Featured Image Credit: Media Wales
Topics: Health, Food And Drink
Joe Harker
You may be aware that ultra-processed foods (UPFs) are perhaps not the best thing for you to be eating.
Studies have indicated that eating lots of UPFs results in a 'higher risk of adverse health outcomes', but you perhaps already suspected that eating slices of ham with a face superimposed into the meat wasn't the best way to go.
One man decided to try and go six months without heavily processed foods to see what it'd feel like and the results were quite something.
Steffan Rhys, the editor of Wales Online, made the choice at the beginning of 2024 to cut out UPFs after he 'felt a bit rough and a bit bloated after Christmas'.
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He also decided to drop foods with added sugar, and this isn't a lifelong commitment but half a year later he found that he'd lost 'at least a stone' and had gained some territory in the battle of the belt loops that many of us are fighting.
He's not eating less food, just different stuff with fewer processed foods in it, and it seems to be going well.
It's an issue for many Brits, as about 57 percent of the daily energy intake for a British adult comes from ultra-processed foods and it's even worse for adolescents, who have two-thirds of all energy coming from them.
Rhys found that exercising felt easier as well, but the catalyst for the weight loss was changing his diet.
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He said that someone trying the reverse had seen corresponding results, noting that a man named Dr Chris Van Tulleken 'gained a huge amount of weight' in just one month after switching to a diet that was 80 percent UPFs.
If he'd done it for a full year he reckoned he'd have 'doubled my body weight', so it sounds like cutting this stuff out is good for you.
If you want to try and tweak your own diet the important thing to start with is knowing which foods are ultra processed.
They tend to be ones with plenty of fat and sugar so things like ready meals, mass produced baked goods, packets of meat and cheese with a texture closer to plastic than cheddar are common ones.
However, as Rhys discovered there were more UPFs than he expected as he learned that his morning granola fell into this category and he'd thought he was getting a healthy breakfast.
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He found the best way around processed foods was to eschew the packets and cook from scratch, so his breakfasts became a mixture of nuts, fruit, yoghurt and honey.
Cooking from scratch replaced ready meals, while homemade sweet treats replaced the store-bought stuff that was quicker and more convenient.
The man noted that you didn't need to almost completely ditch the processed stuff as he had, saying that as long as you got it down to about 20 percent of your diet that ought to be alright.
Nuts, Greek yoghurt and honey featured in a lot of his new meals to replace the processed stuff, so you might want to figure out where in your supermarket to get those.
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Doing this also meant cutting down a lot on fizzy drinks, where a lot of the sugar we consume comes from.
All in all it seems to have been a pretty good thing for Rhys' health, which isn't surprising considering recent studies have linked UPFs to cancer, diabetes, heart disease and depression.
It sounds like the gateway to a healthier, happier and longer life.