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Check food labels
Smith said that checking the nutrition labels on food items helps him choose products that are minimally processed.
He’s found that even some items you’d expect to be “perfectly OK,” like a tin of grocery store kidney beans, can contain gelling agents or stabilizers. He gets around this by opting for the organic versions.
Unfortunately, this highlights how eating a healthy diet can be dependent on a person’s food environment and socioeconomic status.
Find genuinely tasty alternatives
As a professor of the senses, Smith is interested in the multisensory experience of tasting. “How things look, how they smell, the feel on the fingers, even the sound of the food when you’re snapping something or when you’re shaking something up. All of those things are part of the experience of tasting and eating,” he said.
It’s crucial to take this into account when shifting away from UPFs that have been manufactured to be delicious, he said.
“You’re not going to persuade people to move away from ultra-processed food by telling them it’s bad for them. It’s got to be flavor first,” he said.
Although nutritious, vegetables can be quite boring, he said, but there are many ways to make them interesting such as roasting, pickling, and fermenting.
“You need to make them really tasty so that people realize I can actually make something reasonably cheap and reasonably well that I’m actually going to enjoy eating,” he said.