How do you cut out ultra processed food from your diet?

[Mariayves]

Ultra processed people was a brilliant, yet very infuriating read. I'm determined to make a change for my family and to cut out UPFs from our diet. I'm working full time and I can't cook from scratch every single day, so at the moment I'm focusing on shopping UPF-free as much as I can. Found this brilliant list of products that helped me a lot https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61551827109379

Would love to hear what others are doing.

@LizzieSiddal
sounds lovely! Are you able to share your bread recipe?
I've also made bread a few times, the prep/kneading takes less than I'd expected.

I don't feel it's possible or realistic to cut all UPF out for me- but I keep them to a minimum. Also processed meat- I have bacon about once a month or less and sausages twice a month. I don't eat a lot of meat generally though chicken breast is a very useful, filling and tasty lean protein. I have chocolate once a week and about two bags of crisps a week. Alcohol I generally average 5-10 units a week. I count everything on Nutracheck so it's a fairly accurate reflection. When I have starchy carbs I have the high fibre kind and try and have 25-30g fibre a day and my carbs are generally 100g-150g a day. I think for me fibre is more important than protein re filling and satiating foods. Apart from chicken and eggs, I could eat meat, fish, tofu and cheese until it comes out of my ears so it is not filling for me! Also nuts- have to be really moderate with them. I do have plenty of protein but like 80g-100g most days, not the 120g or 150g some trainers and nutritionists recommend.

Cutting things out entirely just makes me want them more. I went mad after I did a very low carb diet once, bingeing on everything I hadn't been allowed before. What I do is cook from scratch 5 nights a week, one night we have a takeaway and another night we have something I shove in the oven like veggie burgers or prepared chicken. I eat well more than 5 a day of veg, lots of green veg. A little fruit but not much - pears are brilliant for fibre.

What we eat is not haute cuisine, it's things like lentil spag bol, stir fries, jacket potatoes and curries, mostly veggie but without using packet or jar sauces. Most things take me half an hour.

Even when say I have a takeaway I tend to have things like chicken shish kebab which has a ton of salad with it or tempura prawns and stir fried broccoli, and I have half a sachet of wholegrain rice with things rather than restaurant white rice so it's not generally a diet disaster.

We are never going to eradicate it (well not aiming to). but have taken steps to reduce it from our diets. One of the key ways we've done it is with a bread maker as we have bread every day and I gather bread is one of the worst offenders. It's pretty easy to make a loaf every other day, DS helps. I switched shop bought yoghurts in their packed lunches to Greek yoghurt and frozen fruit, and make a batch of flapjacks on the weekend for packed lunches (assuming syrup is UPF though?!) and they have overnight oats for breakfast. I try to cook from scratch most meals, but do tend to have something like old El Paso once a week, condiments, still have crisps etc. So we are much better than we were, but not striving for perfection!

Oh and we have cut out ham (use to do ham sandwiches a lot) next step is bacon and sausages, we have those 1-2 times a week so really need to reduce that.

I have to say I don't worry about bread too much- it is a brilliant convenience food, the saying "the best thing since sliced bread" is there for a reason.

I tend to just eat this kind though and only two slices a day. It adds a quarter to a fifth of my daily fibre and is not particularly carby being a small loaf. Also as I only eat a small amount it's important that it lasts pretty well.

https://www.sainsburys.co.uk/gol-ui/product/sainsburys-soft-multiseed-wholemeal-taste-the-difference-430g

I was listening to a podcast that said bread was one of the worst (worst in what respects I don't know?!) but we mostly eat white bread which likely doesn't help, the seeded breads also seem very expensive for what they are.

But yes the slicing is pretty annoying, need a new gadget for that aspect, the smell is amazing though! And we also use it for pizza dough once a week, and have used it to make jam.

I think bread is bad in that lots of people rely on it perhaps too much as a staple and we should probably be eating more variety and certainly more veg. And lots of people are eating plain white processed bread with very little fibre.

For me I think fibre is underrated and the processing is a little overstated. The same people often harp on about bread, potatoes and pasta being bad but then in the same breath recommend artificial protein sources like fake meat and protein powder.

Yes, of course bread is processed, chorleywood or not, when you think about the number of activities which have gone into it from growing the wheat to putting it on the table. If you did it all from scratch yourself then you'd have burned the calories before you ate it!

The thing is I used to have a breadmaker and hated the wholemeal bread it made and it's just a faff too far for me, for something I eat very little of anyway. There is nowhere locally which sell good fresh high fibre bread, so supermarket it is.

Plus fresh white bread may be less processed but often sends my stomach off anyway, I just don't digest it very well- so it's all about the fibre and gut health and not processing when it comes to bread, for me.

If you are using golden syrup, yes, but there are other syrups that are only processed rather than ultraprocessed. You could also use honey or various other substitutes.

Yes agree it's relied on too much. I only eat whole meal bread now, I didn't like whole meal shop bought bread (much) but love the Panasonic seeded bread recipe so that's all I eat now. Family aren't converted though!

@ReadRum thank you, I will take a look. I switched our peanut butter to the proper stuff which has helped with breakfast!

Lidl always seem to have interesting fresh loaves and if you have the app you get a free one when you've spent a certain amount each month. I am aware these are not equivalent to a loaf from an artisan bakery but I wonder if they're a step up from bagged, chorleywood white bread? 🤔

I have a great recipe for wholemeal soda bread which doesn't require all the kneading and rising. I don't make it any more because I don't tend to run my oven but it was very nice. More of an accompaniment bread than a sandwich or toasting bread, as I recall.

@KevinHoho Not everything you listed here are upf. Some are processed, which is Nova 3 and not ultra processed Nova 4. You need to do more research before cutting out the things you listed.

We've just switched to this as well!

I rarely eat bread but when I do it's ciabatta (olive oil, usually not ultra processed) or this.

What do you have instead of ham?

@Riverlee cheese or chicken salad usually.

I'm baking when I can, so bread for the bread bin & freezer and homemade treats for the kids in the tins. If you do it once a week (like my grandma used to), it's not an onerous task. Realising that meals don't need to be standard fare like chili, spag bol, pizza, beige-ness etc when we don't have time, we're eating more omelette or soups (from the freezer) - my partner had just done ZOE so we've got even more limitations. I think if you're buying largely non upf in your weekly shop then your can't really go wrong.

I'm still struggling with chocolate though... And eating whilst traveling is really difficult

Is dark chocolate (e.g. 80/90%) a UPF?

I work full time and still cook a meal every evening. It's not that difficult.

You could start by having one UPF meal a week for a month then move to two, three etc over a period of months to get used to thinking and cooking that way gradually.

But basically it's easy. Don't buy anything that contains ingredients other than the thing that you want to eat.

Most chocolate contains soya lecithin, which is used to make the chocolate making process easier. You can get so small batch artisan chocolate that only contains cocoa mass, cocoa butter and sugar. I'm still eating chocolate, but less of it, the research on emulsifiers is still ongoing but it's expected to have negative impacts on the microbiome

@snowgal @waistchallenge while all milk chocolate seems to have emulsifiers, some dark chocolate (e.g. Lindt excellence 75 or 80%) is emulsifier free.

Microbiome versus chocolate? I'll take the chocolate.

And after all those teenage years of depriving myself of chocolate because that was supposed to be bad for my complexion and eating nice healthy cheese... until years later I found out that my skin reacts strongly to cheese and not at all to chocolate, you can keep "expecting". I'll wait for proven.

I eat squares of green and blacks, admittedly a tad too much at the moment. I switched to 85% to try to dissuade me - didn't work!

It's excellent for the micro biome as is a plant food and I think fermented.

Spector and Mosely say yeay! 👍

I have other reasons for avoiding emulsifiers so am very happy with my one square of dark chocolate! (It still counts as one square if you have four squares in the right formation, yes?)

I eat half a bag of Twirl bites at the weekend- you would have to prise that out of my cold, dead hands to swap it for anything.