Are todays eating habits storing up health problems for the future?

If you read the work written by Dr Xand van Tulliken and other writers in the field. They put the blame, not on what we eat but its constituents. the processed ingredients, food elements we never ate before. all those 'modified', emulsifiers, 'hydrolised' etc etc.

Other researchers into the human biomes have reiterated what is being said. It is impossible to completely eliminate these products from our lives, but by home cooking from fresh ingredients can reduce it, as will, ideally, shopping organic, not always possible or affordable, but shop for meat in farm shops where they rear their meat to high welfare standards, many of their other meat products will be free or nearly free of the UPF incgredients.

When meat costs mroe reduce portion size. i was brought up on 4oz of meat per person - and most recipes work to this portion size. I have gradually reduced portion size to 2 oz. We eat a lot of casseroles and stews and I add extra vegetables and beans to every casserole.

The trouble is JaxJacky i fear women now have a different pigeon hole! of work and all the domestic stuff.
Schools do seem to take a great interest in the lunch boxes, I wouldn’t get away with the odd Penguin biscuit now

Yes indeed all this oven/microwave/airfryer preprepared food is bad for people who eat it. It is full a various e's fat and sugar often hidden.

We've know that for a long time. I watch a lot of the old Top of the Pops, rarely do you see an overweight person.

In answer to the OP.
Yes, absolutely. We GN's know that where parenting is concerned we have to keep our opinions to ourselves, unless asked. My DD's and DIL's are busy people. All with full time jobs with homes, partners and children too. They all use ultra processed food and ready meals for convenience and speed. Rarely do I see any colourful vegetables on the plates. At the moment I am dropping hints about how good is Jamie Oliver's Healthy Eating cookery programme which is currently on TV. I daresay it will fall on deaf ears. I do worry about my GC's future health though.

The standard of food consumed today is poor in general and so easily accessed with very little effort required. The Tesco store I shop at has 2 aisles of frozen foods, 1 aisle dedicated entirely to pizzas and ice cream, I do buy the occasional ready meal as so many of us do but far too many of us rely on ready meals as a staple part of our diet. Surely this sort of eating must be storing up problems in later life.

I was born in the mid-sixties my parents were born in the war. Having talked with friends of a similar age with parents around my parents' age, we have come to conclusion that they wanted us to have what they could not because of rationing. We are always told that the rationing diet was the healthiest but it was limited and boring. For my generation, it was full fat milk, plenty of fresh fruit, especially oranges, and vegetables and, yes, sugar. For most of us as children, it was also a traditional British diet cooked from scratch. We played outside a lot so were generally healthy and very few children were overweight. We always added sugar to breakfast cereals unless it was already added - seventies adverts always showed children adding sugar to cornflakes and rice krispies. I was strict with my own children - sugar was NOT added to cereals or cups of tea and sweets and biscuits were a rare treat. They drank milk or water as small children. They were healthy, slim and had beautiful teeth.

mabon2

Yes indeed all this oven/microwave/airfryer preprepared food is bad for people who eat it. It is full a various e's fat and sugar often hidden.

You do realise that many people use their microwave or airfryer to cook 'normal' food from scratch too? You can cook most things in an airfryer - it doesn't have to all be prepacked ready meals.

Are todays eating habits storing up health problems for the future?

Nah! Wes Streeting is saving the world by giving MacDonald's customers fat jabs on the NHS while the government hemorrhages tax receipts from dwindling providers

My mother worked during the war on the railway. Due to having children she didn't do all the shifts others did. Always had home cooked meals, a main one at teatime as it was known then and when at school had lunches there. Holiday time it was a sandwich, sometimes just jam, perhaps a tomato, and if lucky an apple or berries from the garden. Washing was in a boiler and tub with a wringler on the sink. Mother continued working up until her 60s dying at 78 in the early 80s. There is an impression that women just floated about doing nothing but a bit of housework and going to the co-op up until the 70s. Definitely not my experience.

mabon2

Yes indeed all this oven/microwave/airfryer preprepared food is bad for people who eat it. It is full a various e's fat and sugar often hidden.

Lots of fresh food is cooked in an oven, airfryer or microwave.

ViceVersa

mabon2

Yes indeed all this oven/microwave/airfryer preprepared food is bad for people who eat it. It is full a various e's fat and sugar often hidden.

You do realise that many people use their microwave or airfryer to cook 'normal' food from scratch too? You can cook most things in an airfryer - it doesn't have to all be prepacked ready meals.

I didn't know you could cook ready meals in an airfryer, we haven't got one.
Yet.

LucyAnna5

Contents of Greggs sausage rolls…….

My nan used to make them from scratch, but full butter pastry, and local butchers sausage meat. Not sure they are any healthier.
My friend's husband is a butcher, I have seen him making them. I worked for Quaker Oats - the office was between the dog food factory and the Walls factory. I can tell you which smelled better.
Our children eat a lot of processed meat - none of it healthy

Not so much how it is prepared, but we eat more often. Seems a child cannot leave home without a snack.

Our standard plates are bigger, and because we often eat in front of the TV, we eat mindlessly, and so eat more.

We eat more quickly, and so our "full trigger" kicks in after more food.

Food has either more fats or more sugars - perhaps our taste buds are less efficient

FranP

Not so much how it is prepared, but we eat more often. Seems a child cannot leave home without a snack.

Our standard plates are bigger, and because we often eat in front of the TV, we eat mindlessly, and so eat more.

We eat more quickly, and so our "full trigger" kicks in after more food.

Food has either more fats or more sugars - perhaps our taste buds are less efficient

I have been saying this about plate sizes for years. A pre-2000 plate is definitely smaller.

I certainly wasn't overweight as a child, mainly because 50s food was so horrible. I suppose we were lucky to have meat most nights but I just remember lots of gristle and fat that I was supposed to eat because it was good for me. Needless to say I didn't. Runner beans were another "favourite" very stringy, with very tough skin. Peas were lovely but they were fresh so we only had them two or three times in the summer.

I think my daughter's boys have got off to a good start. Only water to drink when they were little, and they still aren't keen on fizzy drinks. As a biochemist working with plants she is very careful about what food she cooks and how she prepares it.

Grammaretto

I have never knowingly eaten a Gregg's sausage roll. I'm veggie and I may have eaten a vegan SR.

My guilty eating habits are eating too much. I cook from scratch lots of veg but I eat butter, cheese and dairy..

It's true that there weren't many overweight kids when I was young.
Given the chance we'd have devoured a sweetshop. I feel sorry for today's children who have to learn self control!

Greggs do a good vegan sausage roll too!

Sarnia

In answer to the OP.
Yes, absolutely. We GN's know that where parenting is concerned we have to keep our opinions to ourselves, unless asked. My DD's and DIL's are busy people. All with full time jobs with homes, partners and children too. They all use ultra processed food and ready meals for convenience and speed. Rarely do I see any colourful vegetables on the plates. At the moment I am dropping hints about how good is Jamie Oliver's Healthy Eating cookery programme which is currently on TV. I daresay it will fall on deaf ears. I do worry about my GC's future health though.

Plenty of us had full time jobs, with homes, partners and children and still managed to feed ourselves and our families properly.

I can see no reason why the above full time jobs etc etc, should suddenly have become so onerous that feeding your family properly is too difficult. Frozen vegetables are quick and easy to prepare and in many cases fresher and more nutritious than fresh vegetables. the same with fruit. Fresh fruit needs only the briefest of washes.

When I was in school, every other class may have had a hefty child. Now seeing the kids coming out of high school, I see a lot of hefty children, some quite obese.
Do they not learn about nutrition at school anymore?
Where does the money come from for all these snacks?

Everyone has cars these days and kids get picked up from school round here. We had to walk, sometimes a long way. It kept us fit and I remember always feeling hungry as a child, never quite enough to eat. I disagree about fat kids,though. I don’t see any round here,they are all slim but very tall, much taller than we were. Not unusual to see young girls 6 foot tall, including one of my granddaughters. Aussie sunshine ??

I also think it’s the habit of snacks/grazing all the time, mostly sweet, which are a huge part of the problem.
Lack of exercise too, walking/cycling to school; being shooed out of the house after breakfast and only coming home for meals, being bored and finding something to do. All that seems to have gone out of the window.

M0nica

If you read the work written by Dr Xand van Tulliken and other writers in the field. They put the blame, not on what we eat but its constituents. the processed ingredients, food elements we never ate before. all those 'modified', emulsifiers, 'hydrolised' etc etc.

Other researchers into the human biomes have reiterated what is being said. It is impossible to completely eliminate these products from our lives, but by home cooking from fresh ingredients can reduce it, as will, ideally, shopping organic, not always possible or affordable, but shop for meat in farm shops where they rear their meat to high welfare standards, many of their other meat products will be free or nearly free of the UPF incgredients.

When meat costs mroe reduce portion size. i was brought up on 4oz of meat per person - and most recipes work to this portion size. I have gradually reduced portion size to 2 oz. We eat a lot of casseroles and stews and I add extra vegetables and beans to every casserole.

I read Chris van Tulleken's book "Ultra-Processed People" and, honestly, you'd never eat an ice cream again! It was very enlightening, and now I am verging on paranoid about reading labels on things!
I think the whole nutrition issue is down to education, and it surprises me that some people are so unaware of it, because it is so easy nowadays to learn about just about anything from a quick google search!

posset thank you for correctly namimg the author. I was too lazy to check.

What surprises me is that it has taken so long for this issue to come to the fore. In the mid 1980s a book called 'E for Additives' was published and was a best seller. I can remember then looking at packets of food and being quite horrified by all the synthetic ingredients in the food I was buying and that while each may have been tested and found safe for human consumption, little was known about how they interacted. Then, I was thinking more in terms of causing allergies and other reactions, not the effects we now know it has.

It was reading the 'E for Additives' book and thinking round it, which made me decide not just to cook from scratch - I already did that - but as far as possible to avoid processed food. As we had the BSE crisis at the same time, I moved to buying organic meat, even though it meant halving the average meat portion we ate to cope with the high price.

I am not purist, I accept that I cannot avoid all processed foods, but I consciously avoid them and have adapted our portion size and meal choices in order to do so.

It was always home cooked food when we were growing up, we never had takeaway outlets- only the Wimpy bar for a rare birthday treat.
Also, amazed at the amount of kids today that need their teeth coating to protect the enamel, probably because of all the sugar in food.
We only ever got fruit for supper.
Treat was a caramac bar on my when home from Sunday school.
Had my first filling at nearly thirty.

I agree but not in our house even my adult children agree. They did not grow up and eat takeaways. McDonalds,Morrisons etc was a once a month weekend treat and usually breakfast....My children rarely got processed food and I worked full time as a secondary teacher.. Slow Cookers,homemade soup and freezers are marvellous things!