Our kitchen cupboards are slowly killing us
Throw open your fridge and see the foods putting your family at risk
Ding! Ding! Bring out your dead! Or, if your family haven’t yet perished from a surfeit of French Fancies, Froot Loops and Haribo, chuck those in the barrow instead. In case you didn’t get the memo, there’s an amnesty on ultra-processed foods, so best get rid of the evidence now, before the chicken nugget vigilantes turn up.
Me, I’m happy to hand over the digestives and the Walkers crisps (at a push), but if anyone shops me for the secret stash of Fanta Zeros I keep in the basement, I’ll break their ankles with my contraband box of Crunchies. A study published in the British
Medical Journal has suggested that eating ultra-processed food – in the form of ready meals, high-sugar cereals and fizzy drinks – is driving up rates of cancer. It comes as no surprise to be told, yet again, that we are what we eat. What is different is that French experts have done the sums and calculated that people who ate the most processed food were 23 per cent more likely to develop cancer over the subsequent five years than those who ate very little.
Women were most at risk; those in the top 25 per cent of processed-food eaters were 38 per cent more likely to develop postmenopausal breast cancer. The risk for younger women from this group was elevated by 27 per cent.
Overall, a 10 per cent increase in eating ultra-processed food was linked with a 12 per cent higher risk of getting the disease. If that makes for grim reading, throw open your fridge and have a look at the array of foods that are putting you and your family at risk.
Now, I never buy ready meals because I’m historically too mean and because they don’t taste as good as the meals I can make for a fraction of the cost. This doesn’t make me some kind of domestic goddess, just someone who can chop onions efficiently, crack open a tin of tomatoes, throw in a handful of basil and boil pasta. Ta-dah!
Younger generations are in awe: “You cook from scratch? What, every day?” Yes, I do. But if it helps to dispel the idolatry, my feet are made of clay, as I never dust, iron or clean.
However, the contents of my cupboards are shameful – or they would be, if I were minded to feel ashamed of such things. The enemies within include biscuits, chocolate, sweetened cereals, mass-produced bread. In the freezer lurk sausages, or “reconstituted meat products”, as we must learn to describe them.
All are delicious, in their own way,
but all pose a danger to my family’s health because of added sugar and fat, lack of nutritional goodness and the fact that they have been created on an industrial scale using additives and emulsifiers, stabilisers and saturated fats, until they do not resemble anything our forebears would have recognised as food.
Incidentally, I was ahead of the curve on this one, as several years ago I found myself sending a stern letter to kindly old bewiskered baker Mr Kipling about the additives in his Angel Slices. Having bought them on a nostalgic impulse – oooh, such a Seventies treat! – I was reassured by the box that stated they contained “No Artificial Colours or Flavours”. I tucked in and was struck at how unpleasant they tasted to my adult palate. I scanned the box again. Among the ingredients was titanium dioxide.
Enraged, I dashed off a shrill letter to Mr Kipling – oh, all right them, Premier Foods, which owns the brand. “There is nothing natural about this,” I said. “Human beings are not supposed to eat titanium dioxide.” Mr K’s reply, which came within days, first thanked me for my recent “enquiry and interest in our cakes”, before adding that “titanium dioxide is an approved additive for food use, and as such has been designated the E-number E171”.
I have no idea which other E numbers have been rebranded in a bid to appease modern sensibilities, but it really is a case of caveat emptor. Unfortunately, as a nation, 50.7 per cent of the food we buy is heavily processed, compared to 46.2 in Germany and just 14.2 per cent in France.
It’s no coincidence that we are the fattest in Western Europe (26.9 per cent of our population is obese, and we’re heading for 50 per cent by 2050), so it’s obvious that health warnings aren’t getting through our collective addiction to sugar, salt and fat. Sedentariness is fast (slowly?) becoming a terminal illness.
And even when people do take notice, they don’t necessarily take action. Two thirds of us would put off going to our GP in case we were told we had a serious illness. Another third told the Patients Association that they would delay because they didn’t want the inevitable lecture on their lifestyle.
So what to do? I personally look forward to shouting at the children that pick-and-mix can kill and biscuits are carcinogenic. Frankly, a little exaggeration will go a long way with the younger daughter. The elder will no doubt think that death by chocolate is a rather acceptable form of martyrdom.
But we need joined-up thinking on this. Maybe graphic warnings on the side of packaging? Although if you’ve seen a cigarette box recently, you wonder how anyone could bring themselves to light up when confronted by pictures of tar-blackened lungs. But still they do.
To combat bad choices, obesity and cancer, perhaps legal action is needed – that, or a moratorium on sugary multipacks in supermarkets, the outlawing of sliced white and a witch hunt against pre-prepared lasagne. Or – radical this – we could all double our daily fruit and veg consumption and, in the eventuality we had enough room left and fancied a naughty treat, get off our bottoms and go to a statelicensed confectioners for a Double Decker. Just the one; wars are won on rationing. Although if it’s fizzy pop you’re after, perhaps you might like to make an offer for one of my transgressive cans of contraband Fanta Zero.