Can someone help with healthy options please, ie butter or flora?

[greenbananas29]

So I'm wanting to make some changes to our food shop.
I've swapped my milk to organic milk.
We usually have countrylife spreadable or anchor butter, but is Flora better for you? It's such a mine field 🤦🏻‍♀️
Any other swaps you recommend please? Thanks

what is it you are actually trying to achieve?

organic milk is not healthier for you than normal milk.

flora is edible spreadable plastic and definitely not healthier.

what do you think you mean by eating healthy?

Butter is my first choice every time. For flavour and for health reasons.
Have a look into UPFs and see how margarine stands with them.

Well there's lots of different ways you can improve the quality of your food shop but obviously some of those changes may come at a cost. The biggest one IMHO is to avoid sugary or processed food as much as possible and steer your family's diet towards more whole/unprocessed food. I really don't know if switching between different brands of spread is going to turn the dial much..

Flora - highly processed, tastes horrible, cannot be used in cooking
Butter - natural product, tastes fantastic, can be used in cooking

Fat is good for you.
No brainer

Thanks for the replies.
I have no idea I'm just trying to swap things that may be more healthier!
I assumed organic milk would be better and have no chemicals or anything in 🙈
Interesting that a few have said about sticking with good old butter, when you look at flora it tries to sell it to you with all the omega stuff etc

You're wasting money on organic milk and always, always use real butter. Any of those fake butters are absolute shit, both in taste and for your body.

I buy margarine because my son has a dairy free diet and he finds it acceptable

Buy foods that haven’t been processed in a factory heavily.
Thats it!
Butter, fruit, veg, good quality meat, free range eggs, nuts, fish = good
Margarine, bread, pasta, highly processed and sugary things, bad.

I don't buy organic milk but are there anima welfare benefits to organic ?

Do you just not eat bread or pasta or is there a healthy alternative?

Flora can be used for cooking. However it a revolting. Butter every time - block.not spreadable stuff, just leave the butter out of the fridge, it tastes so much better. Just eat unprocessed food & plenty of vegetables.

Its not at all clear OP what you are trying to achieve by being 'healthier'? Less chemicals, less fat, less calories, less processing???

I'd choose real butter every time. You can even make it yourself with cream and a blender! Next to no processing involved at all! I haven't used margarine for years.

Use butter every time. Flora has been promoted as being a good way of lowering cholesterol, but if you read Dr. Malcolm Kendrick's books, you will learn that dietary cholesterol is not very important, as cholesterol is mainly produced in the liver. If your body has too little cholesterol, the liver makes more, and if your body has too much, the liver compensates by producing less.

any farmers selling milk to any of the big dairies will be red tractor assured and the rules for that are extremely high and rigourous. We are talking a fail for there even being a cobweb in the milking parlour.

in this country cows are fed primarily silage and concentrated feed which is pellets made out of leftover stuff from arable crop processing. They also eat lots of 'wonky' veg and things brewers grains (waste product from breweries). Cows producing organic milk eat the organic versions of these rather than the normal versions.

the cows don't care if what they eat is organic or not.

cows producing organic milk also have longer withdrawal periods on medications when they are given them. Again the redd tractor standards are already very stringent on this so the additional organic standards are a bit unnecessary.

but people are prepared to pay for it based on horror stories about milk, growth hormones etc from the USA which just aren't relevant in this country because those practices just don't happen anyway here.

'Healthier' these days now seems to mean a diet low in ultra processed foods, ie no more than 20% of calories.

The podcast series about it was very interesting

www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0017tcz/episodes/player

What convinced me was an experiment where they compared two groups of people that ate a diet that was the same in terms of calories and macro and micronutrients but one was mostly unprocessed and the other mostly ultra processed and the processed group gained much more weight. It seems it's all the additives that causes the problem.

In terms of bread, almost all supermarket bread is ultraprocessed but there's a new sourdough thats becoming more widely available
Bertinet. I heard about it on the BBC food programme.

However, it's £2 for a small loaf and only really good for toast, even when fresh, it wouldn't make nice sandwiches. I think if you want to be healthier, you want to avoid bread being a significant part of your diet, which means having something other than sandwiches for packed lunches.

Organic milk is potentially better for you/the environment because it is produced using fewer chemicals/less medication etc....at the end of the day though, it's still milk, I'm not sure the benefit there is measurable.

General guide really is to buy the least messed about with food. Butter is better than marg because it's just churned cream. Anything processed or treated with chemicals is worse for you. Natural foods are best. Natural fats, fruit and veg, not too many carbs. Drink lots of water. Don't get sucked into marketing 😊

Thank you for the replies guys it's really helpful.
Apart from eating plenty of fruit and veg and drinking water there's so much I don't know about healthy eating I need to educate myself.
So ham sandwiches are a no then 😂
Any healthy dinner ideas?

Thats interesting about milk, I always thought organic is better if you can afford it (our income is variable so I’ll buy it when I can, but not always).

I keep meaning to try and make my own spreadable butter - just butter, salt and oil apparently: mobile.twitter.com/nancybbakes/status/1411565469602091008/mediaViewer

Define what you mean by healthy?

do you mean 'nourishing for your body' or do you mean 'will I lose weight eating this and things like this'?

today I had a delicious sandwich made with thin slices of salty silverside beef still slightly pink in the middle left over from the roast we had on Tuesday nigh. It was made with co-op sourdough ciabatta rolls (not UPF for anyone interested), loads of home grown salad leaves and a big dollop of sliced pickled sweet red onions. It was delicious and nutritious. I ate whole punnet of cherry tomatoes on the side of it.

Will I lose weight eating things like that every dinner time? Nope

will my body have received a good dose of lots of nutrients from a wide range of food types. Yes

Was it delicious and made me happy - thus improving my mental health? Abso-fucking-loutly.

Haha PastaBest 😂 love your comment
So healthy as in we need to give our diets a shake up, we eat a lot of foods 'for ease' ie hams in sandwiches, sausages, etc.
I just want to be more healthy but don't know where to start, it's more of a nutrition thing more than a weight loss diet. Eating the right foods etc.
I'm struggling doing my shop because DS likes a good old ham sandwich.

I think it can be more about adding things in, like a big mixed salad and have it with a smaller sandwich. Eat as many single ingredient foods as you can with a variety of veg, eg a chicken traybake with onion, tomato, pepper, spinach and only add in as much carbohydrate eg potato as you need so you're not hungry. Butter every time - it's good for you!

Make your own bread. Add lots of seeds to it. Or nuts. Or oats. Use different flours.

I make lots of different breads now, rarely ever knead. Keep dough in the fridge & make flour tortillas fresh.

Sourdough is fun too.

Bake with Jack on YouTube. 😁👌

And yeah, butter.

If a product has more than 5 ingredients most of which you can't spell, swerve.

Life is miserable enough - get butter.

There’s nothing more healthy with “organic” products over others, it’s purely marketing.

There’s also not really such a thing as an “unhealthy” food, it’s the overall diet which matters.

What’s wrong with your current diet? Too many calories, not enough fibre, too little variety?