Do people really not know what to eat?

[WilderHawthorn]

Watching ‘what not to eat’, and the family they’ve found are just hopeless. Four small children all shovelled full of UPF junk, parents both obese, freely admit to eating crap constantly.

How adults choose to feed themselves is their choice, but to feed four small kids that much junk? It’s bordering on abuse. An apple/banana costs the same as a packet of crisps, jacket potato is one of the cheapest meals you can make, basic porridge oats and milk for breakfast, it’s not difficult to eat whole foods, so why rely on packaged things?

Freely admit I judge those who feed their children this way and truly despair over childhood obesity stats. I work full time, have 4 DC, DH works full time and I volunteer. I’m very time poor and partially disabled, I still feed my kids well and it doesn’t cost me a fortune. Taught myself to cook. There’s no excuse!

. We camp and DH & I still feed the kids good meals with some veg and fruit. We make burgers from mince, salt and pepper, not UPF ONES. We make pizzas from scratch, the dough is yeast, flour and water.

I would absolutely not be bothering with making my own burger patties or pizza dough when camping! That’s pretty unusual

Just watching this programme now. I find these shows so patronising. Not cos I think I’m some sort of diet expert. But he keeps banging on about how hard UPFs are to spot like the ingredients are some sort of well-kept secret..not right there on the back of the packet!! Surely if you want to know if a bag of rice is processed you just look at the back and if it lists other ingredients other than rice & water it’s processed. The more ingredients something lists the more processed it is. I came to this conclusion by common sense alone and I’m of very average intelligence 🙄

DH’s family have absolutely no idea about nutrition. They see our diet as weird. They just don’t get it.

I know a woman with an obese toddler who is constantly eating family size bags of chocolates. Whenever this gets discussed online people wheel out the excuses “they just don’t know that chocolate is fattening” I mean ffs come on I became a mum at 16 and my kids always ate healthy even when I lived with other people and had to share the kitchen with someone with personality disorders who used to smash up all my plates after an argument and threaten to put me through the wall, I was still in there cooking my meals, a more pathetic being would have retreated to their room with pot noodles and a family size dairy milk.

How can someone claim they don’t know why their toddler is obese when he’s eating a family size bags of maltesers? I’m convinced some people do it on purpose

…”no kids yet”

And your point is?

There are lots of reasons. Maybe they don't have a car so have to walk half an hour to get their dc from school. Maybe 1 of their dc has football practice after school so it's 5pm when they get home and bedtime is at 7. Maybe there isn't an asda close by so they do all their shopping at the corner shop, which doesn't sell fruit and vegetables.

Maybe they are a single parent and the dc fight all the time so they can't cook anything that will burn or stick to the pan if you leave it for a few minutes. Maybe they are just knackered. Maybe they had to take one of the dc to the dr or dentist at 5pm.

These are just off the top of my head. Today we had sausages in bread rolls for tea, which isn't great but it was all I had time for in between taking the dc to their various activities. Tomorrow we will have cottage pie with lots of veg because I'll have time to do it.

I think there has been a swing in the prices for convenience food being cheaper than home cooking.

There are now huge numbers available and a packet of chicken nuggets is vastly cheaper than chicken nuggets.

in the 80s and 90s and into the 2000s convenience food was seen as and often eas the more expended option.

They were also relatively new and people were still often eating now their parents ate.

The point she’s making is babies take up a lot of time, then school, homework, clubs - more kids more knackered and thrown in full time work and you can’t think straight.

You can feed your kids al the fruit and veg when they are young and they vote with the feet when they get to teens

Look at the school dinners! We never had chips at school. nor burgers it was a cooked meal or salad.

UPF is very deliberately created to be visually attractive, cheap, delicious and moreish. And to light up the happy sensors in your brain. Kids (and most adults) are almost always going to prefer these foods for that reason.

We could all educate ourselves and develop the fortitude to fight against that preference, for ourselves and our whole families, every meal for our whole lives.

Or our governments could be bold enough to stand up to the food industry and actually DO SOMETHING.

Firstly, stop pussy footing around peoples' feelings and be clear about which foods are genuinely not good for you and should be avoided - not eaten 'as part of a balanced diet' or as a 'treat' (making it even more desirable!).

Then, legislate against advertising and packaging that makes false and misleading health claims. In Mexico, for example, food packaging has big alerts on it telling you if it's too high in salt, sugar etc. We could go further with UPF, known carcinogens.

Finally, legislate to get the worst of the poisonous shit off the shelves altogether. Just ban it - 'personal choice' and 'nanny state' be damned, people will get over themselves eventually.

I think this is a good point. We do know that these foods are designed to appeal in this way, they’re meant to be addictive.

Lifetimes ago after a couple of very promising dates with a new bloke I cooked him dinner. It was a pretty simple meal and included if I remember correctly some form of meat, probably chicken, some form of potatoes and some ratatouille, which didn’t eat and explained he didn’t like it. Fair enough, so I asked if he’d like some salad or another vegetable option instead, which he declined. Apparently he just didn’t like vegetables full stop. I’m not saying I’ve ever been the most virtuous eater but I di find it incredibly immature and unattractive. Instant ick really. I persevered for a few more dates but it tended to feel like trying to eat with a five year old and I was sometimes a bit embarrassed for and by him, especially eating around other people. A grown man going to a dinner at another grown up’s house and declining all the food served and asking if she could do him some chicken nuggets and chips? Or throwing half a bottle of ketchup over his plate to hide any sign of anything healthy? (This at his mother’s as she would still always try to force some veg into him) Just no.

I can’t really see that people don’t know how bad it is for you to eat like this. Maybe they’ve lost sight of the scale of it in their lives, the haven’t realised yet that they’ve lost any control over their diet but I don’t buy that they don’t know. Not these days, when we hear about it all the time and indeed entire programmes are dedicated to it.

I fed my kids a pizza tonight. Not homemade, bought in a shop in a plastic package. It was quick and easy, it suited our purposes for this occasion and it’s not a one off - like many mothers I am nowhere near perfect enough to manage a completely home cooked from scratch, UPF-free diet for every single meal. Frankly even if I could no doubt the bloody kids wouldn’t eat half of it. So yes, it happens as a minimum of once per week that I will rely on something like that to make our lives easier and while I’m pleased I have that option, I’m under no illusions about the quality and nutritional value (or otherwise) of this stuff. I haven’t seen this particular episode but do we really believe that an (apparently) clearly obese family has no idea how they got there? No clue?

Surely they know. We all do. I may not be able to give you the exact nutritional breakdown of 100g of carrot compared to 100g of chocolate but everyone knows which is healthier. No-one is living on UPFs and thinking that’s a healthy diet. Maybe they don’t care, or they have sensory issues around food, or they’ve never been taught how to prepare and cook decent food, or maybe they’re just embarrassed to admit to any of those or other reasons but they still know it’s not a healthy diet. They might struggle to make changes for various reasons and need support and education to make healthy choices but they do still know.

Thinking some more about the issue, I think many people have a level of trust in government, corporations, retailers etc. and assume that if something was REALLY bad for them it would either be banned (like drugs) or have explicit warnings all over it (like tobacco).

They assume that if nobody is stopping or deterring them from buying something, it must be OK.

Exactly.

It's not exactly rocket science to figure this stuff out, and it's really misleading of people to say stuff like, "oh they just don't know/they haven't been educated about it". Nonsense. It's not bloody hard to figure out homemade Bolognese is healthier than a frozen chips and mini pizzas. It's like saying that the poor are thick or something; well no, because I grew up poor and this sort of eating just wasn't something that was the norm back then.

Penny sweets were a real treat, all the kids in school would talk about getting them towards the end of the week. Now if I walk through the city centre, there are kids under 5 with a bag of crisps in one hand and empty packets of snack biscuits shoved in the hood of the pram. I walked past a maybe 7 year old girl screaming blue murder because she wanted two pasties not one outside Greggs. It was 10am!

I was in an FB group for a little while for a hobby, there's a woman on there with a morbidly obese toddler. She for some reason would post pictures of all of his (adult sized, and I mean working a labour job man sized) meals. It was utterly bizarre and any comment about it would be, "he's big boned and bonny", meanwhile she's on bloody mounjaro herself to lose weight and her older boys are also overweight. It baffled me.

Think the point was you can kiss goodbye to spending your mornings chopping up veg for the slow cooker when you have kids 🤣

I struggle with reading some of the excuses sometimes especially “people just don’t know” come on we all know a toddler shouldn’t be eating a family size bags of maltesers. I’m no genius didn’t even go to sixth form or college and I’m of the generation that were supposed to have to stay on till 18. There’s no one on gods green earth who doesn’t know this basic stuff.

Google feeders, they’re people who purposely make their partners fat because it gives them more control over them. I’m convinced some of the people I know are doing this to their own kids

You're ignoring the insidious addictiveness of the junk food and the lack of clear information about it.

Misinformation led that person to believe that Maltesers were 'ok in moderation' then suddenly they find themselves in a bind because the toddler LOVES them and is throwing a tantrum if they're offered a fruit snack instead.

It genuinely wouldn't surprise me in some cases. I have a friend who used to be very overweight, she lost it all through a complete overhaul of diet and eats really well now, cooks from scratch and her kids are very healthy too. Her mum can't stand it. She constantly makes snide comments and tries to sabotage their meals, brings out massive bars of chocolate for them to eat before dinner. Everything revolves around food, and it's not healthy and home cooked stuff either.

This friend says she was the only obese girl in her class growing up, and every time she tried to diet as a teen her mum would do the same sabotaging then.

I also think some people are blind to what being obese looks like. It's so normal these days that it's not worth even a double take. I'm certainly not saying the diet culture of the 90s/early noughties was good either, but now we've spun the other way. Fat acceptance! I'm all for being confident in yourself, but some of the stuff I hear is just dangerous. And it all comes down to lazy cooking and an obsession with UPFs. As though they alone make a day worthwhile.

@Seymorbuttsthats a bit catty! Chilli con carne tomorrow will require onion, garlic, tinned tomatoes, tinned kidney beans, spices and mince in the slow cooker. Maybe 3-5 minutes prep, for a balanced, filling and healthy meal. Not ‘all morning chopping’ and I have 4 DC and animals to see to. It’s another excuse!

I genuinely think that a lot of people just don't understand the link between food and their health, or don't truly believe it.

After all, eating a high calorie meal doesn't make you overweight that day. Eating processed meat doesn't give you cancer straight afterwards. Without a bit of grounding in how bodies work, a lot of people can go about thinking that eating healthy "won't change anything", or that they're overweight/sick for no reason at all.

I've worked with disadvantaged adults, and there's often a disconnect with anything other than the immediate. Long term cause-and-effect doesn't register. They're not stupid, just detached from the kind of decision making capacity that you and I take for granted.

Depends what kind of things you mean about banning them but please don't forget that some children with SEND including ARFID and other food restrictions/medical reasons heavily rely on some of these UPFs.

Frozen peas are yummy! I fed some to DS the other day and he seemed to like them frozen as well (although I cooked the rest.)

I buy frozen and tinned fruit and veg more than I buy fresh because it's just me and DS, and we sometimes don't get round to eating it before it gets manky. When Lidl were selling their veg for 5p at Christmas I got some things then, and cooked it before freezing it in portions.

I have an extensive collection of jars of herbs and spices in my cupboard. I love herby mashed potato, for example.

Just because a toddler loves them doesn't mean they should be getting them every day in vast quantities though? I like cheese but I know if I eat a whole block a day, I'm going to get fat. And I wouldn't let my children gorge on it either.

DD loves homemade cake. I bake one of a weekend. She can scream until she's blue in the face, but she's not getting half of it in one sitting and nor will I be baking one on a Wednesday too.

I know someone like this she’s a grandmother now, her daughter was obese as a child and lost all the weight through her own will as a teen as soon as she could sort her own food. Her mother now regularly urges her to eat donuts and says “you’re so thin” (she’s literally a normal weight) she’s now moaning she doesn’t get to see her grandkids as much as she used to because her daughter found out she was giving them unnecessary large quantities of sweets.

It's really sad how skewed peoples perspectives are on this. It's as though a lot of people take it as a personal insult that others don't want to eat unhealthy foods, that they can see "bad foods" do exist and want to better themselves and their families.

You can see it in these threads, too. Everyone starts screaming about others being judgemental; outside of medical reasoning (ARFID or whatever which isn't the debate in these threads no matter what keeps getting pushed, because it's not something most families deal with) there is absolutely no need for people to be consuming so much junk. To say they don't have time just blatantly isn't true; we all have the same time, some people just decide to use it to cook healthy food for their families.

I work full time as does DH; we still cook from scratch. So did my dad. So does my sister, and my brother. It's a choice. I'd have much more respect for people if they admitted it.

I adore Torres crisps. They're £4.95 for 125g.

I can buy quite a lot of Pink Lady apples for that price. Thankfully I prefer Royal Gala. They're £1.80 for a bag of six in Sainsburys at the moment and they're delicious.