As an example, I had a friend in college who had a recipie he ate almost every night for dinner: one can of beans, one can of diced tomatoes. Put in bowl, stir, microwave, eat. He called it… Beans and Tomatos.

Yeah that's not a realistic meal. I'm talking about cooking proper balanced, healthy (although not always!) and tasty meals that are suitable for a family. The prep alone can take just as much time as it can to smash some beige oven food in the oven for 20mins at 180C.

Another friend ate (still eats?) the same breakfast for years. His recipie? Oatmeal. Period.

I do this too. I make it for my kids, throw in some frozen blueberries, sprinkle with chia seeds and add a small dollop of biscoff or golden syrup. Although it's not that much effort, it's still quite a bit more than making a bowl of cereal, especially when cleaning the saucepan after as porridge is a bitch to clean once it's started to cool.

Cost wise it absolutely is more expensive. Every substitute product I get that's UPF free costs significantly more. I'd say it added about 20% to our weekly grocery costs trying significantly reduce it.

[–] MareOfNights@discuss.tchncs.de 0 points 1 day ago (1 children)

You don't have to avoid UPF. Just eat less and fill with salad/veggies until you aren't hungry. As long as you keep the calories in range you'll be mostly fine. Maybe watch the macros a bit.

[–] xep@discuss.online 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Calories are a unit of heat, and absorbing nutrition is a biological process. Unless you're a bomb calorimeter, they have very little to do with what goes on inside you after you eat. I urge you to reconsider what food you choose to eat.

You should absolutely desist from saying that other people should not avoid UPFs, because that is a harmful statement in the same vein as "you don't have to stop smoking."

[–] MareOfNights@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 1 day ago

You are like 25 years behind the science. There is a difference in absorption, but its negligible. Your digestion is incredibly efficient at absorbing calories. Unless you have some weird condition, you can count calories 1:1 and ignore the rounding error of absorption.

This calorimeter talking point has been debunked for a long time now.