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!

I'm of an opinion that even though lots of people kind of know what they are eating that there is just so much misinformation out there that leads to poor choices.
An exboyfriend of mine needs to lose some weight so starts eating big bags of nuts as he believes they are full of protein and nutrients which they are but also full of calories in that quantity. Also KFC and Five Guys meals, yes they have protein in them but also a ton of saturated fat. Having salad or soup can be healthy but it can also not be healthy, and no drinking latte all morning is not fasting. He's not stupid, he has a really great job but catching on to words like protein, fasting, general misinformation about food and his diet is pretty awful with very little exercise. He's not going to lose weight at this rate, most probably get bigger..

In defence of schools...

Whatever the school, the issue is getting the children to eat. Being hungry affects learning and behaviour outcomes much more than UPFs and in some areas, the only place the children have access to food is at school. It's why so many breakfast clubs have sugary cereals on the menu even though we know better.

I know the poverty thing is less relevant to private and boarding schools but if you have 15-20 kids in a class who refuse to eat lunch then you have a pretty rough afternoon ahead of you. I was never overly impressed with my daughter's (private) school lunches, but one of my friends worked in the reception class and is super healthy. She said it was a trade off in ensuring that the children would eat and the healthier stuff is refused, one child refused healthier lunches because she knew mum would bring her extra chocolate bars on those days. They had to have a word with mum (who did not change her behaviour).

It's a bit like Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Step one is ensuring that everyone eats enough to survive the day. Step two is improving the diet.

My kids eat a mix of upf, pf and non processed foods. I think we are quite average.

Today - breakfast rice crispies with milk and a piece of fruit. (This will move back to weetabix or porridge as we eat up the Christmas cereals)
snack - neither want to take snack
lunch- M&S less ingredients rolls with salad and cold meat and cheese, grapes, cucumber, cheese string, smoothie
dinner - pasta with a home made sauce served with garlic bread.

That’s a very standard day, I could swap out the yoghurt / smoothie / cheese string and sometimes they have a block of cheese or something.

They have crisps (one standard multi pack bag) once a week. I sometimes buy chocolate biscuit bars, they might have knelt those after school or a pack of proper pop corn.

At weekends they are allowed a couple of fizzy drinks. During the week it’s mainly water, milk or hot chocolate.

Once or twice a week we will have a upf dinner, tomnorow its going to be Birds Eye chicken, potato waffles, frozen peas and baked beans.

I cook a roast on a Sunday, upf stuffing and gravy sometimes. Monday is leftover roast kn some way (gammon, egg, home made chips and baked beans this week), Tuesday I made a curry and it had M&S bhaji with jt (assume upf), yesterday we had jacket potatoes with upf baked beans or upf tuna and mayo and salad. I don’t offer dessert, there is a fruit bowl.

I think I’m a very average family, we could cut down but we are all healthy weights, I’ve been on mj for 18 months, my family are all active people and I’m chronically ill and physically buggered.

we eat McDonald’s, once a month maybe, this week we had smash burgers and fries and chicken tenders from a local non-chain takeaway. It was delicious. I like kebabs.

We talk with our kids (10 and 12) about exercise, nutrition and balance. My 12 year old got a fabulous ramen graphic novel for Christmas and has been learning to make soft boiled eggs and noodle dishes. My 10 year old loves to bake and we do that when I’m able to.

A level of upf is normal and manageable. I think those eating 75%+ of upf is an outlier and being used to froth people up.

Not unreasonable but yes, as you admit, very judgemental and, dare I say it, (?, yes, I do), sanctimonious.
Sadly as a society we've become used to being told what to eat. Low socioeconomic status, shift patterns ,lack of education etc all contribute to poor diet. UPF foods contribute to many poor health outcomes, including low self esteem and depression and yes, sadly, many families would benefit from being educated about what to eat.
I've developed the same, fascistic attitudes to food that I was brought up with, organic, made from scratch including bread, minimal processed foods etc etc but unfortunately, just as I did as a teen, my kids don't appreciate this. In fact not long ago my teenage DD had a meltdown, asking why I didn't just let her eat "normal food" like her friends. I said she'd tank me one day!!
But that's how much we've been blindsided about what's healthy and what isn't. So I don't think judging and shaming is particularly helpful.
I write this a single parent with no support network, working 50+ hour weeks on the nhs and still struggling financially, so like you, I know it's still doable to find the time to cook but as with everything it isn't that simple.

I think this is pretty balanced and normal.

I do fear that there are more ‘outliers’ than you think.

Im actually about to do a grocery shop in person. I’m going to have a sneak at what is in other peoples trolleys.

Bring back Home Economics. We should all be taught basic cooking and household skills at school. I remember when we were taught to sew and some of the boys scoffed and my HE teacher said to them I don't know what woman you think will want you if you don't have basic life skills 😂

@TheGrinchWasHere please report back 🤣

Both my kids are in scouting and have learnt cooking skills there and they’ve regularly been set badge work around cooking or had bake offs. School is one place but there is other community opportunities for learning skills.

It’s about 60p for a bag of carrots and £1.50 for potatoes but it’s much too much work to chop them up with some potatoes and sling them in the oven or air fryer with a tbs of oil for 15 minutes clearly. Serve with fish fingers, chicken dippers, sausages or whatever, frozen peas or fried egg and done. How’s that harder than opening a bag of crisps. I’ve been properly skint and survived feeding DS veg, beans on toast, soup with bread, veg chucked into oven roasted in the oven. Chopping vegetables seems to be like climbing Everest for some reason. Root veg can be v cheap if you shop sensibly and it’s filling and healthy. One ingredient food is not difficult to make.

Not as revealing as I thought.

Lots of bread and a fair amount of vegetables, eggs and fresh meat. To be fair I live in a fairly upmarket suburb so it’s probably to be expected. Note that it’s lots of middle age women who I assume are sahm doing the grocery shopping…. Not too many men about so probably not a good sample.

I’ll have to extend my research.

Are air fryers usually bought by unhealthy and/or overweight people to heat up crap?

I used my air fryer to heat up my frozen Iceland kebab meat but it made it go too crispy. I found it heats up much better in the steamer in the microwave.

air fryers can be used to heat up crap, they can also be used to make home made chips, jacket potatoes, roasted vegetables, cooking whole foods. It’s just a device.

Depends how pedantic you want to be on the health train …

Airfyers definitely make it easier and quicker to heat up and cook uhp foods but there is also some concern on teflon and acrylamides…

I couldn’t be bothered and we don’t use it every day.

Yanbu, i also despair of this and of parents saying 'its all they will eat' - kids arent born asking for pizzas and beige food, its all they will eat because its what they were given from a young age. Im not talking about neurodiversity here, im talking about lazy parenting and pandering to neurotypical kids. Yes its judgy but i also think its a form of neglect

My point was that people are very happy to put in effort when they want to wrt food and cooking.

@TheGrinchWasHereif you want to look at a larger cross section of the UK diet then you can check out the National Diet and Nutrition Survey. The most recent is 2019-2023.

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/national-diet-and-nutrition-survey-2019-to-2023/national-diet-and-nutrition-survey-2019-to-2023-report

There is really. Some is more or less poison.

It’s just not going to matter once in a while.

The fact it makes it easier and quicker is why it's used daily in my house.

I don't understand what's different now to in the 80s early 90s. I (and most of my friends) had a diet based on crispy pancakes, egg and chips, hoops on toast and snacks of crisps, angel delight, biscuits, orangeaid that stained your mouth etc. and there was not one obese kid in our class. Maybe it's portions sizes rather than the food itself? Or maybe we were just more active.

I'm in my very early 50's, I learnt how to cook by watching my Mum, who in turn learnt by her Mum. I also did Home Economics at school. I wonder if we have a lot of generations who don't know how to cook, because they've never been set that example?? Ready meals, pizza, chips etc, it's all easy - grab it out the freezer and shove it in the oven. Nothing wrong in eating pizza or chips, just not every day!

We went on holiday abroad last year, which we do most years, usually visit a different country each year. We always go self-catering, rather than AI. This year, I really noticed the amount of overweight children, who were usually with very overweight parents. The sad fact, they were all British. It shocked me, the amount of children I saw who were very clearly overweight.

End of the 90s saw meals like a whole pizza and a full serving of chips; huge glasses of wine; enormous hamburgers also stuffed with large portions of cheese; “Sharing” bags of crisps and sweets but few single portion options;
places like Costa with huge lattes and enormous cakes and pastries; Poundland with almost free sweets and crisps; no lunch hours; giant bottles of fizzy drinks full of sugar ( now full of poisonous sweeteners that cause sugar cravings); more and more ‘ready meals’ and hyper palatable food; and starting from the ‘90s the ‘Food Pyramid’ showing massive amounts of starchy carbohydrates as the basis for health so everyone thought how healthy they were eating pasta for every meal.

For the most part people know what's healthy and what isn't.
But that knowledge doesn't override the craving for the artificial food-like substances which have been designed to be as addictive as possible!

There’s something which I think many of the people saying “of course they know” or “they don’t want to try” are missing, or at least not giving enough weight to: the power of addiction.

Sugar, and UPF’s more broadly, are addictive. One of the features of addiction is denial. The imperative to consume the substance is so powerful, people will seize on any excuse to indulge - and they do not even know they are doing it.

Take cigarette smoking. Everyone knows that smoking is harmful, literally everyone. Smoking rates in the UK peaked in 1974 at 46% of adults, since which we have had 50 years of increasing pressure to get people to stop. Public information, warnings on packs, a ban on advertising, smoking banned indoors, plain packaging, out of sight, NHS stop smoking programmes, legal age raised to 18. And yet, in 2023, 11.9% of adults still smoke.

Do they not know it’s harmful? And costs them a fortune? Of course they do - but they are addicted, and addictions are hard to kick. And while I don’t have any smokers in my life currently, I imagine that people who continue to smoke are either in denial about JUST how harmful it is, or they are demoralised by their repeated failure to quit and have given up trying. I recognise those responses from my own as a morbidly obese diabetic binge eater ( who has quit bingeing, gone sugar free, lost 8 stone, got off all diabetes meds)

Sugar is addictive - and most of us were first exposed to it before the age of 1. Almost everybody consumes sugar Not everyone is addicted, but an awful lot of people are. Or, are consuming at a level which is potentially damaging to their health. But it tastes sooooo good, it makes me feel calm…. `surely it can’t be that bad, can it? This is the denial which is part of addiction - the reasons the subconscious mind comes up with to make it OK to persist with use, even when experiencing negative consequences.

it has taken to years and a whole series of initiatives to reduce smoking as much as has happened. It will probably take similar legislation to reduce sugar and UPF consumption. And you can guarantee that Big Food will fight it every step of the way. Did you see the report the other day - Greggs saying that the use of GLP-1 injections have hit their sales?

We are now just territory which is being fought over by big food and big pharma.
Big food wants our money and in order to do this it makes its product as addictive as possible.
Big pharma wants to sell its appetite suppressant drugs.
If all the addictive foods went away so would the need for the appetite suppressant drugs.
The more addictive foods there are the better it is for the profits of the pharmaceutical companies selling the appetite suppressant drugs.
It's a racket.

You don’t see aisle after aisle of crisps, cake and snacks foods in the supermarkets abroad.

Um, yeah you do in France. And loads of ready meals.