If we’re going to be brutally honest with ourselves we eat mostly for enjoyment and pleasure not to remain healthy. Which is why ultra-processed foods skillfully crafted with combinations of fat, salt and sugar to light up those parts of our brain that trigger maximal consumption are our primary delight and our principal nemesis. Even calling them frankenfoods hasn’t curbed our insatiable desire to eat these foods with reckless abandon as we delude ourselves that a muesli bar is actually a healthy food choice.
Ultra-processed foods span a wide variety of options including burgers, fries, chocolate, biscuits, cookies, confectionary, chips, flavoured yoghurt and soft drinks, a compendium of all our guilty pleasures. They’re energy dense and extremely moreish but interestingly the combination of tastes that is so compelling is not found in nature. Grapes, strawberries and watermelon contain sugar and while we enjoy eating them we don’t have to endlessly gorge on them but try walking away from the fat and sugar high of a cheesecake experience without finishing the whole piece.
So how do we turn our backs on this eating frenzy which is probably one of the prime instigators of our obesity epidemic? Nutritionists advise that we read labels, more than five ingredients would suggest that it’s processed as well as swapping unhealthy choices like store-bought biscuits for example for nuts or cheese and apple slices, sugary breakfast for porridge and fruit.
When I remember I remind myself that ultra-processed foods are poisons for the most part and I use a combination of protein powders in a smoothie to enjoy the hit of a sweet, fatty combination or tuck into a hopefully healthy high protein bar.
