The New Tobacco!
At the end of February, the BMJ (British Medical Journal) published a paper conclusively showing that ultra-processed foods are directly linked to cancer and a whole host of other problems, including early death, mental illness, gastrointestinal issues, and diabetes.
Here, I want to show you exactly what ULTRA processed foods are and 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?
and
How to ditch them for good?
By definition, UPFs are foods that you wouldn’t be able to recreate in your own kitchen.
Think of brightly packaged ‘foods’ that are heavily marketed to our children. They are advertised in bright packaging, with smiling faces printed on billboards, and through relentless bombardment on their iPads, phones, and TVs. Usually, these foods are beige and devoid of nutrients, or the packages boast about the health benefits of the food through fortification with vitamins and nutrients. The reality is that many of those vitamins aren’t even available to the body and sometimes they can cause harm (e.g. Folic Acid).
Research shows that 12% of children and 14% of adults in the UK population are addicted to UPF (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 UPF and fall under the category of junk food:
- Breakfast cereals, including those marketed as healthy, such as shredded wheat, cornflakes, bran flakes, and Weetabix.
- Energy drinks of any kind!
- Breakfast bars!
- Healthy snack bars, for example, those found in garages like the ‘Kind’ brand (coated with toxic sugars and oils).
- Baked beans, tinned soups.
- Canned sauces.
- Crisps, chocolates, and 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.
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 kill pests and 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 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 greatly improve with diet and lifestyle. 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 them 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 godsend. Just load it up in the morning and put it on low heat. When you get home from work, you have a hot, healthy, and fresh dinner ready to go. It’s the best kind of “fast food.”
Keep healthy snacks in the fridge, such as hard-boiled eggs, cold meat cuts, leftovers, potato salad, and cheese cubes.
Batch cook soup on a Sunday and freeze it in portions for the week so that you have plenty of vegetables.
References
https://www.bmj.com/content/383/bmj-2023-075354
https://www.bmj.com/content/384/bmj-2023-077310
Main – Photo by Polina Tankilevitch
