You’re probably annoyed about plenty of hopeless things the UK government’s done/not done lately but here’s another!
While many governments world-wide are taking action against the massive food corporations ruining their populations’ health with Ultra Processed Foods (UPFs), politicians here are actively helping to promote them.
They u-turned on stopping junk food advertising to children.
And the Soil Association revealed the NHS Food Scanner app promoted UPFs as ‘healthier swaps’ or awards them with ‘Good Choice’ badges, including:
- Aero Chocolate Caramel Bubbly Mousse
- Monster zero sugar energy drink
- Mr Kipling Bakewell Sponge Slices
- Pot Noodle
- Alpen Light Cereal Bars - Chocolate and Fudge
As I’m sure you’ve guessed, these are all UPFs.
As someone who takes interest in nutrition and health, you may find it obvious.
But it’s hard to know these foods are unhealthy if you haven’t been taught to cook and the packaging tricks you by saying ‘low sugar’ and ‘light’ - and the ACTUAL HEALTH SERVICE tells you they’re good.
These foods are designed to be addictive; they’re nutrient poor and calorie dense; some additives like sweeteners are messing with our gut bacteria which will inevitably have negative health implications!
A diet high in ultra processed foods is linked to chronic disease such as diabetes.
Luckily there's more coverage in the mainstream media now, such as this helpful article about the food processing scale:
Ultra-processed foods: the 19 things everyone needs to know.
Your modern life needs a nutrition top up
Even if you regularly cook fresh and healthy food (bucking the UK trend for diets containing more than 50% UPFs!!), the modern world still provides lots of reasons to optimise your diet with nutrition supplements:
- Stress, pollution, smoking, alcohol, and prescription medications cause nutrient depletion.
- Food quality has deteriorated due to soil depletion, non-organic farming, long-distance transportation & storage.
- Some diets lack nutrients e.g. B12 (vegans), K2 (diets lacking in fermented foods), D3 (lack of sun).
- Taking care to avoid illness when travelling, performing, busy at work, exposed to colds.
- Specific health concerns may benefit from higher dose nutrients e.g. cramps and magnesium, PMS and B6.
The best foundation supplements to start with:
- a quality, nutritionist formulated multivitamin with good antioxidants
- magnesium - because you’ll never get enough in a multi
If you’ve got the budget and want to optimise your nutrition, the next 2 things to add are
We get too little Omega 3 in our diets. Adding good quality fish or algae oil can:
- reduce inflammation
- improve skin
- nourish your brain.
We also don’t eat enough collagen-rich foods (it comes from all the ick bits like skin and boiled bones) so that’s another great addition.
Supplement quality matters too
We can avoid unnecessary additives in nutrition supplements as well as food.
Unfortunately, just like supermarket bread, a lot of supermarket/low quality supplements are loaded with additives - bulking and glazing agents, flavour enhancers, colours, emulsifiers, sweeteners.
In contrast, at City Survivor we fill capsules only with the best quality active nutrients.