Ellie Jackson spends hours each week baking fresh bread, cakes, brownies and muffins for her family, preparing home-cooked meals from scratch – all in an effort to remove ultra-processed foods (UPF) from their diet. While Ellie believes this will improve their health, it has not improved her bank account. Switching to premium, fresh, and organic produce, with no UPFs, has increased her grocery bills by 25 per cent, from £80 to £100 per week.
There’s also been a hefty outlay in kitchen appliances – £120 for a bread maker, £150 for an air fryer, £280 for two pressure cookers, £50 for an electric stand mixer, £50 for a food processor, and £15 for a vegetable dicer, among other things. Ellie, 44, spent the past year overhauling how she and her family shops, eats and cooks after being left horrified about the negative effects of UPFs. This includes contributing to obesity, cancer, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, irritable bowel syndrome, depression, and more, according to the British Nutrition Foundation.
“What’s happened to our food is one of the biggest disasters in our lifetime. It doesn’t taste good. It doesn’t fill us up – the children were always hungry.
We’ve also got a high cancer risk in my family, so I’ve been worried about that, along with the general anxiety of trying to do the best for your kids,” says Cornwall-based Ellie, whose four children are aged between seven and 14. “I feel like I’m winning at being a mum when I give .