Tomato Purée · Yeast Extract · Onions · Carrots · Leeks · Parsley · Garlic · White Peppercorns · Ground Bay Leaf."

It doesn't take six hours, though. It takes a couple of minutes to mix (and top up the starter), then leave it, do all the other things in the day, then come back to bake it (whilst getting on with other things), etc.

It means planning and scheduling, yes - for example, having beef and automatically putting the bones on for stock so that the stock is ready/in the fridge/frozen in cubes for when you have planned to make the soup - but not spending hours doing anything.

We buy the frozen beef bone broth cubes from M&S in place of stock cubes nowadays. The ingredients list is literally: water, beef bones, tomato paste, onions, carrots, salt. Bone broth is also very easy to make yourself and freeze into the required portions in an ice cube tray. Overall, I do find your all or nothing stance a bit strange and unnecessary though. It’s absolutely fine to have a mostly UPF-free diet, still have the occasional treat and be perfectly healthy.

Do you live near a co-op? Their in store bakery bread is pretty good. The only additional ingredient is ascorbic acid (vitamin C).
I don't know what other supermarkets put in their in store bakery bread but maybe it's worth checking the ingredients.

With the six hours a week you'll save on the sourdough, you can hunt your own cows and boil their bones.

I really don't want to be a smug mumsnetter type but honestly, we never use stock cubes or gravy granules or any of that stuff.

We always put chicken bones on for stock and dh sometimes goes out to buy beef bones for making stock in the pressure cooker.

Gravy is a reduction of the meat juices with a bit of wine or vermouth (UPFs I guess).

For added flavour, I use miso, like a pp said. It's a UPF for sure. An OXO cube is probably not worse.

In terms of things like bread, I just don't eat it much. Occasionally make a brown loaf and add wheatgerm. Or just buy one.

You're choosing to spend the time on sourdough and jam.

Plenty of people eat very low amounts of UPF food without taking much time.

Get bones from your butchers (they are usually free) simmer for several hours with herbs and veg. Freeze. There's your stock

So don’t make sourdough! Buy a bread maker and spend about 5 minutes putting ingredients in it for a healthy wholewheat loaf.
Most jam that you buy has the same ingredients as home made.

I think there’s the usual hysteria about this latest iteration of ‘clean eating’ with that easily runs into orthorexic territory. Remember that most people (influencers) giving ‘advice’ on diets of any kind are selling something.

I choose to improve my diet without aiming for ‘perfection’ and getting too sucked in to the culture surrounding avoiding upfs. I moderate my intake and make concessions for the good - I have salad cream on my salad because otherwise I wouldn’t eat salad, make miso soup from packaged miso because otherwise I’d have a tin of Heinz cream of tomato, and eat high end dark chocolate because otherwise I’d have a twix.

Its early days and I will try and improve things further as I go along but I’m learning and to try for the perfect wholefood diet immediately and forever will be setting myself up for failure.

I watch a lot of Japanese cooking videos and their diet, while shockingly high in salt, is still rated as one of the healthiest in the world due to the small overall amount of food eaten, fermented foods, many, many vegetables and quality proteins. They’re not afraid of the odd deep fried spam fritter though and they’re certainly not afraid of white rice.

Just your best in this terrible food environment we live in, aim to improve what you can, when you can and don’t be too hard on yourself.

But sourdough is better for you and thus the better idea, the entire point is to eat healthily! It's just madness to me that the only option is to invest a ton of time, or money, into something that should be cheap and easy

But you are making this harder for yourself than it needs to be. Just make simpler, cheaper choices.

Not at all. Just eat more fresh foods and less food out of brightly coloured packaging. It's really not that hard.

Then accept that you are going to spend 6 hours making it, although afaik most of the time is spent waiting for it to prove or bake which is time you can spend doing other things.

Ordinary Western diet, maybe. Easy with Eastern diets.

Who said it should be cheap and easy?

You sound overwhelmed by all this, I’ve been there with ‘healthy eating’ before and the scary, inflexible information you get bombarded with is far from healthy.

Some processed food and even a few UPFs (like miso, dark chocolate) are not going to kill you. Just make easy better choices.

So - Instead of worrrying about home made sourdough bread to the point that you’re on here getting frustred and upset try making a vegetable filled omelette with a side salad, olive oil and vinegar and buy good quality wholegrain sourdough bread - supermarkets carry these - which may or may not have a small amount of preservative in it and learn to call it good enough.

What you put in your mouth is a deeply, deeply personal thing and nobody can tell you exactly what is right for your body or your lifestyle.

Fuelling your body should of course be cheap and easy!

You’re wildly over complicating it. As others have said, just look to make simple swaps that are going to be sustainable for you (found at your local supermarkets, things you enjoy, etc etc) and stop striving for perfection or you’ll last about 5 mins with this.

I understand that.

Buy a pouch of beef stock if you want real food.

But a stock cube is clearly a "food product", not actual food, a manufactured UPF. Why would this be a surprise?

How expensive should it be to eat real food?

Why? Bread making isn’t easy, it’s a ballache. That’s why people generally buy it. If you can’t be arsed making bread, and don’t want to eat shop bought, eat something else instead. I don’t eat bread at all. I’m coeliac, and I don’t eat gluten free alternatives because they’re full of shit (and mostly horrible). I haven’t starved to death, and I still eat a full, varied diet.

Why do you believe the people who say sourdough is better for you than any other home-made bread? You have been suckered by the health buzzword de jour.

If you start off this gullible then you may as well eat anything, as you will never actually know any better.