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!

Maybe funding should also be poured into mental health for children as well then? Taking away UPFs or making them unaffordable for the majority when some children would be in hospital without them is cruel without also offering support and that would be my concern as the support is currently poor and underfunded.

@Binus I have suggested much, much more than telling adults to stop snacking. I’ve suggested a whole raft of measures, including:

• a change in the “healthy eating” guidelines, to discourage UPF’s in favour of real food, and to discourage snacking
• a move from low fat as the default recommendation
• measures to make UPF less available, less visible and more expensive, e.g. plain packaging, advertising bans, limits on the number of outlets, bans on vending machines in certain locations (or what can be sold in them), sugar taxes etc.
• a change to the standards for the food provided in schools, hospitals and prisons
• subsidies for real food
• recognition of the addictive nature of sugar and other UPF’s and pointing people to help for that

None of these are “diets” as usually understood. Diets didn’t work for me, despite decades of effort. What did work for me was recognising my addiction and the resultant need to take sugar and most UPF’s out of my life, AND the support to enable me to do it.

I’ve managed to do that while living in our current food environment - but it would have been a hell of a lot easier to do if some of the measures I’ve listed had been in place.

And I’m not saying these things should happen instead of people using WLI’s. I’m saying they should be alongside - and that they would result in fewer people needing to use WLI’s.

If you’ve got time, https://openknowledge.fao.org/items/48b09e6f-bfee-4b80-a2d5-c24440c6d4a8 the information here is really interesting.

I don't object to these things, and even if your guess that they'd make fewer people need WLIs is incorrect, some of them could offer other potential benefits. My problem is when people try and misrepresent the state of the existing evidence. If you accept that this is additional to not a replacement for the proven success of WLIs, we've no quarrel.

Sausage and gammon are both treated with nitrates… proven carcinogens. So that simple food can cause cancer

I really haven’t said anything about the effectiveness of WLI’s. The state of play appears to be: they are effective for the vast majority who use them, and some (most) of those will need to stay on them long term to avoid regain. I have no problem with that, if people/society are willing to pay the price.

I also freely admit there is no direct evidence for the potential effectiveness for the public health measures I’ve suggested - for the simple reason they have never been tried. However, they are analogous to the whole raft of measures which, over the course of nearly 50 years, have reduced the rate of smoking from almost half to one in eight. So it’s reasonable to think they may also be effective in reducing obesity rates.

Out of interest, what proportion of the population do you think would be on WLI’s long term?

This sort of thinking is silly. Sausages or gammon now and again are not going to have a huge effect. There is too much of this all or nothing attitude with some people, and it leads others to develop anxiety and stress about eating, which should be a simple process.

Didn't say you had. You did play fast and loose with the evidence though, as you said the recent BMJ review indicated there was a lot to be said for a two pronged approach. When actually the little it said about other forms of support was that they made no difference. It must be clear, if you read it, that most of the things you want weren't covered at all by the review. I don't think people should take any evidence for the possible limitations of WLIs and argue this to be a point in favour of something else either untried or shown to fail.

Also dispute that they'd be analogous to anti smoking measures because so much of the public campaigning there centred on the impact to others. There isn't a good equivalent of passive smoking.

On the percentage, hard to say as I don't see it happening for a while yet. WLIs will need to get cheaper, the NHS be more set up to administer and also probably tablet form availability will make a difference too. The ethnic composition of the adult population will make a difference too. Then I expect there'll always be people who don't want to take them, they don't work for and who experience side effects that make the juice not worth the squeeze. But I'm open to the possibility that it might end up with the majority of adults on them at some point in their lives, or a substantial minority.

I have lots of thoughts on this topic and I think labelling and judging people is the opposite to what is needed to help shift a mindset and educate people! I try and feed my family well however I have one child with afrid- eating disorder so they consume a lot more UPF than I could ever want however we are trying to improve this obviously. I worry that school judge their lunch box, that people see what they eat and judge me as I have failed my child. My other children and myself generally eat well however there are a lot of UPF in our life without doubt from sauces and condiments to snacks even the advertised “ healthy” snacks !

Ah, you misunderstood what I said about the two-pronged approach, or perhaps I didn’t express myself clearly. The two-pronged approach was all my own idea, I didn’t mean to imply it was on the BMJ article.

For the public health measures - there is evidence that a low carb whole food based approach produces sustainable weight loss, when the dietary changes are maintained. There is a GP practice in Cumbria which has been offering this to their newly diagnosed type 2 diabetes patients, providing information about the carb content of food in an easily accessible form (teaspoons of sugar equivalent in a typical serving) and a group support setting. They have a high success rate in patients losing significant weight, maintaining that loss, and putting their diabetes into drug-fee remission. It is the basis of the Low Carb Program now being rolled out by the NHS - albeit patchily.

It’s not that diet (as distinct from “going on a diet”) doesn’t work. It’s that making sustainable change to diet is extremely difficult. How to provide the support so that more people can make the change is where the challenge lies.

I take your point about there being no direct equivalent to passive smoking. At the same time, I would contend that severe obesity does have a knock on effect on others around the person concerned. Not least - obesity in parents increases the risk of obesity in children. And while some of that is genetic, a bigger proportion of it is to do with the eating habits which are passed on. Although even saying that makes me worry about obese parents being guilt tripped, which is not what I would want to see happen at all. Obese people have enough stigma and shame to deal with already.

Yes, perhaps I too should be clearer in my wording in that it's not that traditional methods don't work in getting the weight off people. They just regain it. But this is the problem- formerly obese bodies don't behave like we want them to. Humans have undergone millennia of evolutionary pressure to gain and regain weight easily, because for most of us the ability to do this has been advantageous. Changing this would be a challenge indeed! It's actually quite plausible that WLIs are the only way for societies to reverse obesity rates.

I also think the guilt and shaming aspect of existing food and fat discourse do make this a totally different proposition from smoking. There is a very well established cultural context to all of this that we cannot opt out of. The stigma is there however well intentioned we are. It's a much harder proposition than smoking in that respect, which is one reason why WLIs are such an amazing prospect.

But I don't think you and I are broadly in disagreement here. We can roll out WLI access and try to rein in Big Food as well. The latter potentially has value beyond obesity rates, in any case.

When it comes to traditional methods, my problem was not that they stopped working, but that I couldn’t stick to them for long enough - I never once reached my goal weight, despite literally hundreds of attempts. But I am a binge eater, and it was that which got me. Not everyone has that issue.

My current weight loss journey - not my largest weight loss, or the lowest I’ve got to, but the one which has lasted the longest - began two years ago. It was prompted by a seriously high diabetes number and the nurse adding a third anti-diabetes medication to my list. If, instead of offering me another tablet, she had suggested I try WLI, I might well have given it a go. As it happens, one of the meds I was already on was a GLP-1 mimic, although one formulated for diabetes rather than weight loss. I had been on it 5 years. When I started on it there was some initial weight loss in the first couple of months, of which about a half came back over the next few months (while still on it). Net loss was about 10lb, and when you’re over 20 stone that doesn’t make much difference. It was mere noise in the swings which were caused by my binge eating.

Ironically, a few months later, my Trulicity became impossible to obtain, in part because of the increased demand for the injector pens as a result of the licensing of semaglutide for weight loss. But it turned out well for me, because it made me double down on my efforts and add fasting to my regime. And that required me to accept a lot of uncomfortable truths about myself.

Between January 2024 and January 2025 I lost 4st 8lb.
Between January 2025 and January 2026 I lost a further 4lb.

There’s more to it than that, of course. But I do believe that, for me, something has radically shifted.

I hear, and respect, people saying that WLI are not an easy fix. People still have to do the work of changing their eating habits, even though the WLI help enormously by turning off the food noise.

For me, reducing carbs and UPF turned the food noise down quite a bit, as that deals with the physical hunger aspects very well. This style of eating increases GLP-1 secretion, reduces insulin, and influences other hormones in a way which make our natural appetite control systems work better against overconsumption.

But it did nothing for the emotional and situational (habit) drivers of my overeating. I had to find other things for that - a mix of psychology, community support, and more recently a Twelve Step programme

I am like an alcoholic. Getting sober is not easy, because they have a physical craving for alcohol, perpetuated by the regular intake of alcohol. If they can stop drinking and get through how ever many days it takes, then the physical craving leaves them. But the mental compulsion to drink remains, and has to be dealt with by other means.

Not everyone is like me with the mental compulsion part. But I believe many people re like me with the physical craving in response to UPF’s.

Not wishing to jump on a bandwagon but I genuinely believe UPF are at the heart of many weight issues - they are addictive just like nicotine and alcohol. I'm overweight and I do eat some UPF although I'm trying to reduce them sensibly so I'm not just pointing the finger.

It feels like a massive conspiracy to make us all fat then sell us drugs to make us thin again. Nobody is looking at why this stuff is bad for us and why so many of us need the 'comfort' of food so badly.

It's also concerning how many people with food issues will/can only eat UPF - that can't be good for someone already having problems although I take on board the points about consistency of flavour etc.

It's a mess, and as mentioned previously, a mess that other European countries dont seem to have. It makes me sad that we have such an unhealthy relationship with food.

It's a mess, and as mentioned previously, a mess that other European countries dont seem to have. It makes me sad that we have such an unhealthy relationship with food.

I actually think that some European countries are sadly starting to catch up on the UPF front. I’ve noticed that over the past ten years there are far more UPFs in French supermarkets than ever before - frozen pizzas, ready meals, pre-packaged sandwiches etc. There has also been an explosion of McDonalds, Burger Kings and KFCs in recent years, whereas you’d struggle to find one outside of a big city ten years ago.

When I was young there were less fat people BUT a lot more people smoked. People have always used something as an emotional crutch. (Not everyone but a section of the population.)

There was an 18th-century philosopher Edmund Burke, who said, “Under the pressure of the cares and sorrows of our mortal condition men have at all times called in some physical aid to their moral consolations.”

In the 18th century there was the gin craze which caused huge problems

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gin_Craze

The victorians took lots of drugs

wellcomecollection.org/articles/W87wthIAACQizfap

You would be amazed at the lack of education many people - usually poorer, less educated people - have around food and nutrition. I thought everyone knew about 5 a day, about the importance of eating a wide and varied range of fruit and veg, about what a rough portion size would be. They really don't. What seems obvious to many of us isn't to all.

UPFs are foods with weird, chemical ingredients added to them. Not fruit and veg that has been washed and peeled!

You’re right that people have always used things to enable them to cope with the challenges of life. The trick is to find coping mechanisms which are benign or even positive, rather than harmful.

Easier said than done. But possible.

Which period in history has that ever happened though?

We are animals at the end of the day. A dog for example does not ration itself.

Well it’s happening all the time, but for only a minority of people. People swap their preferred coping mechanism for another which is less harmful - think vaping instead of smoking.

Dogs don’t limit themselves, and you’re right, we are animals. But we also have a frontal cortex which gives us the ability to learn how our lower brain is driving our behaviour and find ways to circumvent or rewire it.

A lot of people have managed to give up alcohol, drugs, gambling, sugar…. you name it, someone somewhere has managed to kick it, in favour of something which doesn’t harm them to the same extent.

Sorry I meant solely about food

Fags, booze, drugs you dont have to interact with but we have to eat, you cant avoid it

Gotcha.

Well, I’m in Overeaters Anonymous, and this is our stock in trade. We have to eat - so we identify any specific foods and food behaviours which are problematic for us, and aim to stop consuming/doing them. We continue with the foods and behaviours which are healthful, possibly adding others that we weren’t using before.

Identifying the harmful ones is not a trivial task, but you have to start somewhere. So you start with the most obvious ones, and go from there. For me, it´s sugar, crisps and similar salty snack foods, peanut butter, and eating between meals.

And then you have to replace them with something better. There are numerous possibilities of what that might be. For the food side, I make sure that my plates are full enough of good stuff at meal times that I am truly physically satisfied and can’t use being hungry as an excuse to put some of the problematic stuff in my mouth, And for the rest - when I’m agitated, I am learning to sit with my feelings, rather than eat to push them away. I make phone calls, I journal, I knit, I read, I meditate.

I’ve only been in for six months, but there are some who have been abstaining from their problematic foods and food behaviours for decades.

I think it could only really change in a shame-based society. At least, this was how it worked in Asia. People are super open about their opinions on your weight. They definitely comment if you gained weight. It’s something your boss would mention and it wouldn’t be seen as overstepping. Overweight people are negatively stereotyped. Just no comparison with the West on this.

I don’t think it’s good tbh—or at least, I don’t prefer that on a social level, which is why I’d prefer cheap, lifelong GLP-1s

People really forget that smoking was very negatively stereotyped in a way that obesity is not.

Interestingly, obesity rates are also on the rise in several East and South East Asian countries too. Japan, Thailand, Vietnam, South Korea and the Philippines are all increasing. To the extent that shaming worked as a societal strategy, that's on the wane.

Well I was subject to shaming for my weight for over 50 years and it did bugger all to bring about useful change. I vehemently disagree that it’s a good strategy- it may work on a few people, but that is far outweighed by the damage it does.