What ultra-processed foods really do to your body
With UPFs making up 56 per cent of the average UK diet, experts reveal how over-consumption of them can impact our organs and overall health
A properly conservative newspaper would be shouting “Fie!” to these morons. But nooooo:
David Cox
Health and medical journalist
Sigh:
“Overall, poor diet has overtaken tobacco globally as the leading cause of early death,” says Chris van Tulleken, a professor at University College London and author of Ultra-Processed People.
Complete bollocks of course. Unless we’re talking famine which does still kill people.
They should start a special section for Zac’s demented followers. “The secret effects of the dandelion diet and how it lengthens your life span by 27 minutes”.
As soon as I see UCL as the looney bin where they’re bred, I know it’s going to be load of old crap…
UCL.. The Lancet.. “Experts”, most of which have books about UPF’s and theiir Danger!!one1 out, “associated with” , “linked to” , and the usual “Advice”..
I could swear this was a Graun “not-a-book-promotion” article in setup and execution as well…
Does Chris van Tellinglies have a scientifically meaningful definition of UPFs?
“do proles eat it?”
It’s all about the anxiety of stupid Waitrose MILFs. Like organic twats who don’t even understand what that means, or why organic often tastes better (it’s not about the pesticides).
People have books to flog and after a while that market gets but exhausted so they find a new thing.
Spot on. I had a Times sub for a bit last year and every single article about UPFs had the BTL comments section full of ponces moaning about the awfulness of the lower orders and their pigpen diets.
That proles are allowed to eat at all is the problem, not the food. Easier to attack food than proles.
Dan Olson has a good video on the subject of class distinctions in food through the lens of chicken nuggets.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-a9VDIbZCU
I find chicken inedible without tarragon sauce. I don’t insist everyone agree with me. Yet it makes fine soup: cock-a-leekie is hard to beat. It’s a mystery.
Devoted followers often claim UPF is “anything that contains ingredients you wouldn’t find on your kitchen shelf”. To which I point out that food I cook for myself usually get’s consumed within a few minutes, it doesn’t have to sit on a supermarket shelf for a week. Take out all those (approved and carefully tested) preservatives and UPF really would be dangerous for your health.
Milk, cheese, butter, and beef are ultra-processed grass.
I think that the actual way to eat healthily is to make sure you get lots of variety. That way you have a better chance of getting all of your essential nutrients and if you do consume some stuff that may be a bit bad for you it is more likely to be only moderate amounts. I really think that it is that simple.
My parents ‘ generation tended to have pretty conservative tastes in food and would have nothing to do with any foreign muck. My generation has much more cosmopolitan tastes, my supermarket shop generally involves a visit to the world food aisle. So I would suggest that people are generally eating much more variety than ever before so, in my opinion, have a healthier diet than ever before. How processed your food is seems to be just a red herring, something that the scaremongers have latched onto now that their panic about fat has been discredited.
My Grandmother never would have known what to do with a pepper, much less an avocado, and as for garlic!
My Grandmother used to make a curry in the fifties, albeit an English version, i.e. stew with curry powder mixed in. Even so, it was considered exotic for Romford tastes.
“Eating healthy” is a recent invention, brought on by prosperity.
Eating at all is a gift. As a child, my access to food was limited. I was a very skinny boy. My parents, growing up in rural America during the Great Depression, lived in poverty beyond our comprehension. As did many millions of Americans.
My parents did not eat “healthy,” and lived into their 90s (Mom 4 months short of a 100). So I’m not sure “eating healthy” is of much value, anyway.
What amuses me is it’s the same people obsess over UPF as get the vapours over “food waste”. What do they think UPF is? They think the contents of those Pukka pies is the picture on the package?. It’s mechanically reclaimed meat. What otherwise would be thrown away because people won’t buy it & eat it. And that’s what a great deal of UPF is. A way to make undesirable, desirable.
We eat a great deal of UPF here. Or, at least, there’s a great deal of use of the blender & the pressure cooker. A lot of stuff standing around waiting around for various processes to complete. Very long cooking times. The ingredients need the processes or they’ll make you very ill & can kill you. It’s a cuisine out of the favelas of Brasil. Slave food. Based on what the slave masters threw out or wouldn’t eat. And very tasty, thank you.
And a lot of the processing in processed food is to extend shelf life and thus avoid food wastage.
Not much food waste at our house as all our leftovers go to the chickens.
Food waste? What’s that? We’re a clean plates family, always have been. Veg trimmings make sauerkraut.
Don’t you know there’s children starving in Japan, so eat it!
Or as Vince said “Please clean your plate dear, loadsa folks can see ya, don’t you know people are starving in Korea”.
When someone refers to “food waste”, you need to check what they mean. If you eat an orange, do you peel it and discard the peel or just take bites out of it? If the former, you may be generating food waste as you are discarding something edible (though usually considered edible only when processed into something like marmalade). Similarly banana skins. What about bones from meat? Sometimes the definition covers waste generated as a side effect of eating, even when the waste is not itself edible.
More generally, UPF is just industrial production of food. They have this vague reeee about it, it goes against some childish Trumptonshire model of small grocers and home baking. But the problem is that fundamentally, there’s nothing wrong with industrial production of food. It’s like being against industrial production of cardigans or industrial production of scissors.
I went and visited the factory of Tracklements recently, out near Malmesbury. They make amazing horseradish and onion marmalade. Properly lovely stuff. And they basically do what granny did. Only on a massive scale. Vats as big as a car full of chili jam cooking. It’s the same as Pataks and Mr Kipling. They’re making madras sauce and battenburg on a massive scale. This works at scale. Same as how you can make 4x the normal amount of curry and freeze a load of it, which saves prep time. All of this trades labour for cost.
I mean, a home made cake tastes better than Mr Kipling, but that’s about freshness, moistness, maybe you put a lot more cream in. But there’s nothing *wrong* with Mr Kipling.
My home-made cakes better *to me* than Mr Kipling because I only make the ones that I like (they may taste better to other people but I cannot read minds so I cannot be sure).
Almost everything tastes better home made, if someone knows what they’re doing. Apart from things like icing being thicker, more cream, more sugar, there’s also that flavourings you use are real flavourings. “Natural flavourings” might not mean someone squeezed lemons for their sorbet. It might mean they found out how to make a lemon flavour from natural cheap things. Home made lemon sorbet is sharper because you get some lemons and squeeze them and you get that acidity.
I make lemon sorbet if they’re selling off lemons cheap at a supermarket for 50p a bag. At which point a load of it costs less than a quid.
“it goes against some childish Trumptonshire model of small grocers and home baking. “
I watch a lot of the Food Channel and it always makes me snigger when Jamie Oliver or some other ‘celebity’ chef explains how to fillet a fish or debone a chicken, then looks at the camera and says ‘You can ask your butcher/fishmonger to do this’
JuliaM, Jamie doing what he does best – being a twat:https://www.youtube.com/shorts/cEdUkbukS1Y?feature=share
Ultra Processed Food will make your babies be born naked.
In an effort to contribute something to the debate, apart from my usual cynical moan, I will say that in my boring retirement, there is one ultra processed food that I’ve long disliked. Bread. Since our local bakers went bust a few years ago, I’ve lashed out on a Panasonic bread machine. I now have fantasic bread to munch on. It lasts 12 hours at best quality but is edible for up to two days. It takes a minimum of 4 hours to make. Do the sums and work out whether that’s a solution for all you non-public sector workers out there.
Clue – it ain’t…
Problem with bread is that the flour that makes good bread also makes bread that quickly goes stale. If I remember rightly it’s the difference between N.American Red & European Soft Yellow wheats. UK uses mostly NA Red so you can’t expect bread up to say French standards. Baker I used in Crouch End (Norman may know which) used to go to France to buy his flour because he couldn’t get it UK side. His bread was virtually identical to what I bought in the boulangerie in the French village. But you have to buy it to eat. Goes stale in hours.
Of course it depends on what you’re used to. After becoming accustomed to baguettes still warm from the oven, eating any UK bread was like chewing on cardboard.
Well, osrta. Yes, wheats differ. But what really stops a bread going stale quickly is if there’s a bit of fat (olive oil, veg oil, butter) in the mix. The F baguette is flour, water, yeast and salt. Any bread made like that will stale quickly.
His bread was virtually identical to what I bought in the boulangerie in the French village. But you have to buy it to eat. Goes stale in hours.
We normally stop mid to late morning to get our lunchtime baguette, I make a point of buying whatever is labelled local or traditional and it’s amazing how different they can be within a few miles. In extremis what is left can be freshened up in the oven to go with our evening meal if we don’t find another open boulangerie in the afternoon.
After becoming accustomed to baguettes still warm from the oven, eating any UK bread was like chewing on cardboard.
Oh yesss. I’m surprised the French didn’t insist the we stop backing that disgusting mush labelled “French bread/baguette” or similar that is/was sold in our supermarkets.
Sounds like Sable d’Or. Still going. French Algerian.
Here, BiS, have a laugh at this: https://archive.ph/I1qWf
People nicking car rear parcel shelves and putting them on eBay for their owners to buy back…
Just round the corner from Elder Ave in Topsfield Parade. But unfortunately, looking at StreetView, no longer.
Re your link. I lived in Elder Ave. Reported crimes in the street for a single month was 96. One of my nearby neighbours bled out on her own doorstep around 8AM one morning. Twice I was receiving end of knifepoint robberies. I got a gold chain & a rubbish watch off the first one. Second one had fuck all but received a good kicking. Local n****rs aren’t always very bright at choosing their victims.
I have noticed in our local supermarket that when they get bread delivered then they take the old bread from the back of the shelf (stuff at the front has been sold), put it aside, put today’s bread at the back, then put the old bread back but at the front.
I have pointed out that this is wrong to some people, but nobody seems shocked or offended, indeed they cite such as “prevention of waste”.
I give up, England is not the country for bread, the French would be horrified.
They do that with everything, and you can see why. If you want the freshest, or most distant sell-by date, go fishing at the back of the shelf.
Well of course I want the freshest bread, but I seem to be the outlier here in England. It just strikes me odd that we pay so little heed to the freshness of bread here.
First in, first out may be a acceptable employment pattern but for a shopkeeper it’s lunacy.
Seems rational to me.
Better than f.i.s.h. First in, still here.
Yep. “French” bread in the UK gives me indigestion, in France I can stuff down the whitest loaves without trauma.
Look up tangzhong breadmaking. I get three days of first-day softness.
Bread freezes well.
Anytime someone starts moaning to you about UPFs, remind them that tofu is an ultra processed food. That usually shuts them or starts an argument about definitions.
And don’t forget all that vegan shite trying to pretend to be meat
My local power station has a side business in extracting the salt coagulants, such as calcium and magnesium chlorides and sulfates, from the smoke going up its chimneys. It’s sold to tofu makers.
Is word salad ultra processed language?
Ask Kamala.
Is that an AI app?
Average height in England has steadily gone up by a couple of inches since WW2. It’s generally attributed to better nutrition. This “better” nutrition correlates rather well with rise of cheap UPF’s.
Correlation is not causation, but it does seem likely that UPF’s are much more nutritious than starvation.
Gamecock believes that the reduction of child labor led to taller people. Lifting heavy objects will shut down growth plates. Let your kids be kids, and they will be taller.
England outlawed child labour before WW1, andyf is commenting on the change since WW2.
England did not outlaw what parents made their kids do.
bloke who wrote a book about a thing says buy my book
sap newspaper prints it.
“Overall, poor diet has overtaken tobacco globally as the leading cause of early death.”
I consider abortion to be the leading cause of early death.