Dr Federica Amati issues warning over 'obsession' with breakfast item (original) (raw)
A nutritionist has issued a warning regarding a popular breakfast food. Dr Federica Amati has told people to be wary of items with 'added protein' - including cereal.
Speaking on the Zoe podcast, Dr Amati said that people buying cereals promising ‘added protein’ were in fact not eating healthily and are exposing themselves to ultra processed food.
These can be harmful to a person's health and she explained that people were in fact eating a lot less healthy foods such as fruit and vegetable, SurreyLive reports. "Protein supplements have exploded in popularity," Dr Amati said.
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She continued: "We’ve seen things like breakfast cereals with added protein, sliced bread with added protein, chocolate bars and ice cream. These are foods you don’t need. They’re not supposed to be a source of protein in our diet.
“These protein drinks and the bars especially, are very often completely ultra processed foods. And this obsession with adding more protein to our diet has moved us away from adding more real foods to our diet and towards adding foods that we really don’t need to be eating.”
They can be packed with additives, emulsifiers and sugar, she said. Dr Amati added: “These products are made by extracting the protein from animal or plant based materials. That might be egg, peas, hemp, rice, soy, or cow’s milk.
“The extraction process often requires a lot of industrial steps, so you wouldn’t be able to do this at home. But the thing is, protein bars and shakes don’t contain only protein. They’ve often got a bunch of other things in them like added sodium, sugars, thickeners, emulsifiers and other additives to make them look, taste and smell more palatable than pure protein would.
“These protein drinks and the bars especially are completely ultra-processed foods. They are food-like products that contain lots of ingredients that you would never have in your kitchen and that you would frankly never make at home.
“Take for example a chocolate protein bar. It has protein added as a separate ingredient but it also is high in sugars and oils, gelling agents and a long list of emulsifiers, sweeteners and thickeners that you would normally never add to your food.”
Tim Spector, a professor of genetic epidemiology at King’s College London and founder of the Zoe health app, said: ”Ultra-processed foods are defined in the NOVA scale as industrially processed, hyper-palatable foods that are nutritionally poor. As a general rule of thumb, if the ingredients list includes items you wouldn’t find in your kitchen cupboards, it’s likely an UPF.
“In the UK, our consumption of UPF is the highest in Europe, around 4 times higher than in Italy and while it’s impossible to remove these foods from our diet, we can benefit from reducing our intake where possible.”
Child poverty is soaring in Birmingham and without urgent change, will only get worse. Having worked with charities and community groups, BirminghamLive is campaigning for the following changes to start to turn the tide:
- End the two-child benefit cap
- Provide free school meals to every child in poverty
- Create a city “aid bank” for baby and child essentials
- Protect children’s and youth services
- Create permanent, multi year Household Support Fund and give more Discretionary Housing grants
- Set up child health and wellbeing hubs in our most deprived neighbourhoods
- Appoint a Birmingham child poverty tsar
- Provide free public travel for young people
You can see why in more detail here.
Read our full report Birmingham: A Child Poverty Emergency here.
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