Ultra processed food

Has anyone else read Dr Chris van Tullekans' book?

Ultra-Processed People: Why Do We All Eat Stuff That Isn’t Food … and Why Can’t We Stop?

https://amzn.eu/d/7BxnXqy


Is it really that bad? Is most of the good we eat made for money and not necessarily good for us.?

Is it addictive and the reason for obesity?

There's too much free reign on what amounts of rubbish gets into the food chain. Also it's done to a price...cheap to produce. I bet it's also controlled by producers of the major food groups...wheat,sugar and oil/fat.
A major cause is complete lack of food education in terms of where our food comes from,what you can make with basic ingredients and how to make it.

Clint said:

food groups...wheat,sugar and oil/fat.

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I worked in baking, those are the 4 main ingredients, take tins of soup or packaged, were i worked they called it money for old rope, if you saw what goes in a sausage roll most people would puke pie's is another, these are all foods that slowly kill you, we used to go through 5 1000L stillages of veg oil a week, i don't eat all those foods or very rarely, puff pastry is another absolute killer i used to make 9 tons a week, as an aside my bil delivers veg oil in tankers he once told me the cleanest place he goes to is are pet food manufactures. says it all really, and the massive producers use really large plant to produce food those machines are not designed for easy cleaning hence all the recalls you here about

It's easy to blame producers of food, but I'm not convinced there's such a thing as 'bad' food. Thanks to changes in society people just eat too much, and don't move enough.

An abundance of food is something that's really only come about in the first world in the last century. At the same time employment has heavily shifted from the more physical agricultural and industrial jobs to more sedentary service based jobs. In those roles people moving around is inefficient and technology has gradually further reduced movement.

So people can more easily eat more calories and they don't have to move as much to do so.

In the last half century we also tend to work more on average - longer hours, more commuting, and with both parents in a family often going out to work, leaving less time for meal prep and exercise.

Frankly, I'm fat because I eat too much and drink too much.
I really should cut down on my portion sizes.

However, I rarely if ever eat processed foods. My wife has IBS and we have to be very careful with certain foods, so it's easier to make from scratch.
If I look at our main meals this week.....
Pork steaks with vegetables and mash
Roast dinner
Steak chips and salad
BBQ chicken and burger and salad
Chicken baked in ham and cheese with crushed potatoes
Spag Bol (from scratch) served on jacket potato

My lunch is spanish tortilla - I make a really large one when I'm doing the roast.

Everything is either fresh meat from tesco and the burgers come from the butcher.

Probably sounds posh and stuff, but none of the above is difficult to make and in terms of pricing, our grocery bill is probably less than most people who buy instant food. Most of our costs are meat. Veg and potatoes aren't particularly expensive.

My wife is mostly wheat intolerant (but fortunately, not malt), so pasta, bread and breaded products are out of the equation.

Stu said:

Frankly, I'm fat because I eat too much and drink too much.
I really should cut down on my portion sizes

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Same here.

Why is it that the stuff you like to eat is bad for you, when I have a beer i snack i like cheese, peanuts and several varieties of crisps, red Leicester mini cheddars are a favourite at the moment, I have given up worrying about what I eat i eat what i enjoy sod it

The recent survey we did showed most of us drink far more that the 8 units recommended a week and quite a few over 35 are we going to stop because its bad for us no.

I am 63 if I gave up processed food and alcohol now I may live an extra few years but I say **** it I am going to carry on enjoying myself and if it costs me a few years so be it, we don't know on which day we will die so we will never know, why worry.

JockyBrewer said:

Thanks to changes in society people just eat too much, and don't move enough.

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Spot on, back in the day when most people ate three meals a day they were proper home cooked meals not the over sugared **** we get out of tins etc now, they needed three meals back then because work was hard graft now machines do most of the graft for us no more hod carrying on building sites or carrying 25 litre drums of liquid about its not a wonder waistlines are getting bigger.

There's plenty of liquid carried round by a few on here...I bet they're like racing snakes!

Chippy_Tea said:

Same here.

Why is it that the stuff you like to eat is bad for you, when I have a beer i snack i like cheese, peanuts and several varieties of crisps, red Leicester mini cheddars are a favourite at the moment, I have given up worrying about what I eat i eat what i enjoy sod it

The recent survey we did showed most of us drink far more that the 8 units recommended a week and quite a few over 35 are we going to stop because its bad for us no.

I am 63 if I gave up processed food and alcohol now I may live an extra few years but I say **** it I am going to carry on enjoying myself and if it costs me a few years so be it, we don't know on which day we will die so we will never know, why worry.

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I know i posted about all the bad stuff but, i am in your camp, i will never stop drinking and when i do it's crisps and peanuts and popcorn and some times a platter of continental meats and olives with sun dried toms, like Stu my wife has colitis and crohns so has to be carful what she eats

Clint said:

There's plenty of liquid carried round by a few on here.

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Mostly in the bladder especially at night

JockyBrewer said:

It's easy to blame producers of food, but I'm not convinced there's such a thing as 'bad' food. Thanks to changes in society people just eat too much, and don't move enough.

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This book makes the point it is not people that eat too much.. The food is designed to make you eat more.

MashBag said:

This book makes the point it is not people that eat too much.. The food is designed to make you eat more.

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I've purchased the book as it's an interesting subject, but if I'm honest I think the idea that food is designed to make you eat more is a victim mindset. It's much easier to blame a faceless corporation than get off the sofa and make an effort at eating properly.

My observation of the food industry isn't that it's trying to load its wares full of addictive substances, more that consumers buy more of the ultra palatable foods and they're ultra cheap to make, so they economically incentivised to go down that route.

I do think that there could be much stricter guidelines on food labelling, particularly around fat, sugar and salt, and restrictions on claims of the goodness of something. The traffic light system brought in a while ago was a great start but I think it should go further.

Think people are under the misapprehension that we actually understand any of this from a fundamental scientific perspective. The reality is there has been zero proper scientific studies done on any of this stuff and the 'science' that is peddled in the media is all based on correlation studies, which is an exercise in statistics rather than real science.

The root cause of all this is a massive multi billion dollar marketing campaign by US big agriculture to push agricultural products, mainly corn based products (corn bread, cord dogs, corn syrup) with the main thrust being a supposed link to heart disease with the consumption of saturated animal fats...based 100% on correlation studies. In actual fact the big multi decade long experiment to replace animal fats with highly processed seed oils and corn based products, and highly refined sugars, which in all likelihood are pretty bad for you if not toxic and certainly seem to have driven a stratospheric increase in a bunch of highly deadly health issues like type 2 diabetes, obesity, heart disease as well has a whole host of digestive system issues like IBS and potentially a bunch of issues from inflammation like arthritis and mental issues like anxiety and Alzheimer's...and then on top of all that the fact so many people are allergic to a whole host of foods that people have been eating for a hundred thousand years, as well as halting our previous trend for increasing life expectancy.

And waiting in the wings to profit massively from all this is big Pharma who are always happy to get us hooked on a whole cocktail of drugs to treat all these things and a bunch of other drugs to deal with the side affects of the other drugs...and on the basis that big Pharma funds almost all proper scientific studies, then there is little appetite for them to instigate and fund the proper scientific studies that are needed to get some level of understanding about how different foods impact our long term health.

Just eat real food, keep an eye on portion sizes and move around as much as you can. Generally if the food you eat requires manufacturing/processing in a facility that resembles an oil refinery, it's probably best to avoid or at least minimise. If its pulled out of the ground and gets a wash before ending up on your plate or comes straight from a butcher before ending up on your plate then its probably good for you.

Indeed! I spent this morning washing the bugs and slugs off a builders trug full of produce I picked from the allotment yesterday.
Potatoes, lettuce,cucumber,runner beans,French and broad beans,tomatoes,blackberries, blueberries and raspberries.

So I'm currently battling cancer, so are a lot of my mates, all in our 50s. At the NHS rehab class I'd worked with 30% of the people there. I feel that processed foods maybe a contributing factor, although hard to prove e.g. greater testing might be finding cancer early.

Cooking a lot more from scratch now, cooking in bulk and freezing it, and growing my own veg. A lot more conscious about what I eat, although I'm still partial to the odd pasty.

hoppyscotty said:

Just eat real food,

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Yeees indeed. This solves the portion problem too.. Cos you get full properly.

JockyBrewer said:

I've purchased the book as it's an interesting subject

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It will be interesting to see your review.

The "healthy food is expensive" fallacy
It's actually much cheaper to buy base ingredients and make a recipe.

So i am on board with what you are saying, so if no scientific studies have been done on this so called bad food, how come there are hundreds of experts who know it's bad for us, i eat the bad stuff but not in huge amounts we mainly cook from scratch, one thing we don't buy is supermarket meat ours comes from Scotland Donald Russell, also i think most folk know it's bad but choose to eat it anyway

I suspect the last actual large scale scientific studies were done at the start of WW2 to set rationing limits.

Its also not just food, it's ingrained human behaviour for too many cultures.
Like: Cooking not being taught in schools an huge portions shown in film/TV/insta & served in eateries so nobody knows what a portion size should be.
Risk adverse parents that ferry their child around, rather than telling them to walk/cycle to their friends (& also lack of wild/wasteland type places for kids to explore & learn to manage risk)
Certain health conditions being medicalised, so rather than changing behaviour/diet to improve health, you can now carry on as you were and just take one of these a day.
Too much information (news) about how **** the world really is, effecting mental health (especially kids)

That's probably e.nough for a Tuesday morning

It's not just the food, it's laziness as well.

Some people can't be bothered to cook from scratch; it's sooo much easier to put a ready meal in the microwave. And now, you can have a takeaway delivered to your door so you have to do even less work before stuffing your face. I remember a Jamie Oliver series a long time ago when he was teaching people how to cook. One family had a brand new kitchen and a very large set of brand new pans. They had never been used and the oven/hobs had never been switched on.

Just like during the first lockdown. We were allowed out for an hour a day for a walk. As it was actually nice weather the first two weeks, I used to regularly see families together out for a walk. That novelty soon wore off and I saw less families out but more individuals.

If you don't want to move about or eat properly, then it will have an effect on your weight and health.