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!

No. Admittedly I worked as a commis chef many moons ago like a late teen so know how to cook most things at a basic level. A healthy meal composed of veg and fish can all be done in the air fryer and microwave. Tin foil wrapped fish takes 10 minutes, roast root veg the same just chopped and bunged in and steamed broccoli takes one minute in the mic. How the fack is that hard?!

I agree, the end of the 90’s is when things changed a lot. In the early 90’s I didn’t have access to fast food chains, we lived in a rural village and the only take away was the fish and chip shop, I remember trying my first Burger King whilst on holiday abroad but didn’t really go near a McDonald’s until late 90’s, now there are at least 4 or 5 McDonald’s in a 10 mile radius. My diet growing up was pretty varied, yes we were fed crispy pancakes and Spagetti hoops but it wasn’t every day, we often had home made meals including stews, lasagna and a roast every Sunday. Convenience food and frozen processed meals we pretty new. There are so many options now and when we go out for the day we plan it around ‘where are we going to eat’, it’s become the norm to go out and grab some awful food from McDonald’s, KFC or Subway, because it’s easy and cheap to do so. It’s now been made even easy by the likes of Uber eats etc…, you can just order food to your do.

My kids/teens probably hate me as I am one of those parents that packs food to take out with us as an excuse not to be sucked in by McDonald’s every time we go out. We do eat out occasionally (I am partial to a 5 guys) but I would rather these places didn’t exist 😬.

I find that younger people are a lot more sane and conscious about what they eat, certainly better than I was in my teens and twenties.

My 60-somethinhg parents, on the other hand fed me processed ham and white supermarket bread, and thought their stodgy dinners were healthy as long as there was a serving of boiled vegetables on the side. When I tell them I'm avoiding fast and processed food because of the cancer and other health risks, they say I'm being prissy and ridiculous, and that "if they were dangerous it'd be on the front page of the newspaper!". I've given up.

I think people have advice fatigue. If you look and how many flip flops there have been about foods and what’s healthy and what isn’t it’s ridiculous. The generations who grew up on eggs and bacon for breakfast and “go to work on a egg” were then told eggs were terrible for them and must be limited and then told actually they were healthy and it was all a mistake.

Same with butter and margarine, low fat vs full fat, bananas have too may carbs and should be banned…

I think people to some degree have been given so much advice and information they’ve stopped giving a shit.

is there a place for banning the substances in foods that we know are contributing to poor health outcomes or like other countries putting bold on the pack what’s in it and what the risks are?

At the end of the day I believe 90% of people are trying their best. Trying to balance all the information, life, finances and their health.

Very true. It's absolutely freezing where I am today so I've made a big pot of vegetable soup. All the ingredients cost about £6. I did get some sourdough and cheese to go along with it but still everything was under a tenner for a nourishing meal.

We also played out a lot more. We had one TV in the house so couldn't do non stop screens. Less snacking and takeaways. Takeaways were a big deal as they happened infrequently. It was a huge treat if we had roses or quality street at Christmas.

For a start TV programmes like this always try to show extremes (the average family who eat a reasonable diet with treats a few times a week just don't pull in the high ratings!)
Also we have a generation (or two) that possibly didn't have great food technology/cookery/home economics lessons at high school. My son rarely did cookery of any sort at school (it was on a rotation with textiles, woodwork, and something else) luckily for him I was taught cookery skills both at school and by my Mum/Grandmas. I got him involved from an early age (preschool age) gradually taught him to cook basics and how to read a recipe, but if someone's parents don't have those skills they can't pass them down to children/grandchildren.
If both parents are working (which in today's world seems to be the majority) they come in from work/picking up children and everyone is hungry so they go for the quickest route to get them all fed which is often UPF that requires no prep and is ready in half an hour (or delivered from the local takeaway)

I'm sorry, but I think the "it's so confusing!" line is a bit of a cop-out.

Trendy, naff pop-science benefits from being contrary and sensational, and always will. But the basic facts told to us by actual experts have remained pretty consistent for decades. Fat is calorie-dense. Too much sugar is bad. Vegetables have good stuff in them. When new worthwhile research comes out it tends to build upon the previous body of knowledge rather than contradicting it.

It's not the indecipherable minefield some people like to say it is. It only looks that way if you can't tell genuine research from lurid tabloid headlines.

Even if someone hasn't learned to meal plan, it isn't rocket science?

That's a poor excuse.

What happened 20 to 40 years ago to the current generation of parents to young children which means they don’t know how to cook from scratch a simple nutritious meal?

I see USA has reviewed its good food pyramid to tackle poor diet. https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/health-wellness/2026/01/07/rfk-jr-new-us-dietary-guidelines/88063817007/#

I think it's a bit of both. I'm not in the UK but here when you go to a cafe the size of the muffins, scones, cakes etc. is so much larger than it used to be. You used to be able to buy a sandwich with just simple fillings, now they usually only come in packs of two which are stuffed with several fillings. It's ridiculous.

Same! We currently have a 6 month old who wakes hourly and if I’m lucky I get 2 hours sleep. I also exclusively bf and have another young dc and housework, work etc but still find the time to cook whole foods because eating well is the only reason I’m feeling ok and coping!

It’s all about balance really isn’t it. We mostly eat fairly healthily and I cook from scratch probably 5 nights a week, but on the other two nights we might have fish in batter or fish fingers, or at the moment the kids are very keen on southern fried chicken thighs from Tesco with some oven chips. Or we might have veggie fajitas (from a kit) made with Quorn - that’s UPF city but not awful compared to some things we could be eating. I encourage fruit / veg as snacks before anything else, but the kids do eat a small pack of crisps most days in their packed lunches, and I let them have Frijj milkshakes after sports training a few times a week (they also love homemade banana & blueberry smoothies too). They do huge amounts of sports training and they are hardcore sessions they do as well. I can’t be bothered to get too excited about UPF as long as we’re not solely existing on them, and I do think there’s different types of UPF as well. For example we all eat wholemeal sliced bread for our sandwiches, that’s a UPF but I would also see it as pretty healthy.

Research and development in the food manufacturing industry.

Competition for our food budget is fierce.

There's a lot of time and effort being poured into developing formulations with ingredients that are;

1. as cheap and stable as possible, and
2. as tasty and moreish as possible so you'll eat more and buy more.

These ingredients don't necessarily come from what you would recognise as food.

The absolute last thing they care about is whether any of these ingredients are any good for you, as long as they're not already banned because they're proven to be harmful. Very difficult to establish with new ingredients and combinations coming out all the time, and some of the effects could be seen years and years down the track. We're being experimented on.

There's a good chance that in the 80s your biscuits had flour, butter, sugar and cocoa in them and not much more. Have a look at the packet now!

Sorry, I'm not entirely sure what you're saying here? In your original comment, you told another poster that it was 'factually incorrect' to say that a banana or apple costs less than a bag of crisps or a chocolate bar. It's not.

Now, I think you're talking about calories and affordability which is a different matter.
I'd need to eat a heck of a lot of crisps and chocolate to make myself feel full. In fact I'd probably make myself feel sick eating crisps and chocolate before I felt full. Not to mention the massive increase in the price of chocolate in the last few years (an average increase of 18% in one year). Who can afford to fill themselves up on chocolate?

Whilst Torres are pricy, I can still pick them up in the same aisle of the supermarket that I can buy a multipack of your aforementioned Walkers.
If I can buy something in the supermarket it feels to me unlikely that it is 'the best of anything'.

I checked this on the supermarket app we use. Here - a single banana costs almost twice what one of a multipack of crisps costs.

The reason I checked is because I once did a charity challenge to eat for $2 a day (based
on the amount a refugee gets) with a friend, it fascinated me that she thought brown rice, leafy green veg and fish would be the things to buy (as simple, nutritious etc) and was shocked she could not do it in that budget. Meanwhile I, who had lived on a very very tight budget through 11 years
of entirely self-funded university study found it very easy to make meals within the budget with the cheapest crappiest plain pasta etc.

So I know now that many people make sweeping unfounded statements about the relative costs of food they consider good and bad.

I'm always baffled by people's stupidity.
There's a sandwich chain called Subway which advertised itself as healthy. I remember a woman saying she wanted to improve her diet, but unfortunately there were no Subway shops near her - as though she was convinced that was her only option.

I notice you're using dollars so evidently you're not in the UK, and prices will be different.
I regularly buy a single banana for work. It's around 12 - 14p in Sainsburys dependent on size.
A 45g bar of Dairy Milk will cost you 95p.
The cheapest own brand multipack (6 bags) of crisps in my nearest supermarket is £1.10.
Six bananas at 14p each is 84p.
The bananas are much cheaper.
Yes they ripen too quickly if you don't store them correctly but then you can have banana bread which is delicious and can be cooked at the same time that you have your main meal in the oven.

factually incorrect to state that fresh food was ‘far cheaper’ than UPF. The cheapest fruit is cheaper than the less cheap processed food, but as a whole, UPF are cheaper than
fresh foods for ineluctable reasons which I won’t bore readers by repeating. I don’t think what I am saying is really that complicated or controversial: I am not advocating in favour of UPF but if there is no interventionist measures then capitalism will do its work.::

I have so many random thoughts to add. I don't think home cooked meals are without flaw. The vast majority of our meals were homemade. I grew up eating, and loving, every vegetable but they were all dripping in butter. They tasted lovely, but did not help my weight. I was also told that I had to clear my plate, even when I was full - because "there are starving children in Africa". This still has an impact on my life today (I don't tend to get the "belly is filling up" signal until it's too late and I almost feel sick). I don't make my kids clean their plates. When they tell me they're done, they're done.

Unfortunately, we were sold a lie. We were told that a "vesta curry" was the answer to the busy woman's prayers. A little extra help in the kitchen, and people found them handy. And, in truth the ready meals and products sold in the 70s/80s (not sure exactly when vesta arrived) were probably not too bad. But today's UPFs are highly addictive substances. They have been specifically engineered to make them taste as good and be as addictive as possible.

Also, we are a lot less active than we were (as a whole), and portion sizes are colossal!
In our local bakery, the cakes are so big that I struggle to eat even half. I think people don't realise the amount of calories that they're actually eating unless they're actively tracking them. It's eye opening.

I think there's almost too much availability of food also these days. There are takeaways, cafés, fast food restaurants on every corner and now you don't even have to leave your house, you can uber eats until your heart desires.

I can cook well. I've always been interested in food. I grew up in a food-oriented family, and watching jamie Oliver and devouring any cook books and magazines I could get my hands on. I was lucky to learn to bake with my Granny. Home Economics was not what it used to be, and not every person grew up like I did. I have a friend who has asked me to go to her house to show her how to cook because she was never shown how. I make things like curries (but add spinach and chickpeas), lasagne, gnocchi bakes with butternut squash, roasts, stirfries, Chinese takeaway dishes (such as chow mein, sweet and sour, chicken and cashew nuts, etc), fakeaway McDonald's sausage and egg bagels... cakes, biscuits, pies, confectionery.

Interestingly, my now-adult daughter hated that I cooked every night and would tell me that it was horrible to have to eat these home cooked meals every night and she was deprived, and why couldn't she have the 'good food' like her friends etc, etc. She had a boyfriend for a few months who would come round for dinner (his own mum didn't cook and he ended up eating takeaways every night), and he kept telling her how lucky she was that I cooked. You can't win!

I get what you're saying @BambinaCucina and I think it's partly because it's easy to conflate several issues;

-healthy vs unhealthy (in terms of the actual ingredients and macros)
-whole, real food vs industrial/UPF
-high calorie vs low calorie

Very few foods other than fresh, whole plants tick all those boxes, so which things do we prioritise?

Both parents work full time.

Loads more takeaways, it used to be you could only get a takeaway in the evening, now you can get breakfast, lunch, dinner, cakes and alcohol delivered until about 3am.

Ready meals are a thing.

Packed lunches used to be a sandwich and a piece of fruit, now they include yoghurt, and the fruit yoghurts are full of sugar, crisps, some form of UPF and a drink.

Immigration has an impact, both in terms of immigrants bringing their food and not knowing things in the supermarket that are healthy.

Poverty. If a school does have some form of cookery class then you need to buy the ingredients, and often something to put the final product in.

School breakfast clubs.

After school clubs, children used to be home from about 4pm, not necessarily to eat at that time but children did often eat earlier than they do now followed by playing out with friends.

Subjects that weren't measured by SATS or deemed 'essential' by OFSTED were squeezed out of the timetable. I noticed a big difference in the amount of cookery lessons between my oldest being at high school and my youngest 7 years later.

Making banana bread out of overripe bananas is missing the point, in fact a bit privileged. Someone on the borderline of food poverty is unlikely to have all the eggs, flour, sugar, dried fruit, equipment and baking tin. They will just either eat or leave the banana. Yes your thrifty granny might have done that but she would have been already set up for home baking.
It's very easy to be healthy and economical when you have a well equipped kitchen and plenty of cooking skills.