Foods that make up half of the typical British diet are fuelling the risk of cancer, a major study suggests.
Scientists said common daily fare – including most breakfast cereals, breads, snacks and convenience meals – appears to be endangering the nation’s health.
A number of studies have previously linked “ultra-processed” foods, which are mass produced, containing chemicals, colourings, sweeteners and preservatives, to cancer.
I’m running with the thought that this idea about “ultraprocessed” foods is complete bollocks. Anyone want to tell me different?
Ultra-processed foods, also referred to as ultra-processed food products (UPP), are food and drink products that have undergone specified types of food processing, usually by transnational and other very large ‘Big food’ corporations.
Made by capitalists, d’ye see, out of the blood of Christian children.
You will have your turnip plain as well as raw…….
Processing as such is essential, and virtually all food is processed in some way.[11] The term ultra-processing refers to the processing of industrial ingredients derived from foods, for example by extruding, moulding, re-shaping,
By this definition cookies are fine, cookies made with a cookie cutter are not.
It’s bollocks in short.
Not just cookies from a cookie cutter. Pasta and spaghetti is haram too.
Industrial ingredients, such as flour…
I’m renaming my kitchen the processing centre – can I get a grant now?
Contrary opinion: creating products with an almost indefinite shelflife such that even yeast, those omnidigesters of stuff lying around, can’t use them suggests that humans may lack the digestive pathways to deal with whatever is preserving them and if absorbed disrupt normal metabolism.
It’s probably rubbish. The “risk of cancer” usually turns out to be a relative risk that is really small when stated in absolute terms, which is why they don’t.
And if you don’t want to eat this food there’s a whole industry of more expensive stuff aimed at gullible middle class people. They didn’t fund the study behind this article did they?
… and when it comes down to it, cancer is basically a disease of old age – yes, there are the tragic (but mercifully very few) cases of childhood cancers and those in young-adulthood – but the stats are heavily against the old, which doesn’t make very good advertising copy. We’re living longer, medical science has clobbered all the “traditional” killers of the not-geriatric, thus we survive long enough to get knocked-off by “the Big C”. I’d guess that a decent statistical analysis of diet v cancer v age would show the diet function to be near statistically-insignificant.
I stick to the principle of “never eat anything your grandmother wouldn’t have recognised as food”, although as in some communities you can be a grandmother at 30 maybe that should be rephrased as “female ancestor of pensionable age” for the masses.
I’m always highly sceptical of studies on ‘processed’ food. There is an inherent assumption that somehow, processing is bad, natural is good, and therefore it’s fine to design studies to test this hypothesis. However, it is extraordinarily difficult, costly and time consuming to run such studies properly given the massive number of variables in the number of components of the foodstuffs, their individual ingredient toxicological profiles and the physical and chemical processing involved. A quick look at the study design, methodology and publication source usually gives you an appropriate insight into the likely validity of the subsequent claims, especially if they are cited by a third party wishing to make a point.
What is conveniently forgotten is that processing is exactly what the body does, thankfully to the majority of foodstuffs consumed, and it mostly doesn’t care what processing has been done to it.
Processing in and of itself, I would agree, that it ain’t that which is the problem so much as what goes into the processing. Flour, water, eggs, yeast and all that stuff, I don’t have much problem with, it’s all the other crap to turn it from “Good old cooking” into something that can sit on the shelf for 2 years and still be (technically) edible.
Lets say “Something Mrs. Beaton would have recognised and thought reasonable”.
…and yes I am well aware that some of the colourings and additives just used specific technical terms like “E150a-d” is just another way of saying caramelised sugar (which Mrs. Beaton would have been fine with, I guess), but I’m not sure that’s the end of it, which is why I try and avoid “processed crap”.
It certainly shows on the waistline as well, but this has probably to do with the amount of sugar used in everything nowadays. At least if I cook it myself, I get to determine how much sugar to add (usually none-to-not-much).
Special mention must go to hydrogenated fats, seed oils and the like. That shit is just garbage.
Quite what Mrs. Beaton would have thought of it I have no idea.
@ Arthur the Cat
Advantage of your generalisation is that any recipe that has survived two generations is probably quite good (if not, why would people keep trying it?), but global warming and refrigerated transportation have provided us with access to foods that weren’t available when my grandmother was growing up/learning to cook.
Must admit I incline to your theory Baron J.
As for the food I eat, I generally look for cheap, easy to cook, long lasting, and I like the taste. Seems to provide me with plenty of calories, and the necessary vitamins. (As near as I can tell, my waistline is caused more by flabby muscles than just pure flab.)
Chilled foods contain more preservatives than frozen, by necessity; yet it’s frozen food that gets associated with the underclass. This health campaign is just a front for class snobbery.
Just wait till the UK follows the EU, and starts adding powdered crickets into the food chain (EU directive 2023/5). That’ll sort everyone out, especially those who are allergic to shellfish or other creatures with an exoskeleton.
Not my expertise, but can one view this more generally? From a DNA perspective, we’ve not changed from our earlier hunter/gatherer ancestry. In the last 10,000 (or whatever it is) years, our diet has been influenced by our shift towards farming, and then very recently a whole lot more. Hence, to what extent might our bodies or health be affected by those diet changes (for better or worse), and not just wrt cancers, or wrt sugar or ultra-processing/artificial additives etc.
Hence, bollocks or “nothing to see” intuitively appears baseless, at least to me. Perhaps more likely, we simply don’t yet fully know?
Evolution doesn’t quite work that way. It’s not only “change DNA” it’s also “selection among DNA”. If the Black Death broke out in Europe today few would die. Because most of those prone to dying of the Black Death died 7 centuries back. And yes, people have checked this, BD changed the human genome. Not through changing DNA, but by killing those with the wrong type.
10k years of food would have had much the same effect.
“selection among DNA … 10k years of food would have had much the same effect.”
The coming shift to crickets should be a breeze… 🙂
“but by killing those with the wrong type”
More seriously… That accepts that the changes might select for for those with the right type. Ie, damage may indeed be done – to all those with the wrong type.
(i) It’s from Imperial College so it’s probably balls.
(2) It’s about cancer and food stuffs so it’s almost certainly balls.
(3) Remember that until recently the all-caring medical trades were instructing you to avoid an almost unprocessed food – butter – and replace it by a hyper-processed food, margarine. Other similar examples exist.
(4) On matters of diet the amount of “knowledge” that’s supported by top class evidence is pretty bloody small.
(5) Short of gigantic effects – such as those you’d see by swigging cyanide – mere observational studies are usually so polluted by biases and confounders that they yield nothing much you’d want to bet on.
“From a DNA perspective, we’ve not changed from our earlier hunter/gatherer ancestry.” Of course we have; the huge population explosion since agriculture started guarantees it. If you want an easy example just consider lactose tolerance.
I’ve been keeping a food diary for a few weeks to get a base measurement before doing a concerted push to lose a bit of weight. I was shocked to discover the two slices of bread in my sandwich have more calories than the contents.
2 x bread = 262cal
1 x beef = 61cal
marge = 18cal
Lactose tolerance is more that you keep the tolerance if you keep ingesting the lactose. If you follow a “traditional” diet where you stop drinking milk at a couple of years old, your body follows a natural process of “forgetting” how to digest it. If you continue to drink milk all through your life, your body never has the chance to stagnate in a non-milk environment and forget the digestion abilities.
There’s been interesting studies showing that Chinese children who grow up in Hong Kong consuming a western level of milk in their diet have typically western levels of lactose tolerance, in comparison with mainlanders consuming tradition chinese levels of milk.
@jgh: That matches my experience. I used to consume a lot of milk but for various reasons stopped for about 10 years. When I restarted the result was unpleasant, painful and often explosive.
The problem with being lactose intolerant is that most people, especially those in restaurants, conflate it with being dairy allergic and presume I can’t have butter or cheese.
Just stop eating. You won’t die of cancer.
All very well, chaps, but the genetics of lactose tolerance are well studied. As I understand it the phenomenon has evolved more than once, and in different ways. To my inexpert eye this WKPD entry is useful.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactase_persistence
A lot of food is highly processed causing significant chemical changes which are highly noticeable to anyone. It’s called cooking. Very unnatural!
Studies have shown that 50% of foods increase the risk of cancer, and 50% of foods decrease the risk of cancer.
The same studies have shown that if you stratify the analysis by types of cancer it turns out that 100% of foods increase the risk of some type of cancer, and 100% of foods decrease the risk of some type of cancer.
Setting aside the fact that most of said studies are basically random number generators, this provides endless publication and promotion opportunities for “epidemiologists” and an endless supply of headlines for the Daily Mail.
@Baron Jackfield… and when it comes down to it, cancer is basically a disease of old age.
Several months ago Mrs G. was diagnosed with stage 3 bowel cancer. “What!” she cries, when given the news. “Unlike slacker husband my body remains a temple – textbook diet, alcohol consumption well within official guidelines, I maintain a punishing fitness regime and take zero medication (other than childhood diseases have never been ill nor injured). How did this happen?” The consultant, gentlemen to the last, replied: “You got old.”
Coming in late, but here goes. The European lactose tolerant / intolerant gradient maps pretty well with the areas that were early adopters of cheese making, with natives of Italy, Spain, and southern France being less likely to retain lactose tolerance into adulthood, compared to Germans, Dutch, or English. When milk is made into cheese the lactose content is significantly reduced – by 80%-ish, if I correctly remember the book I got this from. The argument is that the availability of the food energy from milk via cheese reduced the selection pressure to retain lactose tolerance, but the process had already advanced by the time cheese-making technology made its way north.