Ultra-Processed People

[Fairislefandango]

Anyone read this? I'm currently listening to it as an audiobook and it's really enlightening, if depressing! After spending years on and off various diets and ending up back where I started, I'm thinking that cutting out UPF is the only sane thing left to try.

Natural sugars and fats are fine though. It is the ultra-processed stuff such as HFCS that is the issue. I'd say this book is likely to be on the right track, especially as there are numerous studies on how back to basics is healthier than going through each fad diet, one after another, in an attempt to be healthy.

I’m gonna buy the book!

Here’s an amazing, tasty, simple breakfast (no crunch though). Though I have made my own crunch granola in the past - coat with oil and put in the oven. I could do without the calories at the moment though.

Anyway, porridge with chia seeds and bananas:-

Soak porridge oats and chia seeds (protein) in water or water/milk mix for 10 - 20 minutes. Both expand a lot. Add chopped banana. Microwave for 2 - 4 minutes roughly. It’s very tasty. The chia seeds add a nutty flavour and the cooked banana is lovely.

Bread has been the easiest for me.

I bought a cheap breadmaker in a charity shop for £20. It's now part of my evening routine to chuck in the ingredients and set the timer.

Not slimming though, I'm confident I could eat a loaf a day...

Yourapplepie what yeast do you use? I need to find one without emulsifiers

But there's been some very good quality scientific studies (by Kevin Hall) that have compared food intakes over a period that have been the same in terms of calories and carb/protein/fat ratios and the only difference being naturally made vs UPF and there was a significant difference in weight gain/loss and health outcomes (blood pressure, cholesterol etc). This shit is literally killing us all.

But it's not necessary to cut out UPFs completely, if we can make it less than 20% of our food intake, it's good enough.

I want to read this book, but I recently listened to the podcast of a Guardian long read:

https://www.theguardian.com/news/audio/2023/may/17/from-the-archive-how-ultra-processed-food-took-over-your-shopping-basket-podcast

and I previously listened to the Thorough Examination podcast.

A couple of interesting points from the Guardian podcast were that Governments in some South American countries are obviously more enlightened and less under the influence of Big Food and are advising their citizens to eat fewer UPFs.

There's also a scientist in Brazil who's leading work into categorising food into 4 groups (Nova) and it's group 4, UPFs that we need to avoid.

Interestingly he has noticed a big reduction in the amount of sugar people in Brazil buy, but he's concluded that the people who are still buying sugar are the more healthy people, not because sugar itself has any goodness in it, but because it belongs to a person who cooks. Data suggested to him that the households who were still buying sugar were also the ones who were still making the old Brazilian dishes such as rice and beans so ate fewer UPFs.

This website also looks very useful

https://world.openfoodfacts.org/

Something I've always wondered and now need to look into. If we make our own bread using 'normal' flour and dried yeast from the supermarket, along with butter/olive oil and salt is this good enough or does the flour and/or yeast have nasty ingredients in that we're trying to avoid.

Must do more reading.

I found that supermarket yeast contains emulsifiers, so I bought some from Amazon that is pure dried yeast, emulsifier free. That’s the only thing to look out for with home baking bread, AFAIK!

The scientist talking about it on R4 was saying that she believes it's the tip of the iceberg at the moment and that the research going to come out is going to make us all questions how much food industry you previously and how it's allowed to continue. But that it will take a huge cultural shift and legislative change a bit like smoking before people change their dietary habits. Companies like nestle do research into making UPF more addictive. They are some seriously malevolent people who will do anything to make money.

@colachive It has never occurred to me that the yeast I've been buying would have any additional ingredients. I've just checked every yeast brand on Ocado and they all have additives. Thanks for the heads up. I'll seek out some pure yeast. Can you still use it as 'fast action' yeast?

I'm reading this at the moment - it is very sobering! I'm starting to think about what can be cut out and how. I cook from scratch a lot for dinner but lunch and breakfast are always a bit more of an issue.

I do however make bread (well, put ingredients in a breadmaker). I bulk buy flour and yeast from Shipton Mill and that yeast appears to be as good as it gets https://www.shipton-mill.com/products/organic-dried-yeast-500g

Surely ultra processed food is the new "fad" and non-upf food is just . . . food?

I feel what is faddish is labelling things like that.

Sure, some people prefer to cook from scratch today and in the past. A more recent development has been the option of processed food.

Just seems like people are trying to make money out of our obsession with what we eat by writing books/giving interviews etc on what they call "ultra processed food". That is the new enemy. If we could all just cook from scratch we would be slim & healthy... maybe

@ReallyShouldBeDoingSomethingElse i know, it’s infuriating! I felt the same about stock cubes. So here is the yeast I use, Organic Bioreal yeast, works great in my bread maker: https://amzn.eu/d/eOjdlZn

I don't think we eat much UPF really. Not through any particular resolution, but just through how we tend to prefer tp eat. Are there things that we are probably eating regularly that it hasn't occurred to me are UPF? DH bakes almost all our bread.

There is a huge difference between processed food and UPF. Processed food - cheese, pasta, flour - we have consumed for centuries if not thousands of years.

The UPF we’re talking about consists of brand new molecules, often waste products from other industries, that have not been part of the human diet until the last 50 years - which have effectively replaced our traditional food culture, and reduced our quality of life. These things are unknown chemicals and their effects on our bodies are just starting to be understood, hence the wave of new information.

no one is saying that you need to cut out processed food, or never have a chocolate bar or a ready meal again, or spend hours chained to the cooker. It’s simply that eating large quantities of this synthetic mush is catastrophic for our health. As those on this thread can attest, reducing it has a huge impact.

it’s not a fad, the message is simply: eat real food

Perhaps the message needs to be a bit clearer if the intention is to reach the masses about what are the worst "enemies" people should avoid in food. Obviously, we are a long way away from giving up all processed food, including ready meals, that market is huge. And you are saying that is not the message, though I thought it was.
So - what is the message? Without expecting the whole population to read one particular book or wade through loads of information, because most people realistically won't. Most people won't buy organic flour let alone bake their own bread. Most people can't afford special bread from Waitrose or Gail's.

I'm not talking about myself necessarily, I can afford it and I read a lot, but you have to think about the population as a whole. So what are the main things we should avoid?

I think we need to clearly label all UPFs as such alongside the other nutritional information, so we can see at a glance what we should be avoiding.

Hopefully this will encourage manufacturers to reformulate to merely 'processed' foods to avoid losing sales. one can dream

I haven’t read it all yet. But I think the authors don’t proclaim to know all the answers to everything as it all needs more research. He does say that people shouldn’t feel bad about what they eat. Their intention isn’t that they expect everyone to start cooking everything from scratch. They acknowledge that this all takes so much time, effort and money. And that upf food is so ingrained in to society that it is almost impossible to avoid. I think he is raising awareness and hoping if more people put pressure on the government to make changes then slowly things may be able to change.

That sounds like a good idea. I have no idea what the difference is between processed and Ultra processed food. Labelling certain things as UPF would help people to make healthier choices (at least some of the time) like we currently do with salt, sugar & fat on packaged food.

@Twiglets1 i agree, it’s a quagmire and really the effort needs to come from government to start banning the most harmful additives. It’s a tall ask for individuals to remove it from their diet completely, because it’s all around us - it’s impossible to get a lunch option on the high street without chemicals, unless you get fruit and cheese!

A few to look out for - emulsifiers, especially Polysorbate 80, as they damage the gut (made rats’ guts bleed in testing). Some emulsifiers are better than others but they all act as detergent for your microbiome. Then you have synthetic sweetners like sucralose and aspartame, carcinogens but very protected by the food industry as they are money makers.

the list goes on, but a rule of thumb is - if it has ingredients you’ve never heard of, don’t have in your kitchen, etc, it’s not likely to do you any good.

Thank you, it's hard indeed. I have recently become conscious of the dangers of synthetic sweeteners. I won't pretend I never consume anything with them in as I occasionally drink diet Coke, for example, but not often. I would like to see these labelled as undesirable in food & drinks but as you say, they are money makers. And ironically, they a big part of the diet industry as I believe @Peridot1 pointed out, so people think they are making healthier choices when they buy products with them in.

I think the law has also changed recently to strengthen the sugar tax and further restrict advertising of soft drinks sweetened only with sugar, eg you can't get proper Coke with a meal deal any more.

Sadly the outcome of this is that more and more soft drinks and mixers contain artificial sweeteners, even non diet version. Which reduces choice for those of us who don't drink these drinks to excess and hate the taste of artificial sweeteners or even find that they make us ill - I can have these drinks but I don't want to because they taste disgusting.

@BarbaraofSeville yes, 100%! Frustrating. I also find this with “healthy” bars and cereals with claims like “reduced fat” or “reduced sugar”. Most of the time they’ve replaced the reduced element with heavy chemicals, and you’d be much better off with old fashioned fat or sugar.

I used to eat protein bars every day at work instead of a proper lunch, thinking it would be healthy and help manage weight 🙈

Theres plenty of evidence that subjects on a calorie controlled diet full of crap also lose weight. Like the PP said it's the new fad after fat and sugar.

I'm not going to argue whole foods aren't better but people are not fat because of chemical compounds or additives.

People who swap sugar sweetened drinks for artificially sweetened drinks lose weight in plenty of studies conducted on this subject.