Ultra Processed Foods - why they’re as bad as smoking?
ULTRA processed foods
At the end of February, the BMJ (British Medical Journal) published a paper showing conclusively that ultra processed foods are directly linked to cancer and a whole host of other problems including early death, mental illness, gastrointestinal problems and diabetes.
Here I want to show you exactly what ULTRA processed foods are and to dispel the myth that ‘a little of what you fancy does you good’ when it comes to industrially produced food.
What are Ultra Processed Foods (UPFs)? And how do you get them out of your diet once and for all?
By definition UPFs are foods THAT YOU WOULDN’T BE ABLE TO RECREATE IN YOUR OWN KITCHEN.
Think of brightly packaged ‘foods’ that are marketed heavily at our children. They have to be advertised in bright packaging, with smiling faces printed on billboards and with relentless bombardment through their iPads, Phones and TVs. Usually these foods are beige and empty of nutrients or the packages boast of how many health benefits the food has through all the fortification of vitamins and nutrients they proudly include. The reality is that many of those vitamins aren’t even available to the body and sometimes they can cause harm. (Folic Acid)
Research shows that 12% of children and 14% of adults in the UK population are addicted to UPFs (Source: BANT). In the US, 58% of all food consumed is UPF.(Source: Food Navigator). Ultra Processed Foods may be as addictive as smoking (Source: BMJ).
Here is a list of everyday foods that you may not have known were UPFs and come under the category of junk food.
Breakfast Cereals - including those pushed as healthy like shredded wheat, cornflakes, bran flakes and weetabix.
Energy drinks - of any kind!
Breakfast Bars!
Healthy Snack bars e.g. in garages like the ‘Kind’ brand (coated with toxic sugars and oils)
Baked Beans, Tinned Soups
Canned Sauces
Crisps / Chocolates & Sweets
Packaged biscuits (even many of the ‘healthy’ oat biscuits with raisins in them)
Some processed meats
Bread, Pasta, Couscous (wheat is now fortified with Folic Acid in many countries)
Doughnuts/Baked goods
Ready Meals
Gluten Free foods or Free From foods.
What else is important?
When we break it down, a process is anything that can happen to food. A regular vegetable growing in your garden, without the use of chemicals, pesticides or fertilisers, is harvested when it’s ready, prepared in your kitchen and then goes through a small process of being washed, chopped, baked/roasted/mashed or whatever you do to create something from it.
Think about the processes even just a commercially, chemically grown vegetable (non organic) goes through. In the soil it is sprayed with certain nutrients as the soils are so overworked and depleted they have next to no real nutrition left and vegetables need help to even grow there. They are sprayed with chemicals to kills pests/bugs and those chemicals make their way into the body of the plant which means that they are impossible to completely get out prior to eating. They are mechanically harvested, washed in chlorine, stored in a cool storage sometimes for months, transported to a factory which is sometimes many countries away; disinfected/washed, boiled, chopped, or added to other heavily processed foods. Then it could be irradiated, microwaved, have chemicals added to it to preserve it, flavour enhancers or stabilisers added to it, wrapped in plastic/tin/foil/vacuum packed/dried and then left in the packaging for potentially months or even years. By the time it reaches your mouth, it is a long time since that food was alive and nutritious.
We are sat on the brink of an epidemic of cancer. By 2030, it is predicted that 1 in 2 of us will have cancer in our lifetime (medical news today). Cancer is largely preventable and we now know that it is a disease of metabolism and therefore something that we can hugely improve with diet and lifestyle and finally the research is showing us how our diets are responsible for this in part. Prevention is worth a thousand cures.
So What Can You Do?
Make your own base sauces? Like tomato with Olive oil, onion and garlic.
Batch cook and freeze in portions which means you don’t have to buy costly inferior sauces in jars (with poor quality oils).
Get a slow cooker. - For busy people a slow cooker can be a God Send. Just load it up on a morning and put on a low heat and when you get home from work, you have a hot, healthy and fresh dinner ready to go. The best kind of ‘fast food’.
Have healthy snacks in the fridge. Hard Boiled eggs, cold meat cuts, leftovers, potato salad, cheese cubes.
Batch cook soup on a Sunday and freeze in portions for the week so that you get plenty of vegetables
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