Supermarkets pull items off shelves over meat fears
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Your Diet
My comment about the lack of variety/ balance was "if you are eating 24% calories as bread plus flour and pasta you might want to work towards a better variety of carbs (beans, lentils, barley) instead of so much wheat.". These are not three foodstuffs they are one, wheat, comprising a quarter to a third of your entire diet by calories which is huge: presumably you eat ~ twice as much wheat as all the other starchy carbs put together. Variety IS one of the healthy eating guidelines, really to achieve that we should not eat more than one serving of any foodstuff a day.
Bread is not a food group it is within the starchy carbs group, there is no minimum requirement, so I'm not sure why you think the healthy eating guidelines 'advise' eating a minimum amount. I wonder if you have one of the dumbed down leaflets which suggest ways of meeting the guidelines for those who are struggling? Bear in mind some tips are sneaky: the powers-that-be are aiming to get families to cut back on sugary refined breakfast cereals, wholegrain toast is the obvious healthier substitution.
Again I think it's disingenuous to replace bread calories with apples in your example: replace some with dried lentils, beans, sweet potato or purple potato all of which could count towards five to nine a day. The beans and lentils are a particularly good substitute because they are a good source of starchy carbs, minerals and fibre, exactly as wheat is. Fruit is richer in sugars and vitamins so is not a like-for-like switch nutritionally.
Flavour v Cost
A huge part of the problem is the erroneous assumption that healthy eating means salads, platefuls of plain steamed vegetables, dry potatoes, dry bread, chicken breast. That would indeed be quite pricey and bland to boot and doesn't even include many of the most nutrient dense foods. Few starches are innately tasty and neither are many lean proteins, it's the added ingredients that make them so as you say including salt. Canned oily fish (mackerel or pilchards in tomato sauce) and organ meats like chicken liver are far more flavoursome and nutritious than a boring plain chicken breast.
For flavouring starchy carbs and veggies: frozen garlic and ginger, dried red chilli flakes, dried spice blends, dried mixed herbs, coconut milk powder, block creamed coconut, unsweetened dessicated coconut, are all reasonably priced if bought from an Asian grocery store or the World Foods section of a supermarket. I also recommend low salt yeast extract and homemade meat stock which are inexpensive per serving, and encourage clients to make meals like curries and stir fries which are a million miles from being bland.
Weight Management
I deal with weight management clients on a budget as part of my job (lifestyle healthcare). Sorry but you are wrong: the vast majority of people don't need to just reduce the amount they eat they need to change what they eat and often that involves eating a larger volume of food. Telling people who are overweight to eat less by volume simply does not work, often these people are already skipping meals or not having much protein or fat until the evening, and already struggling with cravings and late night snacking as a result.
As a nation we average three servings of fruit and veg a day and just a third of a serving of oily fish a week, I almost never see anyone meeting let alone exceeding all the healthy eating guidelines. The sensible way to lose excess body fat is actually to look at the research - protein, fibre, water and fat confer satiety, micronutrients like omega-3s from oily fish and calcium from dairy are linked to lower body fat, certain carbs spike and trough the blood sugar especially when eaten alone, certain fats are far more likely to burned as fuel, some far more likely to be laid down as fat.
Macros v Micros
Our healthy eating guidelines are not standards or optimal or aspirational, they are minimums and maximums based on what is deemed manageable or realistic for a sedentary population based on the standard UK diet. The micros are just as important as the macros, that is why there are food groups, not jut protein/ fat/ carb splits. There are researched links between micronutrient deficiencies and various common lifestyle health conditions such as insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes. As a nation we are both "overweight and undernourished".
The UK is stuck on 'at least five a day' - which often gets diluted to just or ideally five a day and was plumped for partly because we average three. Most other Western countries advocate seven to ten servings of fruit and veg a day in the full rainbow of colours, and that is what is supported by the research. For those on a budget this is where dried lentils, beans and fresh root vegetables (white potatoes don't count) come into their own, as well as frozen vegetables, canned tomatoes and some dried fruits.
I’ve used all sorts of references, but the guide I was referring to is one published by BBC Education using information from the Open University and WHO. It has a page listing most of the common foodstuffs with the amount that Mr Average eats alongside some suggested quantities for a healthier diet. It also says “Bread, potatoes, rice and pasta are healthy foods for all the family, and should be the basis for all our meals.”, and “Try to eat at least 4 thick slices of bread a day (or 4 chapattis), preferably wholemeal.”. I didn’t say that bread is a food group. My total intake of bread, pasta and flour is 25%, that’s not a third or anywhere near it. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to you that the food which appears most dominant depends on how you measure. By calorie, bread consumption appears higher than fruit and veg because bread is a high energy foodstuff and F&V aren’t. Conversely, if you measure by weight, high density foods like F&V are more dominant than light ones like bread. You have already been told that I’m eating nearly 2kg of F&V for every kilogram of bread, but you choose to ignore that. By weight, 24% of my diet comes from F&V. I also said that I eat 30 odd different types of F&V, but you still seem to think I live off “dry potatoes, dry bread, chicken breast”.
I wasn’t suggesting that apples are equivalent to bread, just picking an example to try and illustrate the cost difference between tasty and bland. You tell me to eat more beans and lentils, but broad beans are one of my favourite veg, and I already scoff them in industrial quantities. Beans are only about a third of the calories of bread though, so if you tried to replace a large quantity of bread with them you would soon run out of stomach to put them all in. But the point is that given the choice between your bland beans and my bland bread, many people will opt for nice tasty cakes, cheeseburgers and chocolate.
I’m eating plenty of fish and liver, but I would rate liver as one of the more bland meals unless it’s fried with onion in lots of fat. I already eat bags of curry and stir fry, that’s where all my chicken breast goes. Recommending more yeast extract to someone who’s already near their upper salt limit is not very wise. Yeast extract is my second highest source of salt after bread, and will still be the fourth highest when I switch to a low salt version as soon as my current jar runs out. It’s quite surprising where salt turns up, I’ve only just discovered that they’re putting it in fresh meat!
Re weight management, as I said before the way to lose weight is by cutting calories, and the way to balance a diet is by comparing its contents against published nutritional standards. If someone needs to do both then they can be combined, but it’s misleading to imply that balancing a diet is the same as cutting intake when it patently isn’t. For example, my cousin is a food professional who knows plenty about nutrition but is overweight, and on the other hand I used to eat a lot less healthily than I do now, but have never been overweight.
The main healthy diet targets that get heavily publicised are fat, saturated fat, fibre, salt, sugar, fruit & veg, fish, and red & processed meat. Here are the figures for my diet:
Fat: 24.8% of calories. Maxima vary from 25% to 35%, depending on the reference.
Sat Fat: 5.7% of cals. Maximum is usually quoted as about a third of total fat.
Fibre: 50g/day. I’ve seen minima anywhere between 18g (FSA) and 30g (my guide).
Salt: 6g/day since I changed to a low salt loaf etc. RDA: 4g min 6g max. (Mr Average: 9-12g)
Fruit and Veg: 481g/day. FSA and WHO both recommend a minimum of 400g.
Fish: 26g/day. RDA 23g, based on two 80g portions a week.
Processed meat: 10g/day.
Red meat: 28g/day.
The FSA recommends 70g maximum for red and processed meat combined, and the study published this week recommends a maximum of 20g processed meat, and a minimum of 20g red meat.
You seem to think I’m not getting enough milk or calcium, I don’t know why. I get through 464cc/day, and my calcium is 1089mg (RDA: 700mg to 2.5g). I haven’t put sugar on the spreadsheet yet, but it won’t be excessive because I don’t eat sweet stuff.
My diet might not be ideal, but it’s far better than the majority of the population, and I know exactly what I’m eating, unlike those who just make assumptions to fit their prejudices. What’s more, I’m eating on a budget that many on this forum are arguing is not possible.0 -
I’ve used all sorts of references, but the guide I was referring to is one published by BBC Education using information from the Open University and WHO. It has a page listing most of the common foodstuffs with the amount that Mr Average eats alongside some suggested quantities for a healthier diet. It also says “Bread, potatoes, rice and pasta are healthy foods for all the family, and should be the basis for all our meals.”, and “Try to eat at least 4 thick slices of bread a day (or 4 chapattis), preferably wholemeal.”. I didn’t say that bread is a food group. My total intake of bread, pasta and flour is 25%, that’s not a third or anywhere near it. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to you that the food which appears most dominant depends on how you measure. By calorie, bread consumption appears higher than fruit and veg because bread is a high energy foodstuff and F&V aren’t. Conversely, if you measure by weight, high density foods like F&V are more dominant than light ones like bread. You have already been told that I’m eating nearly 2kg of F&V for every kilogram of bread, but you choose to ignore that. By weight, 24% of my diet comes from F&V. I also said that I eat 30 odd different types of F&V, but you still seem to think I live off “dry potatoes, dry bread, chicken breast”.
I wasn’t suggesting that apples are equivalent to bread, just picking an example to try and illustrate the cost difference between tasty and bland. You tell me to eat more beans and lentils, but broad beans are one of my favourite veg, and I already scoff them in industrial quantities. Beans are only about a third of the calories of bread though, so if you tried to replace a large quantity of bread with them you would soon run out of stomach to put them all in. But the point is that given the choice between your bland beans and my bland bread, many people will opt for nice tasty cakes, cheeseburgers and chocolate.
I’m eating plenty of fish and liver, but I would rate liver as one of the more bland meals unless it’s fried with onion in lots of fat. I already eat bags of curry and stir fry, that’s where all my chicken breast goes. Recommending more yeast extract to someone who’s already near their upper salt limit is not very wise. Yeast extract is my second highest source of salt after bread, and will still be the fourth highest when I switch to a low salt version as soon as my current jar runs out. It’s quite surprising where salt turns up, I’ve only just discovered that they’re putting it in fresh meat!
Re weight management, as I said before the way to lose weight is by cutting calories, and the way to balance a diet is by comparing its contents against published nutritional standards. If someone needs to do both then they can be combined, but it’s misleading to imply that balancing a diet is the same as cutting intake when it patently isn’t. For example, my cousin is a food professional who knows plenty about nutrition but is overweight, and on the other hand I used to eat a lot less healthily than I do now, but have never been overweight.
<snip>
My diet might not be ideal, but it’s far better than the majority of the population, and I know exactly what I’m eating, unlike those who just make assumptions to fit their prejudices. What’s more, I’m eating on a budget that many on this forum are arguing is not possible.
You might find my last post easier to understand if you reread you own and mine instead of leaping to erroneous conclusions about what I think or believe. Only three paragraphs were devoted exclusively to 'Your Diet', the remaining six were on your claims about nutrition and dietetics generally.
You claimed "It is possible to eat healthily on a budget, but such diets tend to be bland, which is why I think many people don't do it.." And I disputed that, in a section headed 'Flavour v Cost'. Individual ingredients or foodstuffs might be bland if nothing is added but that does not mean the diet tends to be bland - that was the whole point of the list of flavourings many of which actually contribute vitamins, minerals and other antioxidants to the diet!
Of course cakes and chocolate are tastier but that is a disingenuous comparison, these are foods with flavourings already added. The base ingredients cocoa and wheat flour are absolutely disgusting eaten alone. Nobody would choose to eat that any more than they would choose a plate of nothing but plain beans or dry bread. A better comparison would be a homemade bean curry, lentil and coconut soup or houmous none of which are remotely bland.
You also stated "Bread accounts for 24% of all my calories!" then went on to admit only "15% of all my calories are coming from potatoes, rice and oats" which reads to me as all the other starches put together. If a quarter of your calories are from a single processed foodstuff (wheat) you are not eating a balanced/ variety regardless of your fruit and veg intake. I am qualified to degree level in lifestyle healthcare, so reasonably confident I understand nutrition, dietetics and weight management!
You further claimed "Some people need to lose weight, but if they're on a budget the sensible way to do that is by cutting what they eat, not by switching to more expensive foodstuffs". You did not say cutting calories, that reads quite clearly as reducing the quantity/ volume or portion size which is the only way you can reduce caloric intake if not switching to different foods. Sorry but this is not a sensible or effective approach for the average overweight person on the average UK diet. You've actually identified a better solution yourself when noting the differing calories and satiety factor of bread to broad beans. :T
As you have noted there are numerous other starchy foods which you could/ should be eating instead of so much wheat, all carbohydrates contain the same a mount of calories per gram (~4) so eating a wider variety and better balance of starchy foods would not affect the macro split or overall calories. Rice, rye, barley, oats, purple white or sweet potato, any of the many types of lentils or beans.
BBC and the Open University don't write our nutrition guidelines it's done by a panel of medical experts, you might consider going to the source not a strange derivative version. At least four thick slices of bread a day is not an official recommendation and it is illogical given the salt content of bread, that some contain added sugar, the 'variety' guideline and the fact that most people will use butter, oil based spread or something like mayonnaise all of which contain salt and fat. Reduced fat versions tend to be even more heavily processed, and often contain more salt, more sugar or other artificial flavourings. Only butter contains much in the way of natural micronutrients, but still falls under the 'maximum 10% daily calories' category.
In fact the NHS notes
"Other foods, such as bread and breakfast cereals, can contribute a lot of salt to our diet. But that’s not because these foods are always high in salt – it’s because we eat a lot of them."
http://www.nhs.uk/Livewell/Goodfood/Pages/salt.aspx
"The key findings of the CASH survey were that one in four loaves of bread contained as much salt per slice as a packet of crisps and that bread contributes a fifth of many people’s daily salt intake. Freshly baked bread also tended to have higher salt content than pre-packaged varieties, and a few brands contained more than one third of a person’s recommended daily limit of salt per 100g eaten. The highest salt levels were found in bread from high street chain bakeries ...
CASH says the public should look at labels and choose bread products that contain a maximum of 1g of salt per 100g, or about 0.4g per slice. They also highlight that speciality breads, such as rye, which are often perceived as healthier options, can be deceptively high in salt.
CASH’s other ‘top tips’ for reducing salt intake include:
sticking to medium sliced loaves rather than thick, and being careful not to cut bread too thickly if it is bought unsliced
making your own bread at home with no salt."
http://www.nhs.uk/news/2011/09September/Pages/cash-survey-salt-in-bread.aspx
There is no minimum recommended intake for salt, wonder if you have misunderstood. Many of us can get all the sodium we need (500mg+) from fruit, veggies and 'naturally' salty foods like seafood.
Meridian produce a 'no added salt' yeast extract (0.3g sodium per 100g) which is decent for cooking - the amount used does not impact on sodium intake in any meaningful way (15mg sodium in a 5g teaspoon or less than the equiv of 0.04g salt), supplies a variety of B group vitamins and is rich in protein. My clients are not eating too much sodium because they are discouraged from eating heavily processed, salt added foods like commercial bread!!
My current favourite liver dish is chicken livers lightly sauteed (good non stick pan, a tiny bit of unsalted butter and loads of garlic) with veg like red onions, bell peppers or mushrooms, sometimes I dust the liver in peanut flour, sometimes I add ground spices too, occasionally I use a splash of wine. Served over a salad containing avocado (adds the fatty texture, olives are a good sub) and liberally dressed with balsamic vinegar OR Asian style dressing (lime juice, reduced salt soy, red chilli, natural sweetener). :drool:
BTW my salads contain cheap ingredients like red cabbage, carrot, lentils not simply pricey ones. I don't find this meal bland at all and I like spicy flavoursome food, but I don't eat heavily processed, salt added foods like commercial bread.Declutterbug-in-progress.⭐️⭐️⭐️ ⭐️⭐️0 -
Granulated sugar is 50% glucose and 50% fructose. The glucose goes into your bloodstream to provide energy into your cells. The ingestion of glucose triggers an insulin response from the pancreas and it's the insulin which acts like a key and opens the cells for the glucose. The fructose is dealt with by the liver. Fruit is fructose + fibre, fruit juices are fructose.
Carbohydrates are converted into glucose. So you can say I don't eat sweet stuff, but if you're eating bread, pasta, rice, pastry, baked goods and root veg such as potatoes and parsnips, you are eating sugar, in effect.
Back in the 1970s, Ancel Keys produced The Seven Countries Study. He cherry-picked the data from 22 countries to fit his hypothesis. He didn't do multilinear regression analysis to check his results (ie if you get a result A + C = D you have to check the other way around) and he didn't use computers.
From this, the American health organisations and government started advocating cutting back on fat and this was adopted by other governments. Doing that for the past 40 years hasn't dramatically lessened heart disease but it did lead to an explosion in diabetes.
Generally speaking a low fat diet is a high carb diet.
So if 24% of your diet by weight is fruit and vegetables and 25% of your diet is carbohydrates, personally I'd say that your diet is less healthy than you think.
People have been so brainwashed by the low fat mantra that they treat carbs as if they were neutral but carbs = glucose.
Oh if it matters, I am a college-trained ex chef and as my pancreas fails to churn out enough insulin to cope with the modern carb heavy diet, I have Type 2 diabetes. I've read a lot of books and medical studies and emailed with doctors and researchers, and I low carb to compensate.
I'm not saying everyone needs to low carb, I am saying carbs aren't neutral and if your diet is really carb heavy it can have major health consequences.0 -
Salt
I can’t find the reference I was looking at, but it evidently contained a phrase like “between 4 and 6g” which could be read as 4 min 6 max, or taken that the maximum is subject to debate. The FSA guidelines are ambiguous, referring to 6g both as a target and a maximum. Taking the maximum as a target only makes sense whilst people are still typically consuming 9g. Apparently 6g is the average of 5g for women and 7g for men.
The SACN are the body currently charged with providing the official government advice on nutrition. Their guidelines state a sodium RNI of 1.6g, and an LRNI of 0.6g. The RNI is two standard deviations above the mean and satisfies the requirements of 97.7% of the population. LRNI is two standard deviations below the mean and satisfies the requirements of 2.3% of the population. From these figures the mean is 1.1g and the standard deviation 0.25g.
Your suggestion of 0.5g of sodium is below the mean by 0.6g (2.4 SD), which means it will be enough to satisfy the requirements of less than 1% of the population. That sounds like pretty poor advice to me.
I used to use Tesco Value low fat marge until they stopped selling it, and then switched to Flora Light. I recently switched to Flora Lighter than Light because it is lower in salt, not for a further reduction in fat. The same applies to a few other low fat products, low fat digestives are the same or lower in salt than other brands, as are low fat quiches. Low fat mayonnaise is slightly higher in salt, but it contributes so little to my total salt it’s neither here nor there. Chicken breasts and stir fry veg contribute more salt than the LF biscuits, quiche or mayo.
The low salt Yeast Extract looks interesting, but it’s just easier to ration the Sainsburys low salt stuff a bit than go on a special shopping trip looking for it. At 0.75%, the bread I eat is already far lower in salt than the figure you mention.
High sodium intake is associated with elevated blood pressure, but my BP is a healthy average of 120 systolic.
Fat
The SACN haven’t made any pronouncement on fat yet AFAIK, but the FSA recommend a maximum of 35% total and 11% saturates by calorie. The American Dietetic Association recommends 30% in their Food and Nutrition Guide.
In the summer of 2008 I noticed a small cholesterol spot developing in the corner of my eye, so I decided it was time to reduce my fat intake. Instead of jumping to conclusions I totted up where the fat in my diet was coming from, and found that the majority wasn’t coming from “the usual suspects” and that my total fat was already meeting the 35% FSA figure. If I had removed all the “junk food” products from my diet it would only have reduced my fat intake to about 33%, because although those sorts of foodstuffs are high in fat I don’t eat much of them. I reduced my fat intake to 25% just by switching to skimmed milk, low fat marge, and cutting out cheese. Within 18 months the spot had gone, and my cholesterol was a healthy 4.48mmol/l just over a year ago, so I’m not sure of the wisdom of increasing my fat intake back to where it was in 2008.
Carbs and Sugar
My total carb intake is 55%, and in the absence of a figure from the SACN, the FSA recommend a figure of 50%, but as that’s not a maximum I’m not so sure that my intake is that excessive really. They do recommend a maximum of 11% for non-milk extrinsic sugars though, with the remaining 39% as intrinsic and milk sugars and starch. Food labels only specify total sugar so it gets a bit messy to assess, which is why I originally left sugars off the spread sheet. My total sugar intake is 16%, so if I tot up all the sugars that are definitely milk or intrinsic and subtract them from the total I have a conservative estimate of the NMES. Calculating in that way I get at least 9% intrinsic and no more than 7% for NMES. As I said before, I don’t eat sugary stuff, so it’s no surprise that my intake is far below the recommended maximum.
Insulin Resistance
I think Edwardia should bear in mind that bread is not all carb by a long chalk, and the vast majority of bread carb is not sugar. From a quick glance at a couple of recent review papers on the causes of insulin resistance it seems that there’s still not much consensus. High levels of fat and carbohydrate both appear to be implicated, but as Edwardia pointed out that’s a catch 22, since reducing the proportion of one increases the proportion of the other. More specifically though, they point the finger at high levels of saturated fat and simple sugars, which are both very low in my diet. Fibre, exercise and omega 3 are all mentioned as beneficial and I’m getting plenty of each. The FSA say: “The Government recommends that all individuals should consume a diet that contains……plenty of starchy foods such as rice, bread, pasta and potatoes (choosing wholegrain varieties when possible)” and NICE say “Base meals on starchy foods such as potatoes, bread, rice and pasta, choosing wholegrain where possible”.
Comparisons
I’m not suggesting that anyone would eat dry bread, all the bread I eat goes into the sandwiches that I eat for lunch with a variety of about 11 different fillings. However, I still argue that those sandwiches are not only more bland and healthier than the fatty and sugary stuff people often scoff, but they’re also quicker and/or cheaper to make than curries etc.
Here are some interesting prices per 1000kcal:
£0.40 biscuits
£0.59 average for my lunchtime sandwiches.
£1.02 for my diet as a whole.
£1.14 is a figure that many people on this forum think it’s not possible to eat healthily on.
£1.56 average for my evening meals.
£1.88 for a chicken and veg curry.
£2.30 for fruit
£2.58 is the New York Times idea of a cheap meal.
Remember also that I argued that you’re hard pressed to get cheap, healthy, convenient, and tasty all together. Someone who sees cookery as a chore rather than a hobby will also have a very different idea of what convenient or easy mean compared to someone who is sufficiently interested in food to choose it for a career. Adding flavourings might be easy for someone who is a skilled chef, but every cookery book I pick up is just full of recipes which are expensive and use ingredients that can’t be bought in quantities for one. Here are some examples of curry price comparisons (excluding the rice):
Curry made with a jar of Tesco balti sauce: £3.80
Average of four curries from a cookbook: £4.69
A balti recipe off the Channel 4 website does better at £3.75, but even that goes up to £5 if you have to throw away the perishable leftovers.
A quick search on Amazon is a good example of the problem. If you search for cookery books using keywords like “healthy” there are loads of hits, or “budget” there are plenty, or “recipes for one” there are a few, but try searching for all three and you’ll find there’s next to nothing at all
If I switch to butter it will increase the calories in my diet so much that I could leave one sandwich out of my lunch and still get the same calories overall, which increases my fat to 30% and reduce my carbs to 52%, closer to the FSA figures. However, it will also increase my saturated fat right up to the maximum and reduce the omega 3, so I’m not convinced there’s a net benefit.
If I cut out one sandwich a day and replace the calories with cheap beans (eg kidney/pinto) then the budget goes up by 15% even without including other expensive ingredients like herbs and spices. The fat proportion goes down and not up because of all the marge that gets cut out with the sandwich, and even then 18% of my calories are still coming from bread!
I don’t eat sandwiches for lunch just to be perverse, or claim that other carbs are bad, I just eat them because they’re cheap, convenient, and a lot healthier than many of the alternatives. I think you are the one being disingenuous unless you have any alternatives that are more realistic.0 -
Salt
I can’t find the reference I was looking at, but it evidently contained a phrase like “between 4 and 6g” which could be read as 4 min 6 max, or taken that the maximum is subject to debate. The FSA guidelines are ambiguous, referring to 6g both as a target and a maximum. Taking the maximum as a target only makes sense whilst people are still typically consuming 9g. Apparently 6g is the average of 5g for women and 7g for men.
The SACN are the body currently charged with providing the official government advice on nutrition. Their guidelines state a sodium RNI of 1.6g, and an LRNI of 0.6g. The RNI is two standard deviations above the mean and satisfies the requirements of 97.7% of the population. LRNI is two standard deviations below the mean and satisfies the requirements of 2.3% of the population. From these figures the mean is 1.1g and the standard deviation 0.25g.
Your suggestion of 0.5g of sodium is below the mean by 0.6g (2.4 SD), which means it will be enough to satisfy the requirements of less than 1% of the population. That sounds like pretty poor advice to me.
I used to use Tesco Value low fat marge until they stopped selling it, and then switched to Flora Light. I recently switched to Flora Lighter than Light because it is lower in salt, not for a further reduction in fat. The same applies to a few other low fat products, low fat digestives are the same or lower in salt than other brands, as are low fat quiches. Low fat mayonnaise is slightly higher in salt, but it contributes so little to my total salt it’s neither here nor there. Chicken breasts and stir fry veg contribute more salt than the LF biscuits, quiche or mayo.
The low salt Yeast Extract looks interesting, but it’s just easier to ration the Sainsburys low salt stuff a bit than go on a special shopping trip looking for it. At 0.75%, the bread I eat is already far lower in salt than the figure you mention.
High sodium intake is associated with elevated blood pressure, but my BP is a healthy average of 120 systolic.
Fat
The SACN haven’t made any pronouncement on fat yet AFAIK, but the FSA recommend a maximum of 35% total and 11% saturates by calorie. The American Dietetic Association recommends 30% in their Food and Nutrition Guide.
In the summer of 2008 I noticed a small cholesterol spot developing in the corner of my eye, so I decided it was time to reduce my fat intake. Instead of jumping to conclusions I totted up where the fat in my diet was coming from, and found that the majority wasn’t coming from “the usual suspects” and that my total fat was already meeting the 35% FSA figure. If I had removed all the “junk food” products from my diet it would only have reduced my fat intake to about 33%, because although those sorts of foodstuffs are high in fat I don’t eat much of them. I reduced my fat intake to 25% just by switching to skimmed milk, low fat marge, and cutting out cheese. Within 18 months the spot had gone, and my cholesterol was a healthy 4.48mmol/l just over a year ago, so I’m not sure of the wisdom of increasing my fat intake back to where it was in 2008.
Carbs and Sugar
My total carb intake is 55%, and in the absence of a figure from the SACN, the FSA recommend a figure of 50%, but as that’s not a maximum I’m not so sure that my intake is that excessive really. They do recommend a maximum of 11% for non-milk extrinsic sugars though, with the remaining 39% as intrinsic and milk sugars and starch. Food labels only specify total sugar so it gets a bit messy to assess, which is why I originally left sugars off the spread sheet. My total sugar intake is 16%, so if I tot up all the sugars that are definitely milk or intrinsic and subtract them from the total I have a conservative estimate of the NMES. Calculating in that way I get at least 9% intrinsic and no more than 7% for NMES. As I said before, I don’t eat sugary stuff, so it’s no surprise that my intake is far below the recommended maximum.
Insulin Resistance
I think Edwardia should bear in mind that bread is not all carb by a long chalk, and the vast majority of bread carb is not sugar. From a quick glance at a couple of recent review papers on the causes of insulin resistance it seems that there’s still not much consensus. High levels of fat and carbohydrate both appear to be implicated, but as Edwardia pointed out that’s a catch 22, since reducing the proportion of one increases the proportion of the other. More specifically though, they point the finger at high levels of saturated fat and simple sugars, which are both very low in my diet. Fibre, exercise and omega 3 are all mentioned as beneficial and I’m getting plenty of each. The FSA say: “The Government recommends that all individuals should consume a diet that contains……plenty of starchy foods such as rice, bread, pasta and potatoes (choosing wholegrain varieties when possible)” and NICE say “Base meals on starchy foods such as potatoes, bread, rice and pasta, choosing wholegrain where possible”.
Comparisons
I’m not suggesting that anyone would eat dry bread, all the bread I eat goes into the sandwiches that I eat for lunch with a variety of about 11 different fillings. However, I still argue that those sandwiches are not only more bland and healthier than the fatty and sugary stuff people often scoff, but they’re also quicker and/or cheaper to make than curries etc.
Here are some interesting prices per 1000kcal:
£0.40 biscuits
£0.59 average for my lunchtime sandwiches.
£1.02 for my diet as a whole.
£1.14 is a figure that many people on this forum think it’s not possible to eat healthily on.
£1.56 average for my evening meals.
£1.88 for a chicken and veg curry.
£2.30 for fruit
£2.58 is the New York Times idea of a cheap meal.
Remember also that I argued that you’re hard pressed to get cheap, healthy, convenient, and tasty all together. Someone who sees cookery as a chore rather than a hobby will also have a very different idea of what convenient or easy mean compared to someone who is sufficiently interested in food to choose it for a career. Adding flavourings might be easy for someone who is a skilled chef, but every cookery book I pick up is just full of recipes which are expensive and use ingredients that can’t be bought in quantities for one. Here are some examples of curry price comparisons (excluding the rice):
Curry made with a jar of Tesco balti sauce: £3.80
Average of four curries from a cookbook: £4.69
A balti recipe off the Channel 4 website does better at £3.75, but even that goes up to £5 if you have to throw away the perishable leftovers.
A quick search on Amazon is a good example of the problem. If you search for cookery books using keywords like “healthy” there are loads of hits, or “budget” there are plenty, or “recipes for one” there are a few, but try searching for all three and you’ll find there’s next to nothing at all
If I switch to butter it will increase the calories in my diet so much that I could leave one sandwich out of my lunch and still get the same calories overall, which increases my fat to 30% and reduce my carbs to 52%, closer to the FSA figures. However, it will also increase my saturated fat right up to the maximum and reduce the omega 3, so I’m not convinced there’s a net benefit.
If I cut out one sandwich a day and replace the calories with cheap beans (eg kidney/pinto) then the budget goes up by 15% even without including other expensive ingredients like herbs and spices. The fat proportion goes down and not up because of all the marge that gets cut out with the sandwich, and even then 18% of my calories are still coming from bread!
I don’t eat sandwiches for lunch just to be perverse, or claim that other carbs are bad, I just eat them because they’re cheap, convenient, and a lot healthier than many of the alternatives. I think you are the one being disingenuous unless you have any alternatives that are more realistic.
As I said "You might find my last post easier to understand if you reread you own and mine instead of leaping to erroneous conclusions about what I think or believe." I did not and do not recommend that amount of sodium I said "There is no minimum recommended intake for salt, wonder if you have misunderstood. Many of us can get all the sodium we need (500mg+) from fruit, veggies and 'naturally' salty foods like seafood." Optimal amounts, or what I might recommend, vary from person to person based on size/ weight, activity levels, sweating and the like.
Jar sauce for a curry, why would you want to pay for sugar water packaged in heavy glass? Dried spice blends are massively cheaper and can easily be sourced without additives, canned tomatoes and/ or block creamed coconut to make it 'saucey', even curry pastes are cheaper. I can throw a cheap one pot meal together in five minutes if I use the slow cooker, that does me for days, several of my busy clients have slow cookers now.
If you were hitting the recommended total fat content yet exceeding the maximum 10% daily calories from foods with added fat or added sugar you were not eating sufficient natural whole fats - oily fish, nuts, seeds, avocado, whole olives, block creamed coconut, cocoa powder. Whilst some of these are cheaper than others, nuts and seeds are very calorie dense, oily fish is far more nutritious than chicken. I think you are confusing low fat with reduced fat.
You have hit the nail on the head with bread, the problem is partly that it's actually a processed food based on very finely ground (easily digested) grains. Partly the fact that you need spreads and condiments to make it palatable - I have not advocated butter any more than I have advocated vegetable oil spreads or mayonnaise, they all fit into the maximum 10% category and all are extracts not wholefoods. Plus spreads and mayo tend to contain too much omega-6, and the balance of this to omega-3s is critical.
Not sure if I have already said this on this thread but ... I live alone so cook for one, I am no chef, ditto all three for many of my clients. I also don't drive, live in the centre of a deprived city so decent public transport, tho I get supermarket home delivery or use Shanks Pony for most groceries.
I can get through 4kg of red onions, 2kg carrots, one whole red cabbage over a period of weeks, I eat a lot of frozen veg (cheaper and less waste), plus all sort of dried and canned stuff (beans, lentils, tomatoes, oily fish, spices, dried fruit). You don't need to love or be great at cooking to eat cheap and healthy, and even if you did that is a different argument. There are plenty of charities offering cheap/ free cooking classes in poorer areas or videos on YouTube or TV shows. I make up 90% of my own recipes, they don't always work out perfectly but some are delish. Many vegetarian and vegan meals are cheap and healthy, plenty of cookbooks, also good stuff in student cookbooks.
http://www.jamieoliver.com/jamies-ministry-of-food/
http://www.cheap-family-recipes.org.uk/
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Delias-Frugal-Food-Delia-Smith/dp/034091856X/
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0711222401/
Basic slow cooker is well under a tenner and a stick blender is under a fiver, freezer absolutely does make a big difference tho.
Recipes costed in 2010: some items you could get for the same or cheaper on offer, others have gone up in price. Obviously can switch out the vegetables for other reasonably priced ones depending what your tastes and are what stores are accessible or will deliver - Asda butternut squash (£1 a kilo), Asda Smartprice fresh carrots (46p a kilo), Tesco root vegetable selection (67p a kilo), Tesco red onions (50p a kilo), Aldi red cabbage (~50p a kilo), anything from a market or Farmfoods (3 bags of 750g/ 1kg for £2), on the fortnightly offers at Aldi or Lidl, dried split peas (~£1 a kilo), dried chick peas (£1.50 a kilo).
Lentil & vegetable curry (four portions @ 35p each)
Dried red lentils, 250g 45p
Frozen broccoli, 250g 25p
Frozen cauliflower, 250g 28p
Onions, 200g 8p
Coconut cream, 100g 14p
Frozen garlic 8p
Madras spice blend 13p
3/4 litre beef stock free
Plus a little red chilli and ginger.
Mixed bean curry (four portions @ 35p each)
1 tin chick peas 33p
1 tin kidney beans 19p
1 tin tomatoes 33p
Two onions, 300g 12p
Coconut cream, 50g 7p
Plain yoghurt, 150g 15p
Frozen garlic 8p
Garam masala 13p.
If you are going to whinge about meat you could add the pickings from a whole chicken that you'd eat for other meals and boiled up for hours for a mineral rich stock, frozen chicken livers (£2.20 a kilo), pork kidney (£1 a kilo), canned oily fish like pilchards/ mackerel in tomato sauce (<£1 for 400g). I can't see the point but dried soya mince or chunks (£4 a kilo dry weight) is a reasonably priced alternative for those who want more protein but not animal products.Declutterbug-in-progress.⭐️⭐️⭐️ ⭐️⭐️0 -
A point to remember when looking at assorted data from around the world.
If you look at UK/EU figures for carbs, the fibre is already separated out so the carbs figure is net carbs. If you look at US figures the carbs is a total figure which includes fiber so you have to minus that to get the net carbs yourself.
NICE is still pushing the low fat mantra that has been discredited.
http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/fats-full-story/
Above from Harvard School of Public Health0
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