How sad

[Boo1979]

no wonder T2 rates, cancer rates etc etc are on an seemingly inexorable rise as life expectancy is falling too
https://www.theguardian.com/science...-family-food-purchases?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

 

[Rachox]

no wonder T2 rates, cancer rates etc etc are on an seemingly inexorable rise as life expectancy is falling too
https://www.theguardian.com/science...-family-food-purchases?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Very sad indeed. No emoticon suitable to mark your post with

 

[donnellysdogs]

Next generations will be far. Worse than ours if the reliance of processed/fast food/junk food doesnt change.

I wish the general workdwide population could realise this, but until people get a serious illness and then hospital/gp advice added in with miney making PLC's then its going to be a huge long term fix to change anything.

Important to keep chipping away...

 

[Guzzler]

One member had it right when she said 'If you're Granny wouldn't recognise it then don't buy it'.

And bring back good old fashioned Cookery to the curriculum, imo.

 

[Grateful]

The map in that article is very interesting. There is a sharp horizontal line across Europe, with all the southern European countries dramatically less reliant on processed foods, including one north/south "straddler" (France). Even in an advanced industrial economy such as France, where I grew up, a family's percentage of processed food is only 14 percent whereas in the UK it is more than 50 percent.

I can guess that there are two factors: economics, and culture. Some of the poorer southern countries haven't "evolved" to the mass consumption of supermarket-purchased processed food yet. But in the case of France, Spain or Italy, it's not poverty but a still-vibrant culture of cooking your own meals from scratch.

Of course it is perfectly possible to have a very carb-heavy diet and still eat very little processed food.... Which is what happened to me in 30 years on a "Mediterranean, low-fat diet" and mostly cooking our own meals.

Edited later to fix typo.

 

[AdamJames]

It is quite shocking when you see it framed like that.

I couldn't resist doing a random spot check - Portugal comes out best (least processed food) in that map, so I Googled to see how that country ranks for diabetes. Very, very poor apparently, with only Mexico and the US being worse, at least of the countries considered. So much for correlations, or spot checks with a sample size of 1! Interesting anyway.

 

[bulkbiker]

So the UK data is 10 years old.. I wonder when the french data is from.. When I lived there 2011-2014 the supermarkets were pretty full of processed ****.

 

[Kentoldlady1]

We spend quite a lot of time in Rome, where my brother in law lives. They all seem to eat quite a lot of junk food and a lot of carbs. I have no idea what it was like a decade ago, but they seem to have embraced convenience foods whole heartedly!

 

[Tophat1900]

I think Kellogg's, Nestle etc, would be very happy with this.

 

[AloeSvea]

Yes - I had no idea until post-diagnosis etc that the food industry was such an enormously wealthy one - up there with arms and oil - I think even more lucrative than oil. No wonder it is so hard to get the whole foods word out there. I don't know about other posters, but my own extended family and good friends are very resistant to the health/ill-health message. Ultra/processed foods are just so convenient and so yummy. Too sad indeed.

 

[ickihun]

I cannot afford fresh or frozen meat/fish everyday.
I watched a keto video recently and the presenter advised if income is low keto diet is still doable.
I buy what I can afford to fill my kids tummies.
Shopping bill has nearly doubled due to these conmen/women in the food industry taking advantage of brexit. They want to be careful as more parents like us are swooping to quality over quantity and these big companies will go bust as the tide will changes and fashionable very quickly. They dont have backup plans and go bust!
They have all their eggs in one basket.... processed food.
They are winning at mo because they are cheap!

 

[phdiabetic]

One member had it right when she said 'If you're Granny wouldn't recognise it then don't buy it'.

And bring back good old fashioned Cookery to the curriculum, imo.

Also reading nutrition labels and understanding what it means. I had no clue what was high in sugar/fat/etc, or what they even meant (apart from a general "fat=bad") before I was diagnosed.

 

[AloeSvea]

It must be that whole-food availability and cost differs a lot or hugely around our globe. I have found that my whole-food budget is virtually the same as my pre-diagnosis highly processed food budget (with exceptions mentioned below.)

And I can see why my partner and I loved eating in Portugal so much, as we are huge fans, if they have such a low percent of processed food on their tables.

I have eaten LCHF mainly in two countries, one in Europe - Sweden, and here in my home country of NZ. In both countries, even though they differ hugely in terms of climate and proximity to a pole, both have ready affordable access to good poultry, animal and fish produce. Especially here in NZ, as you can imagine. So perhaps I have been blessed in this way, to be able to get such good affordable produce. (But no - it ain't cheap for sure.) And, as middleaged folk, we are not eating as much as we would have done in our youth (I find that I only need 1,600, 1,800 calories max to be satiated.) (And we both practice IFing to various degrees.)

I do believe processed food is also winning, hugely, because of the convenience factor (as well as the low cost of substandard processed food) and work days can be very long. Growing your own food is a part-time job in itself of course, and needs skill and ability to do it, let alone the land and resources. And all that takes money and time too. Knowing how to cook, using herbs and spices (instead of factory produced flavourings) - the same. Our modern complex societies are not set up for easy affordable whole-foods production.

When my food budget now gets out of hand is when we are buying processed food as well, to cater to non LCHF family members and for special occasions (such as Xmas, birthdays and so on). This is why we ask folk who come and stay with us to bring their own processed food if they wish to have it, and we feed them our own LCHF food which they can supplement as they wish.

There was one time that we gasped at the cost of our food bill, was when we were feeding entirely a 21 year old young man, our nephew. He loved eating at our table for two weeks, three meals a day, and was an LCHF knowlegable young man (as Swedes generally are), and he gained obviously in health and vigour by eating all those whole-foods, and would have been eating absolutely over 2,000 calories a day, for sure, but it did cost us a small fortune and as we are on a budget which is not flexible, and we were shocked. So we hear you @ickihun, if you are feeding young adults, who are the biggest eaters of all.

 

[rmz80]

I would think you could probably measure if also a non diabetic had a high amount of processed food in their diet by checking their HbA1C reading.

 

[Chocomin]

Many of those southern european countries have very different work/life balances than the UK. I leave the house at 6 and don't get back 'til 8, which leaves me 0 time to cook. I'm lucky my partner needs less sleep and will cook late at night. Pretty much all the younger people I know have this working pattern too.

 

[ickihun]

I think the government should do something like the Spanish siesta time and make a lunchtime and dinnertime set times. No one should be expected to answer call centre calls etc or have business meetings. After a decade they could relax it as it should be entrenched.....hopefully.
Parents are against it too. Only school routine helps with lunchtime routine. Many have to eat in shifts in the family home due to responsibilities. Until accepted in the UK as important obesity won't improve.

The workplace are the biggest cause of obesity. Sitting and corrupted mealtimes from shift work.
Only a very few respect lunchtime and none respect dinnertime.
Add proceeded food on top.........and here some of us are.

 

[MikeTurin]

We spend quite a lot of time in Rome, where my brother in law lives. They all seem to eat quite a lot of junk food and a lot of carbs. I have no idea what it was like a decade ago, but they seem to have embraced convenience foods whole heartedly!

There's a big problem here, due the imported techniques and bad information on eating here.
Some national staples are carb-heavy like pizza, pasta, rice or polenta. But here fresh vegetables are cheap and supermarkets are filled with fresh food. Anyway it's true that junk food is on the rise.

 

[Kentoldlady1]

There's a big problem here, due the imported techniques and bad information on eating here.
Some national staples are carb-heavy like pizza, pasta, rice or polenta. But here fresh vegetables are cheap and supermarkets are filled with fresh food. Anyway it's true that junk food is on the rise.

I must admit I was surprised. When we first started going out as sort of visitors and not really tourists I thought all the food would be fresh veg and the Mediterranean diet that's in all the diet books!. I was amazed to find out that we had more of a Mediterranean diet at home. I think that I was quite naïve, tbh. I was also saddened by the number of deaths due to drink driving among young people, something I had wrongly assumed did not happen quite as much as it does. I suppose I assumed it was just a British thing.

 

[MikeTurin]

Because the Mediterranean diet is an idea, a distillation of the eating habits of the people living near the seaside.
If you come in Turin you could ask in the winter for the Bagna Caoda, that is vegetables, olive oil and anchoves based, but it's actually not a mediterranean food.
Northern Italy food was traditionally based on grains, especially rice and dairy and meat products. BUT due the globalization and the habits change junk food arrived, but anyway I think moder unprocessed food is bought in respect to other countries, as you could see in open air markets and shops.

For drunk driving, alchool, tobacco and drug abuses in youg people is a big problem, worsened in the last 15-20 years. So the drunks causin driving accidents is a problem, also with elderly people.

 

[DavidGrahamJones]

No wonder it is so hard to get the whole foods word out there. I don't know about other posters, but my own extended family and good friends are very resistant to the health/ill-health message. Ultra/processed foods are just so convenient and so yummy.

In some ways I find that my medical condition, type II and overweight, make my choices so much easier, a no brainer in fact. I started avoiding processed foods in 1989 after gaining 3 st in 3 months, after eating WW frozen meals. Cause? Well the hospital dietician said it was the salt and other "stuff" in processed foods. It's only recently that I've again seen the effect of salt after giving up soluble cocodomol (loads of salt). I have to tolerate the back pain, but weight has dropped (also doing VLDC).

When I look at my friends and family, their approach is based on the fact that they are not type II (yet) or overweight (they think), so the need to change is nil.

As for processed foods being convenient and yummy, nothing I eat (loads of different veg) takes more than 40 minutes to cook (roast veg), oe 20 mins (steamed veg) and 10 minutes to prepare. I also enjoy the taste. I think I've persuaded my brain not to crave for processed foods full of salt or MSG or a whole host of other chemicals, some of which don't even have to be listed.