Get out of the trap! How to avoid secret fattening foods

Industrially manufactured and pre-processed foods are both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, they make our lives a lot easier because you only have to heat them up to get a full meal.

They save us the annoying preparation such as cleaning vegetables and the often longer cooking times. They are ready to hand in the refrigerated counter or on the shelf in the supermarket and thus convey the feeling of being freshly cooked. Unfortunately, this is an incredibly good psychological marketing trick. Modern industrial foods are deliberately presented in contrast to the previously common canned meals, which also belong to the so-called convenience products.

Finished products are overloaded with calories

In the case of ready-to-eat food, five processing stages can be distinguished from ready-to-cook to ready-to-eat. However, the division according to the NOVA classification, which differentiates from 1 (unprocessed foods, e.g. lettuce, fresh vegetables) to 4 (ultra-processed foods, e.g. soft drinks, frozen meals), is more suitable.

Leaving aside ready-to-eat salads and smoothies (often calorie bombs, by the way!), it can be assumed that convenience products always contain many more calories than if you had cooked them yourself. In addition, these industrially produced foods usually contain so much more fat and sugar in addition to numerous preservatives in order to achieve a reasonably tolerable taste experience that we can call them calorie bombs, i.e. fattening foods.

Fat as a flavor carrier and sugar to sweeten the enjoyment, in the truest sense of the word – are fattening. Try it yourself and experience that fresh ingredients are tastier because the loss of flavor caused by boiling and long storage does not have to be compensated for by additives such as fat and sugar. A small example: A portion of homemade chilli con carne brings 193 kilocalories (kcal) to the plate, a comparable finished product contains 418 kilocalories per portion. That’s more than double! Quite apart from the salt content, which is many times higher in finished products, because high blood pressure due to excessive salt intake is not the issue here.

Cook yourself!

You can see that there are health benefits to cooking for yourself because it reduces the number of calories, avoids the consumption of unnecessary additives such as flavor enhancers and maybe even enjoys cooking, which in turn can have a very positive effect on your mood.

There is an almost unmanageable number of books for quick meals on the cookbook market that present delicious, wholesome and varied dishes. Accept these offers, it is good for your health. In this context, it is also interesting to mention that a large study of over 100,000 people showed a clear association between ultra-processed (i.e. highly processed) foods and an increase in the cardiovascular risk of heart attack and stroke. You can avoid this risk with simple strategies. Preparing everything fresh is fun and the healthiest way to eat.

More and more finished products in Germany

The market share of finished products is steadily increasing in Germany. With a market share of 5.9 million euros, Germany is still behind the USA with 64.9 million, but there has been an upward trend for years. As nutritionists, we are concerned about this development, not only because of the increased calorie intake, but also because it significantly increases the intake of potentially carcinogenic substances such as acrylamide and furans.

Although the carcinogenic potential of these substances has not yet been confirmed in some cases, since we are not allowed to uncritically apply results from animal studies to humans, the doubts about this are only minimal. For this reason, there have been official limit values ​​for acrylamide for several years, which should not be exceeded.

It is well documented that ready-to-eat convenience products in particular – ultra-processed foods are referred to here – contain a higher proportion of these potentially carcinogenic substances. In 2018, a large study of over 100,000 people showed that increasing the proportion of ultraprocessed foods by 10 percent in an individual’s diet was associated with a more than 10 percent increase in the risk of developing cancer, particularly breast cancer. With the modern nutritional possibilities, we eat diseases.