Learn English Language & Discover the Hidden Dangers of Ultra Processed Foods
Improve Your Health AND English at the Same Time! Today we explain ultra processed foods (UPF) and discover how UPFs sneak into your diet and harm your health. We share the top 10 "worst" offenders while working on your British English. Just another of our fun and interesting FREE English lessons. Don't miss out—this knowledge could change how you eat and speak English!
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A great English listening lesson which will help your English fluency:
- Understand common health issues.
- Avoid the top ten worst processed foods.
- Master English from beginner to advanced levels.
- Embrace British culture through engaging lessons.
✔️ Lesson transcript: https://adeptenglish.com/lessons/learn-english-language-ultra-processed-foods/
To eat is a necessity, but to eat intelligently is an art.
⭐ François de La Rochefoucauld
Ultra processed foods can be very harmful to your health. They can cause problems like obesity and heart disease. Learning about these dangers can help you make better food choices.
You'll also find out how these foods can affect your mental health, making you feel depressed or anxious. Additionally, you'll learn about how these foods can be addictive, much like drugs.
If it came from a plant, eat it; if it was made in a plant, don't.
⭐ Michael Pollan
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More About This Lesson
Learn about the dangers of ultra processed foods while improving your British English vocabulary and fluency with this engaging lesson.
The food you eat can be either the safest and most powerful form of medicine or the slowest form of poison.
⭐ Ann Wigmore
In this lesson, you will discover the health risks of ultra processed foods while enhancing your British English skills. You'll expand your vocabulary, improve your listening abilities, and gain valuable health insights:
- Improve your British English vocabulary with relevant health-related terms.
- Enhance listening skills through engaging and informative content.
- Learn to speak about health concerns fluently.
- Understand and use phrases related to nutrition and processed foods.
- Practice pronunciation with clear, spoken examples.
- Gain insights into British culture through real-life topics.
- Expand your conversational skills on health and diet.
- Boost fluency with repeated listening practice.
- Learn useful grammar in the context of health discussions.
- Get tips on avoiding common health issues in English.
This lesson will help you worry less about your health by showing you what to avoid in your diet. You will also get to practice your English in a fun and interesting way. Learning about important topics like health keeps you motivated and helps you remember new words. This lesson shows that expanding your vocabulary can be enjoyable. You will see that British English is not as hard to understand as you might think. Also, you will learn that fluency comes from listening and discussing real-world topics, not just from formal study.
Processed foods not only extend the shelf life, but they extend the waistline as well.
⭐ Karen Salmansohn
Subscribe now for more valuable lessons! Expand your vocabulary with real-world health topics, learn to identify harmful ultra processed foods, and improve your listening skills with engaging content.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
- What are Ultra Processed Foods (UPFs)? Ultra Processed Foods (UPFs) are foods made mostly from substances not found in home kitchens. They often contain additives and preservatives that can be harmful to your health. Learning about UPFs helps you make healthier food choices while improving your British English vocabulary.
- How can this lesson improve my English fluency? This lesson focuses on expanding your British English vocabulary with relevant health-related terms and phrases. By listening to and practising these words, you can improve your fluency and ability to converse on important topics like health and nutrition.
- What specific vocabulary will I learn in this lesson? You will learn vocabulary related to ultra processed foods, health concerns, and nutrition tips. Words like "mortality," "nuggets," and "prosciutto" will help you discuss these topics more effectively in British English.
- How does learning about health topics help with my English listening skills? Listening to discussions about health topics in English helps you understand complex subjects and improves your ability to follow conversations. This practice enhances your overall listening skills and prepares you for real-life English interactions.
- Why should I choose this lesson to learn British English? This lesson not only teaches you about the dangers of ultra processed foods but also helps you improve your British English vocabulary and fluency. It's designed to engage you with practical phrases, idioms, and cultural insights, making your language learning journey more effective and enjoyable.
Most Unusual Words:
- UPFs: Ultra Processed Foods, foods made mostly from substances not found in home kitchens.
- Mortality: The likelihood of dying.
- Nuggets: Small, processed pieces of chicken.
- Vegan: A diet that avoids all animal products, including meat, dairy, and eggs.
- Margarine: A butter substitute made from vegetable oils.
- Moreish: Something that makes you want to eat more of it.
- Pringles: A brand of stacked potato crisps.
- Concoctions: Mixtures of different ingredients, often chemicals.
- Prosciutto: An Italian dry-cured ham.
- Nitrites: Chemicals used to preserve meat and add flavour.
Most Frequently Used Words:
| Word | Count |
|---|---|
| Processed | 16 |
| Which | 14 |
| These | 14 |
| Vegan | 13 |
| Ultra | 12 |
| Foods | 10 |
| Cheese | 9 |
| Bread | 9 |
| About | 7 |
| English | 7 |
Listen To The Audio Lesson Now
Transcript: Do This to Improve Your Health AND English at the Same Time
The 10 worst Ultra Processed Foods
Hi there. A while ago I made a podcast about the dangers of ultra processed foods or UPFs. If you’re unfamiliar with this, it may be a good idea to listen to this earlier podcast, number 665 first of all. That way you’ll be familiar with the topic and already have much of the necessary vocabulary. But ultra processed foods, UPFs are a health concern and a growing topic online. People are becoming much more aware of this global, health-threatening problem. In this podcast, you'll uncover the hidden dangers of ultra processed foods while boosting your British English vocabulary. This topic is of interest to anyone concerned about health. Don’t miss out—this lesson could change how you eat and how you speak English forever! Don’t forget this is an English lesson, so listen to it a number of times, until you’ve understood all of it! And if you like our podcast, don’t forget to share it with other people. That helps boost our listener numbers and ensures that Adept English stays around delivering great podcasts and content for everybody!
Hello, I’m Hilary, and you’re listening to Adept English. We will help you to speak English fluently. All you have to do is listen. So start listening now and find out how it works.
So how bad are Ultra Processed Foods? Well, in the BMJ recently - that’s the British Medical Journal, a study published in February 2024, by Melissa Lane and her team found that eating Ultra Processed Foods affected 32 different health measures. So that’s cancer, diabetes, heart disease, stomach and digestive system disease. And UPFs affect simple overall mortality. That’s ‘mortality’, MORTALITY - and ‘mortality’ is ‘how likely you are to die’. It doesn’t take long reading about UPFs to decide that you don’t want to eat them. And they’re everywhere.
📷
A healthy looking setting, with fresh bread, and someone is spreading a chemical cream onto the bread. Learn practical phrases for everyday conversations.
Do you really know what those long ingredient lists mean?
So how do you spot Ultra Processed Foods then? Well, there are certain ways of telling. For example, any food with a very long list of ingredients, usually has a lot of chemical names, things which don’t live in your average kitchen cupboard, but which rather belong somewhere in a chemistry lab. We’re not talking foods that grew directly on trees or in fields, like an apple of a piece of beef! Anyway, if you’re onto this topic and concerned for your health - and even if you aren’t, todays podcast looks at a ‘Top Ten Worst Ultra Processed Foods! So you may not want to change your whole diet - but what foods are most important to avoid, if you want to skip those UPFs? A bit like our Most Common 500 Words Course, it’s the spirit of Adept English - to find what can you get most value out of? So the top 10 worst ultra processed foods - is useful!
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So where do these UPFs hide and how can you cut out the worst of them? This list was published online in BBC Good Food and was written by nutritionist, Kerry Torrens. Here they are - I’ve reversed the order and I’ll give you my take on each one:-
Countdown of the 10 worst ultra processed food
No. 10. Ready Meals. What do we mean by ‘ready meals’? Well, these are the ‘ready-made’ dinners that you just pop into the oven or microwave. It’s a bit of a cheat this number 10 because it really depends on the quality of your ready meal. If you buy good quality ones, then they can just have ‘kitchen cupboard and fridge’ ingredients. So that’s OK! It really depends upon which ready meal you buy. It is more likely to be high in saturated fat or carbohydrate however. And there may be a lack of good nutrition that’s the problem with ready meals.
No. 9. Vegan Cheese. This is a bit like vegan sausages and burgers, which I’ll cover later. Vegan cheese is trying to taste like real cheese but doesn’t contain any dairy or milk. I have tried vegan cheese - and it really is pretty horrible. Like with the vegan burgers, the question is what is vegan cheese actually made out of, if there’s no cheese in it? And this is the problem. It’s more like a chemistry experiment than food! Vegan cheese is often made from plant-sourced saturated fats like coconut oil. It’s a bit like eating a processed cheese flavoured candle. Vegetarianism, I very much understand - you don’t want to eat animals, but veganism I find more difficult. If you’re a vegan for health - how is eating this ultra processed food, which is vegan cheese better than eating real cheese? Please get in touch if you have a good answer to that - I’m always listening and wanting to understand!
No. 8. Margarine - that’s MARGARINE. If you don’t know what margarine is - then stay in ignorance, you will be better off! Basically margarine is a substitute for butter. When I was a child, margarine was promoted as the healthier alternative to butter. Now we know it’s really not! Would you like hydrogenated vegetable fat, full of trans fats with your scone and jam - or would you prefer butter? I know which I’d choose. I’m proud to say I have never bought margarine in my life. And my favourite story is - dogs might like butter, but they don’t actually recognise margarine as food!
No. 7. Reformulated potato snacks. Dare I say it? Things like Pringles, that’s PRINGLES. Have you ever eaten Pringles - they do seem to have cracked the international market!? You can buy them in so many countries. And talk about ‘moreish’ - that word ‘moreish’, ‘MOREISH’ means simply - they make you want to eat more. These are chemical concoctions which are cleverly designed to make you eat the whole lot. And they are as far away from a natural potato as you can get. There may be potato starch or something in there, but there are usually quite a lot of other nasties as well. Better to stick with - and I know this might be boring - but actual crisps. Ready Salted Crisps. Ingredients? Potatoes, sunflower oil, salt. Still not the most healthy food - but a lot better than a Pringle and still quite enjoyable!
No. 6. Chicken nuggets - that’s NUGGETS. I hope you come from a country where there is no such thing as chicken nuggets - where these things haven’t arrived. They’re traditionally given to children, chicken nuggets are all the nastier parts of the chicken - skin, bones, fat - all very processed up and covered in breadcrumbs - but full also of chemicals which attempt to give flavour and the right texture of chicken. Much safer to eat the actual thing - a piece of actual chicken!
No. 5. The next one might surprise to you - ‘vegan meat’. So a little bit like vegan cheese - let me explain as it may not be a thing in your country. If someone follows a ‘vegan’ diet, that’s VEGAN it means they don’t eat meat or fish, but they also don’t eat dairy or eggs. So milk, cheese, cream, butter, yoghurt are all out. So ‘vegan meat’? Well yes, that’s a bit puzzling. But these are vegan products which are designed to look and taste like meat - sausages and burgers typically - but they aren’t actually made of meat. So ‘What are they made from?’, you might ask. That’s a good question and the problem. Often it’s something like textured soya or perhaps Quorn which is a relative of the mushroom - that’s QUORN. Not very appetising - but the problem comes more in what’s added, usually in the attempt to make these foods actually taste like meat. A whole list of chemicals are likely to be in your vegan sausages - to give that meaty taste and texture when you bite into them. Surely if you’ve decided to become vegan, you could just eat vegetables and salads, pulses and carbohydrates? If you avoid eating products that are pretending to be meat, you’ll probably improve your diet a lot. And why would you want to eat ‘burgers’ if you’re vegan? Bit puzzling, but the next one….
No. 4. Hot Dogs. I’m sorry - I like hotdogs too. But the bread is processed and white for a hot dog bun - so in line with lots of supermarket bread that I’ll talk about in a minute. And of course, the dog itself - these are cured or salted sausages of processed pork, PORK. The curing or processing is associated with greater risk of cancer, especially where meats contain ‘nitrates’. Hot dogs are probably the worst type of sausages as they are the most processed, with the highest number of chemical additives. An also cancer stimulating in cold meats are ‘nitrites’. That’s NITRITES. Fortunately, it’s possible to find traditionally made prosciutto and salami that simply has salt rather that nitrates or nitrites in it. Thank goodness - it would be hard for me to give up salami and ham, but I can give up hot dog sausages.
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No. 3. Breakfast Cereals. That’s CEREALS. For those of you who research food, you may know already that breakfast cereals are clearly the work of the devil! Not only are they very high in sugar, so again, sending us all one step further towards diabetes each morning, but rather like bread, these are full of these ultra processed food ingredients. Breakfast Cereal did have a good reputation - they contain fibre and grains, that’s GRAIN and it means cereal crops like oats and corn. But the problem is these grains are very processed, far from their natural state and chemicals have been added. Cereals often contain dried fruit, so again we might think they’re healthier - but dried fruit can contain a lot of sugar and more ingredients from the chemistry lab. If you must have cereal, then simple porridge with simple oats may be the best. But for people with spiky glucose levels like me, a fried egg on natural bread toast is a better choice.
No. 2. Supermarket bread. And to be clear - it probably depends where you live! In the UK, much of the supermarket bread we eat is ‘mass produced’. It’s not produced by a person in a bakery working through the night to produce a nice loaf - that’s LOAF. No, bread is a chemical concoction! So the bread my son eats - which is a white sliced - I’ve tried to persuade him to eat better bread -ingredients include the following. Calcium Propionate E282, DATEM whatever that is…. (diacetyl tartaric acid ester of mono- and diglycerides, that’s E472e), Glycerol Monostearate, E471 and Sodium stearoyl lactylate, E481. There are more additives, but surely that illustrates the point? Do we even know what these compounds are and what they do to our bodies? I don’t think so.
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You can buy a loaf with normal ingredients in the UK - flour, yeast, water, oil, salt perhaps - but bread like this will cost quite a bit more. What used to be ‘bread’ is now called ‘artisan bread’ and it’s rather expensive! If you’ve time and especially if you have a bread making machine - you could make your own! At least you know what’s in there!
And at number one, the worst of the top 10 ultra processed foods
No. 1. Energy drinks. So these are drinks which are carbonated, fizzy, FIZZY in other words, with bubbles and which are ‘for energy’. Typically they come in cans. ‘Energy’ means is that they have extra glucose or sugar in them. So not great for any diabetes or pre-diabetes conditions, they cause rapid ‘spikes’ in your blood glucose, because there’s nothing with them to digest. It’s not like eating an apple, where there’s fibre to ensure that the glucose is released more slowly. And there are often additives in these fizzy drinks - that’s ‘additive’, ADDITIVE - and just means ‘something added’. If the additive is something like ‘citric acid’, perhaps not much to worry about - that’s ‘lemon juice’. But if it’s Aspartame or Phosphoric acid (those are from Pepsi!), do we really know what these chemicals are doing to us? I suspect not.
Give us feedback on this podcast!
Well, that’s quite a list to practise with. Let me know how you got on with that vocabulary-wise - a lot of food vocabulary in there. And let us know what you think of this podcast on ultra processed foods and which ones to avoid!
Goodbye
Enough for now. Have a lovely day. Speak to you again soon. Goodbye.
Thank you so much for listening. Please help me tell others about this podcast by reviewing or rating it. And, please share it on social media. You can find more listening lessons and a free English course at adeptenglish.com
Links
- worst ultra-processed foods
- Ultra-processed food exposure and adverse health outcomes
- Health effects of energy drinks
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