Healthy Lunchboxes vs. Marketing Tactics: The Challenge of Avoiding Ultra-Processed Foods

Could this be any harder? 

This recent article in The Guardian discussed the evils of Ultra Processed Foods (UPF) and offered no less than 20 ways to reduce the use of them. Various health professionals were asked for comment and offered mostly aligned views about the evils and pretty practical advice. There is some discussion about how to categorise a processed food, because let’s face it, almost everything has some degree of processing nowadays. Since understanding the nuances of classification is probably not going to help us that much in deciding whether to include them in the shopping trolley or not, the way that I, and many other nutrition-focussed practitioners, would categorise them is for the most part much more practical: namely many unrecognisible ingredients that serve to create a shelf life for a product that should go off or to provide a heavily manufactured / artifical product that doesn’t offer much in the way of what your body is looking for as food. 

These products, in my view, offer NOTHING of value except the perception of value itself - usually cheap or on bulk purchase offer. We'll go to our graves carrying all manner of preventable health conditions but with money in our pocket. Excellent.

However, rant aside, two things occurred to me while reading that article. The first being that it's unlikely that anyone who has a reliance on UPFs for their sustenance would make it to the end of a list of 20 points. The impact on attention and focus of highly processed ‘food’ containing too much sugar/’sugar like’ ingredients, industrially-destroyed fats and various artificial flavours, colours and preservatives to make the thing enticing being pretty negative.

The second was an unfortunate coincidence that is actually the point I want to make here. Right beside the point on the list about some UPFs being marketed with a ‘health halo’ and therefore perceived as health food and the next one about avoiding the snacks, an advertisement for frubes (on discount) popped up on my screen. 

This was ironic since it's a good example of the thing that both those points are talking about. 

Some years ago when I included homemade truffles containing decent protein, essential fats and slow-release carbohydrates to nourish my child’s body and brain, but not sugar, brain-altering artificial colourings or gut-destroying preservatives I was told by my child’s teacher not to include “treats” in the lunchbox. And yet the lunch boxes containing packets of cheese strings, sugar-laden pots of things claiming to be yoghurt, formed meat slices in the shape of teddy bears, flavoured rice cakes and granola bars passed inspection just fine. These items all contain the very things that send kids up the walls of the classroom in the afternoon, whinging on the way home and not very interested in dinner and really should be considered an occasional ‘treat’. Even dehydrated fruit strips can fall into this category. 

These things are quick, easy and literally light up our brains with how good they make us feel (temporarily I might add - and the higher the high, the lower the low; which is an inevitable follow on). They fit so nicely as the solution to the problems we all want to avoid and make us feel somewhat virtuous doing it. They are designed to seem like wholesome food and make it easy for us time-starved parents to provide our kids something for school lunch that we think they will eat. And to be fair, those teddy bear ham pieces are pretty cute. You could easily be persuaded into them if you happen to take your kids to the supermarket with you.

However, with child instances of obesity, diabetes, anxiety, attention and learning concerns becoming an increasing public health challenge it really is important to pay attention to the fundamental aspect of what we are doing to nourish them, and by extension, ourselves. I appreciate that there are other factors contributing to this bleak picture I've painted for our future adults, however nourishment is foundational to supporting a child to grow as well as possible - to be strong, resilient and happy.

Disappointingly, feeding ourselves and our children seems to be an area that is wrapped in confusion, bad information and very aggressive marketing that is making it difficult to make good choices.

This constant bombardment with messaging about what we should be doing to keep up: to do more with the precious little time we have in a day; to have our kids being able to enjoy the finer things in life and get their 5-a-day in an appealing way is making it sooooo hard to do the right thing. 

Or to even know what the right thing is. As is evident in my experience of reading some useful information about making good food choices in the aforementioned article and being exposed to targeted advertising to make poorer ones at the same time!

Should we become expert chemists to read the labels, should we pay attention to the traffic light system for sugar, salt and fat, can we even work out how the adult daily ‘allowance’ used as reference translates to our kids? Sorting through the “real good” from the “made to look like it might be good” is unbelievably hard work, especially at the end of a day that has already involved plenty of hard work which is for the most part when we are doing the grocery shopping.

Almost everything we have access to in the supermarket is processed to some degree. I’m not against processing, per se. It’s about paying attention to the product - what will it be used for, what’s the quality like, does it help more than it harms (the impact of the packaging on ourselves and the planet has to be considered here too), is there a better choice that can be made at this time?

As much as you can, nourishing yourself and your family with fresh food that you know came from a plant or an animal not too many steps before and preferably is not wrapped in plastic is always the right thing to do. It makes a difference.

If this resonates with you but you don’t know where to begin or how to make it work in your family, contact me here to get a strategy that fits into your life. From a one-off health audit to a personalised and coached multi-session programmes to take the health you have and turn it into the health you want. I’m here to help you and your family thrive.

P.S. In case you are wondering about what happened with my truffles. After my private rage about the instruction I did remove them from the lunchbox and shifted them to the afternoon car snack for fueling the post-school activities. Much more fit for purpose than popcorn.