Big effort needed on UK diet to fight ultra-processed food, say health experts
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
The government need to start teaching about macronutrient breakdowns and calorie intake during early years, mandate that takeaways label their food with the macro-nutritional information, and let people be educated about the amount of food and drink they are consuming.
The bigger challenge is that the obvious solution, advocating "don't succumb to peer pressure", is essentially acknowledging a lack of a clear solution to the issue.
Furthermore, education on caloric intake and macro-nutrients in general would be a very wise decision. From experience, schools in the UK tend to skip what many would consider the essentials (sex education, dieting) to focus on more academic ventures -- it's good that we're focusing on academia, but we also need to place a greater spotlight on ensuring we live healthy lives; this is something regulators and the Government in general are very well-positioned to enforce.
The only real lectures we had on dieting were wishy-washy "eat vegetables" talk, which is glaringly obvious to pretty much anyone. Teaching people how to incorporate them into a meal seems like the logical next step.
Regarding educational institutions, I would much rather such information be presented to children in place of Baccalaureate programs which schools receive kickbacks from the Government to do; I did one and found that the majority of students (including myself) found the entire venture pointless and excruciating.
N.B. A semi-related note: For someone on a restrictive diet such as myself (e.g. keto), having nutritional information for beer is a very welcome luxury. I'm able to have a drink with friends while knowing how it would affect my total intake of carbohydrates for the day.
I really don't see it... We know a Big Mac is a shitty life choice, how is putting a number next to it going to help (we already do this i think)
When did you leave school out of interest? We did pretty comprehensive sex education, self care, hygiene, cooking, nutrition classes ect ect. Hell we even did managing money and understanding taxation.
I dont think the issue is education, the information is out there and has been for a long, long time. The issue is getting people to care.
Yeah "we" do: McD boxes report nutritional information, possibly even the wrappers. I'm sure the numbers are a bit gamed, but they are painfully high even like that. Same for "pizza": Domino's, Pizza Hut, etc, they all report caloric intake on their online menus, even in surprisingly visible places.
People (me included, often) still don't care, because we already know that these are all "sins" - classifying them into minor sins and mortal sins does very little. We should ask ourselves why we sin, instead. But that's hard, and risks messing up the current order.
Surely everyone knows that 12 pints and a Kebab is for after a meetup on a Tuesday, not the weekend?!
Stop looking to the government to solve this problem. There are many many thousands of sources online that one can easily use to get nutrition information.
If you want an example of how NOT to do it, just look at the US Gov food pyramid! Most of that diet is made of carbs.
Edit: I did a search and the first article, albeit from Huff Post, shows the food pyramid - https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/usda-dietary-guidelin...
Top European countries with the most household purchases of ultra-processed food:
1. UK 50.7%
2. Germany 46.9%
3. Ireland 45.9
4. Belgium 44.6
5. Finland 40.9
Top European countries with least household purchases of ultra-processed food:
1. Portugal 10.2%
2. Italy 13.4%
3. Greece 13.7%
4. France 14.2
5. Croatia 17.9
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/feb/02/ultra-proces...
It really is nonsense when people try to define it scientifically.
This is the closest to anything we found that makes sense https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_processing#Processing_lev... but it's kind of separate from the popular idea of processed foods
Here's a Nature article discussing the problems: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41430-022-01099-1
I dunno about you, but this definition doesn't seem to work for me.
Orange juice has gotten sweeter, even shop bought blackberries are noticeably worse than wild blackberries so I just dont buy the fruit and veg now.
Naturally ripened bananas taste so much better than the artificially ripened bananas and you can taste the gas used to ripen the bananas even though they claim you shouldn't be able to.
Carrots today are horse stock carrots, big, bland and no taste. Spuds, you cant get a decent baker with a decent skin on it any more, come back Spud U like, all is forgiven.
The mince meat from supermarkets is just gristle that leaves feeling worse for wear.
Yoghurts, massed produced sludge, designed to forced through pipework for automated containerisation.
Successive Govts have allowed this to occur in the UK and then they wonder why the NHS cant cope.
Thing is, for most people they havent noticed this decline in quality food so they think you are nutter when you complain about the decline, which probably explains the rise of the influencer.
Cheap crap food masks the costs to your health.
I think you're right about steaming though, if you're going for maximum nutrition you're better off eating some vegetables raw.
It's likely just my biases but I've noticed that the vast majority of people using these nonsense terms are, hmmm, let's just call them high calorie humans. They really want to believe
Of course the lists of regulated chemicals and all the weird stuff it covers are don't correspond to what anyone imagines "organic" means, but it is not marketing puffery.
The ultra-processed food are not nonsense, only hard to define depending on your culture.
One example my sister used is bread.
If your bread contain flour water and salt, it's processed food but not ultra-processed. Everyone agree. Even if you use multiple different flour and nuts, still the same.
After that, you can add oil on the bread before cooking it (not mixed with the bread,just on top, to change the crust formation). It is possible to consider it ultra-processed now (people rarely do, even in France).
Now come the question of sugar (there is a salt question too but I don't know enough to talk about it). Sugar help conserving the bread. In France, some people (including me) consider that any amount of sugar in bread makes it ultra-processed. Some consider that it only is if the bread cannot be just called bread, but that depends on your culture. Some 'bread' in the US would be called 'brioche' here by almost everyone.
But for the majority of stuff, it's easier : if it's a pre-prepared meal with conservatives, it's ultra-processed.
Which does not mean it's bad, though. Generally it is, but not always. Nutri-score (at least the last iteration, the previous one was flawed against fat in general and insaturated fat in particular) is imho a better way to look at food.
I was roundly mocked for predicting that sugar would rebrand as "natural" with marketing that heavily exploited "natural=healthy", but now that I have been proven right I just want to see the madness stop here.
The whole of the fruit and vegetable section, unless you're including fruit sugars.
A cursory glance at a UK supermarket website shows that statement to be hyperbole.
Who defines what "healthy" is?
In the US, Big Ag and USDA created a food pyramid that put processed carbohydrates as the base, even knowing at the time that that amount of carbohydrate intake is harmful.
It's really easy to avoid sugar if you buy raw foods and actually cook, rather than convenience food. It's also cheaper. The solution is education.
There is no such thing as healthy food, only a diet which is healthy. You can eat so called healthy foods, but if you eat ecess calories your diet isn't healthy for you!
The problem with "processed" food is that it's usually calorically dense and tasty, so it's easy to eat too much.
You've got to work really, really hard following this rule to still end up as a Double F.
Are you just being contrarian or do you not get the general idea?
You can name the ingredients yes? Surely you can because you've put each one in yourself.
> but I can have loads of potato chips
No, because im not convinced you know what Firming agent (calcium chloride) is.
Getting the idea of how this works?
I gave the general public the benefit of the doubt in another comment but now im not so sure.
You're massively shifting the goalpost by now requiring that I know what calcium chloride is. I do but I still don't think it makes chips better food than the daal, which includes tamarind paste, which I'm not entirely sure what it is (some kind of root?)
And even then, it's not a simple question of volume. The processed foods are addictive and play havoc with blood sugar with little satiety.
I really think they are at the heart of the obesity epidemic.
Many years ago I was obese and it was very difficult to eat less because the junk food that I was buying did not satiate me until eating too large amounts of it.
Now I can easily control my weight and I can have any weight I believe to be optimal, but that is because now I eat only food that I cook myself from raw ingredients and which satiates me in much smaller amounts and I do not feel hungry even a long time after eating.
I have verified that I have not changed and only the choice of food matters, because I have bought some of the things that I liked in the past, and after eating them I was soon hungry like in the old times, despite the big calorie content.
The food that I eat now has a relatively high content of proteins and of healthy fat, and most of the carbohydrates are from starch. I no longer use any sugar in the daily food, I make some sweets at most once per week, but usually more seldom that that.
So while someone who eats "ultraprocessed" food might see a great improvement by just eating less, I believe that it is very unlikely that anyone could succeed to do this as long as they keep eating the same food.
People are a lot more complicated than that, and a persons diet is anything but simple.
Solving poverty is also not very complicated when reduced down to "just have more money". That might be a useful starting point but it's worthless in practical terms.
I disagree that leading with "reduce consumption, if possible" is impractical when we're trying to address the results of calorie intake
We do lead with "Reduce consumption, if possible". The point isn't that it's impractical but rather that stopping there is woefully ineffective. We've never had more visibility into calories consumed; yet we're still seeing rising levels of obesity.
If we actually want to reduce obesity then we need to identify and address the reasons that cause people to overeat. That's what makes the reductive view of "calories in, calories out" counter-productive.
It's nontrivial to simply "eat less", I agree, but knowing that's the core goal (or more accurately, reducing caloric intake) has value when you're trying to decide how to resolve an obesity problem.
Visit countries like Taiwan, Viet Nam, Thailand, Japan, Korea and you'll notice that even the foods that have a processed component often tend to be made by hand, on site, and day-of. Buy scallion pancakes from a street vendor? Very likely that the proprietor purchased the scallions from a market in the morning and made the dough that day. Those scallions came from a farm harvested that day or the day before.
I think part of this is due to lack of density in the US and the supply chain challenges of moving fresh produce across the vastness of the US. California being such a massive producer[1] of agricultural products means that we need a very sophisticated logistical network to move those goods and access to those goods is determined by this logistical network. This naturally leads to a consolidation of the food supply chain as we see in the US (Sysco, Conagra, etc.). Yet another part of it is the US car culture that affects our dining culture (again lack of density); we don't have access to markets and even if we do, those markets are probably only open a few days of the week. Part of it is general food culture and perhaps a more western expectation of "uniformity"[2] in food both in appearance and taste that favors processing. And some part of it might be a legacy from WWII and the rapid adoption of processed foods as a form of preservation and efficiency.
Not sure how to fix it, but I thought it was an interesting observation.
[0] I use "whole foods" here because there's a general consensus that processed foods exist on a spectrum: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Spectrum-of-processing-o... and "whole foods" simply refers to being biased towards unprocessed or minimally processed foods.
[1] https://www.cdfa.ca.gov/Statistics/PDFs/2022_Ag_Stats_Review...
[2] https://freakonomics.com/podcast/how-the-supermarket-helped-...
please don't clump together all westerners
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=pitogyro&atb=v344-1&iax=ima...
(/s)
Anglo countries tend to be more biased towards wheat as a staple versus rice in the east. Whereas rice can be consumed in a minimally processed state, it's rare to see anyone consume wheat berries; it's almost always processed by striping the germ, grinding, bleaching, and then subsequent enriching. Pastas, pizzas, breads, burger buns, tortillas, flat breads -- all would be considered more on the processed end of the spectrum.
Likewise with cheeses and preserved meats; while still present historically in Asia, it is certainly not consumed at the same volume as in Anglo countries. Likely this has a basis in climate where techniques for processing and preserving food in the northern hemisphere is critical for civilization due to the shorter growing season and more extreme winters whereas the population dense parts of Asia tend to be in warmer climates that support year-round agriculture. (Preservation techniques also tend to differ as we examine cultures going northwards from the equator).
Perhaps the more apropos distinction is "wheat staple culture" versus "rice staple culture" (but that roughly aligns with the Anglo West and Asian East)
Some of it being the pressure and pace of modern life. Some of it being western foods being perceived as a "luxury" item and status symbol (e.g. Starbucks). Some of it being changes in economics.
what people in the UK (and elsewhere to a lesser degree) are eating isn't unhealthy because it is "ultra processed", it is unhealthy because it consists of 80% fat&sugar.
Processed foods have added fat and sugar to make them more palatable.
Adding fat and sugar is a processing step.
No processing, no added crap.
Processing isn’t the key point, it’s a simplified way of looking at things to ease decision making.
The book takes a rather expansive view of what counts as 'ultra-processed' - it's not just things like coca-cola and ice cream; apparently Hovis Wholemeal bread and margarine both count as ultra-processed.
[1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Ultra-Processed-People-Stuff-That-I...
So is meat part of the fight against ultra-processed food or not? I believe that meat is a health food, and from where I stand I can't tell where the zeitgeist is on this. Ethics aside, does the nutrition establishment believe that meat is better or worse than ultra-processed options in general?
You are right about meat though.
If this is an argument that "processing" isn't really a useful concept, I'll disagree, because it's clear that post-harvest processing has a very significant effect.
Nevertheless there are valid reasons why some prefer other sources of proteins, due to ethical concerns or sustainability concerns.
Moreover, human stupidity has ensured that today there no longer exists any food choice that is free of health risks. Every choice has health risks, so at most it can be assessed that a choice is less bad than the others.
For instance, beef or poultry meat may contain hormones and antibiotics, fish may contain mercury, nuts and seeds may contain lead and cadmium, and so on.
I don't know that I've heard it referred to as "processed", so there's at least that. On the other hand, it's difficult to argue that some things we call "mystery meat" aren't highly processed. Sausages and such.