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!

@CremeEggsForBreakfast I agree regarding cooking out onions and slices, but I think they did taste tests on browning meat and found it didn’t actually impact flavour.

I have an insta pot which has paid for itself many times over. I turn on the sautee function and heat a little oil in it while I chop the onions for whatever I’m making. I often use a mini chopper so that is very quick. I then soften / brown those off with the spices for the dish and then the tomato puree while I’m prepping the other vegetables. Then I shove everything else in that’s going in the dish and leave it to pressure cook for an hour.

But, it’s a skill you have to learn. DH will happily chop the vegetables and then wait for the kettle to boil and then heat up oil in a pan. Doing every consecutively instead of concurrently makes the cooking process take a huge amount longer. Jamie’s ten minute meals or whatever they were, often weren’t ten minutes but did teach the need to use time wisely. Get the kettle on, get the oil heating, get things going as quickly as possible.

But the thrift granny would have bought essentials like cooking equipment ahead of all else. Now people would not prioritise a baking tin ahead of a more desirable item.

It's mostly culture and education.

The poorest people in the Asian & African countries are not eating nuggets and chips

I agree and don't we all get into bad habits at some point in life?

My first childhood home was a caravan. My parents didn't drive. The nearest public transport was the train station two miles away. We weren't just poor, we were rural poor. We didn't have the privilege of letting anything go to waste.

As a result of this thread, I have just watched the programmes. I don't think there is much more to add nutritionally but the presenters are incredibly irritating and patronising, and the couples are so much nicer.

Look at us all here with access to the internet.

Why assume, if someone has the interest, they are unable to search how to cook a particular something ?

I didn’t really give much thought to this until one week when a local was asking in a local fb group who was the best eye brow threading business around.

within a couple of days later and on an adjoining community thread, she was asking for donations of food/money.

people might not know ‘how’ to do something, but generally they know how to use the internet to find what they seek.

its about priorities. For those who say they don’t know how to cook…

I don’t know, people get themselves into bad eating habits for all sorts of reasons, I am sure it’s more complex than them not being arsed. When I met DH (albeit a very long time ago) I couldn’t cook at all, well I could but it wasn’t a priority for me so I never bothered.

these days with DC (older) we always cook from scratch and both work full time, because it most definitely is a priority for us that we try to eat as healthily as we can. We are a vegetarian family, always have been and I am now vegan which also would raise eyebrows with some MNers. I feed and prepare the food I think is right for my family which I am sure is what we all do.

Interestingly though my daughter, who is off to uni and been bought up on home cooked food can’t wait to get to there and live on a diet of ready meals 😂

No the poorest people in Asia and Africa are eating 85%+ cereals (rice and things like sorghum/amaranth). The vast majority of deaths due to / linked to Protein Energy Malnutrition are from the very poor in Asia and Africa. 800k under 5s die with it each year.

Dont imagine that the poor in these nations are eating healthy, home cooked meals. They are starving to death without access to anything but the most limited diets.

Individual choices alone haven't reduced overweight and obesity in 40 years. Only sustained UK government action can change the environment at scale. Key steps:

• Boost school activity — fund PE and play in state schools to support children’s health and confidence.
• Tighten food regulation — limit sugar and ultra‑processed foods; curb aggressive industry lobbying and imports of highly processed products from the USA etc
• Improve public transport — reduce car use by investing in reliable, affordable networks.
• Limit fast‑food density — let local authorities cap outlets, especially in deprived areas.
• Expose true costs — make the economic and health burden of obesity public.

Relying on individual willpower or mass medical fixes like weight loss injections is not a sustainable solution. Most experts are skeptical about sustainability of weight loss injections at population level. Rightly so.

I think the ' poorest people' narrative isnt helpful either in Africa or Asia or here is helpful. Yes, there are very poor people in Africa and Asia and there are people here without kitchens and who cant afford flour but they dont have problems solvable by watching a telly programme on UPF's. The majority of people eating bad diets have kitchens. They just need help getting out of a rut and being taught how to cook. There are many people in Africa and Asia who arent starving to death. They traditionally cook with local ingredients, foods that their bodies are developed over generations to deal with. Once they get more affluent and reject traditional foods in return for 'western' foods, marketed to them aggressively by Coca Cola, McDonalds, Unilever etc ( often because they are pushed out of countries with better regulation) it leads to huge increases in diabetes and obesity, far faster than in the West, as the risk of diabetes in Black and Asian populations kicks in at a far, far lower BMI, draining precious resources from those countries. A lot of the time, the 'what about people who dont have kitchens' is used to shut down discussion and is unhelpful.

I’m not going to judge. We have no idea what else the family is battling. My DH and I work full time, both have MH challenges, I have a chronic illness and one of my two DC is autistic and struggles with lots of things. The load is mostly left to me day to day. I hate cooking and prepping food and the children are increasingly fussy. So it’s the thing that has lapsed. They don’t eat nuggets every night but will have beans and scrambled egg on toast, a fridge buffet and pesto/Passatta pasta much more than is ideal. There would be a lot of pearl clutching at our weekly menu. People like this need support, skills and kindness, not our judgement.

😂😂😂🤣

@FurForksSake i think you’re smashing it. Nothing wrong with that

Thee is nothing wrong with any of those things though. They arent 2 bars of aero a night!

Relying on individual willpower or mass medical fixes like weight loss injections is not a sustainable solution

Ready access to GLP-1s is probably the most sustainable solution, if we are being totally honest.

Unfortunately, a January 2026 Oxford University study published in the British Medical Journal shows that reliance on weight loss injections is not sustainable. The study from 9000 people showed that stopping weight‑loss injections (e.g., Wegovy, Mounjaro) means regain of about 0.8 kg/month—four times faster than those stopping diet/exercise (0.3 kg/month. People in the study often returned to their baseline within 18 months and blood pressure and cholesterol also reverted. This indicates that at a population level without either changing the environment or funding the required support e.g. dieticians, nutritionists, physical support most people unlikely to realise meaningful change. Policy makers just need to listen to the experts and do whats beneficial to the health and wellbeing of the nation. Are we going to keep large swathes of the population permanently on weight loss medication?

This doesn't surprise me at all!
The manufacturers of these drugs are laughing. The people who use them have two choices, either keep paying the money every month or suffer the consequences of being obese all your life.
The fast food industry will never stop making highly addictive food-like substances which most of us are unable to resist, and so thanks to them the glp1 manufacturers will never run out of customers.
It's a racket.

What you're doing here is taking a known scientific conclusion and then adding things that weren't there. The review indicated that those on WLIs are likely to regain the weight if they stop taking them. There are some limitations, ie most of the studies they looked at weren't the new generation of drugs, and some of it was actually modelling rather than observation. But the broad conclusion, that WLI drugs don't work if you don't take them, wasn't surprising.

However, everything you've written after 'also reverted' is supposition, and wasn't in the review.

In fact, the BMJ review doesn't actually indicate anything at all about whether 'changing the environment or funding the required support e.g. dieticians, nutritionists, physical support' will be effective. There is, in fact, no evidence that any of this will work at tackling obesity on a population level.

That's not to say policy change couldn't do any good things. It's better that people be obese and more active than obese and less active, for example. But it remains the case, however unpalatable, that the only example of a country successfully reducing obesity rates (outside starvation situations) is the US recently. That coincided with the population being able to access WLI. The pp was right, reliance on willpower doesn't work.

I've got two black bananas I really should make into banana bread but I'm most likely gonna throw it in the bin

Just chuck them in a smoothie or mash up with cinnamon. Going black doesn’t make them need to be baked.

Except you’ve forgotten the point of that ‘racket’ which is that the majority of WLI users generally would have remained obese without them. WLI mean they can pay and not be obese… the decision isn’t between being slim through willpower and being slim through WLI. The decision is between being slim and taking WLI or being obese.

Of course you’re right that most average inhabitants of Asia and Africa have home cooked diets. I was simply addressing the comment on the ‘poorest people’ as though they were in some kind of dietary bliss. Not deadly malnutrition.

Same.

Gone off bananas just get thrown away because no one will eat banana bread etc so it would just get chucked anyway.

Have you tried banana fritters? Mash them, mix in egg and flour until itsca very thick gloopy batter and fry. Quick and tasty! I dont like banana bread!