Modern British food is making us ill – these are the old-fashioned meals to eat instead

We in Britain can’t claim to be super-clean eaters, as people in Japan or the Mediterranean are famed to be. But our traditional dishes are hardly health nightmares: comforting cottage pies, hearty beef stews and roasts replete with vegetables are classic dishes that we all think of as being British and as being more-or-less good for us, too.

Yet it has been revealed that in the past decade, rates of bowel cancer in people under 50 rose more dramatically in England than in much of the rest of the world. Only New Zealand, Chile and Puerto Rico were found to have a worse situation on their hands, according to new analysis from the American Cancer Society, with Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland seeing a rise in cases in the past 10 years too.

Experts including Neil Mortensen, an emeritus professor of colorectal surgery at the University of Oxford’s medical school, immediately pointed to shifting diets as a leading cause of colorectal cancers in younger people.

“In the last decade, there have been a shocking number of people in their 30s and 40s presenting at surgery with colorectal cancer. It’s a real phenomenon, and not just something you read about in papers,” Prof Mortensen says.

To our credit, few countries saw their bowel cancer rates fall – a shocking fact when modern medicine has done so much to reduce the incidence of cancers across the world. But Britain seems to have seen a food transformation. “I do buy the idea that our changing diets are behind this rise in cases,” Prof Mortensen adds. Specifically, the problem is “the junk food that many of us are eating more of, and that going hand in hand with a lack of exercise”.

Processed foods have changed our plates

The fact is that in many cases, what once was a healthy meal is no longer. Many traditional dishes are heavy in beef and pork, a fact that once would not have had a drastic effect on our health but that now, with heavy processing, could be spelling disaster.

“Processed red meats like sausages and bacon are seen as class one carcinogens,” says Dr Federica Amati, the head nutritionist for health company Zoe, with diets heavy in them associated with higher risk of bowel cancer and dementia, as well as high blood pressure.

“Fifty years ago, people were eating a lot less processed food and cooking more from scratch,” says registered nutritionist Jenna Hope. “Food additives, preservatives, emulsifiers, colourings and sweeteners became commonplace in the 1990s, but back then, they were largely found in sweet foods.

“Now they’re creeping into most of the things we eat, and we know that they are bad for our health.” Eating a diet full of ultra-processed food ingredients like these has been linked not only to greater risk of cancer, but also type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and even depression.

We’re eating too much

Unhealthy too is the amount we’re eating. On average, men in Britain consume 1,000 more calories per day than they think they do, with women averaging an extra 800 – totalling average daily intakes of 3,119 and 2,393 calories respectively, compared with guideline daily amounts of 2,500 and 2,000 calories each.

“Today, people have endless opportunities for eating,” Hope explains. “It’s common for people to graze on biscuits in the office and snack heavily as soon as they get in from work, and with social media we’re constantly exposed to food, which can subconsciously trigger people to go and find something else to eat. In the past, people would have three meals, perhaps a snack, and be done.”

The weight gain that comes with eating super-calorific, highly processed foods in itself could be impacting our health too. “Research shows that people who consume a lot of ultra-processed foods eat around 500 extra calories each day,” says Dr Amati. “That causes weight gain over time, and inflammation in the body, which itself is a risk factor for cancer.”

American influences have changed our taste

Our diets are more Americanised than ever: burgers, fried chicken, deep-dish pizzas and stacks of pancakes loaded with bacon and maple syrup are now eaten regularly by people in this country. “These sorts of ultra-processed foods are so salty and palatable – and so convenient to access – that it makes us want to go back for more and buy more of these foods,” Hope says. Our traditional dishes have shape-shifted to match modern tastes.

The Americanised foods to ditch for traditional British meals

Swap burgers for cottage pie

The average person in Britain eats 37 beef burgers every year. Try switching some of those to home-made cottage pies: with healthier kinds of red meat, more fibre, and far less saturated fat.

Ditch hot dogs for sausage and mash

What’s in a hot dog? One of these can contain four different kinds of meat, 12 flavourings and dozens of preservatives (never mind the bun). Find a good-quality sausage and go for sausage and mash instead, no more than once a week.

Swap a fast food apple pie for homemade apple crumble

A McDonald’s apple pie contains 243 calories (with more than 9g of sugar and 3g of saturated fat). For the same amount of calories and a fraction of the fat and sugar, you could have a steaming hot bowl of homemade apple crumble with a splash of cream.

Snack on pickled eggs instead of Scotch eggs

Don’t accept the snack-ification of British food. Instead of a cold, dry scotch egg in a packet, with processed red meat and breadcrumbs, reach for a jar of pickled eggs instead. Each egg contains more than 6g of protein and the pickling process can aid digestion and boost your gut health as much as any trendy fermented food.

Put down the protein bar and start the day with porridge

These days we are obsessed with upping our protein intake, but in doing so with bars – first devised in California in the 1980s – we’re depriving ourselves of fibre, a key micronutrient missing from processed foods that can help ward off colorectal cancers. For breakfast, opt for porridge with whole, steel-cut oats instead (with a scoop of protein powder, if you must).

Ditch American-style pancakes for a Full English

For a breakfast treat, do away with the pancake stack – high in saturated fat, calories and ultra-processed ingredients – and have a fry-up instead. (Just remember to go for wholegrain toast.)

Sip on breakfast tea instead of cola

“Fizzy drinks weren’t a thing in the Seventies and Eighties, but now we drink them all the time,” Hope says. Instead of reaching for a cola to get your caffeine fix, full of artificial sweeteners that can wreak havoc on your health, stick with a good old-fashioned breakfast tea. Five cups a day can help stave off dementia thanks to the polyphenols in this favourite drink.

Opt for a (homemade) chicken curry over a Chinese takeaway

British people have been ordering takeaways since the 1800s, says Prof Rebecca Earle, a food historian at the University of Warwick, and the first sort available were Indian-style curries. Swap a takeaway Chinese meal packed with salt, sugar and MSG for a homemade chicken tikka massala, a British-Indian fusion dish dreamt up in the 1970s.

How traditional British dishes have evolved

Sausages contain as little as 40 per cent pork

British people have been eating sausages since time immemorial, says Prof Earle.

“People all around the world have made sausages as a way to preserve meat or use up scraps of an animal that don’t make it into a big joint,” says Prof Earle. “The process would also use up the intestines of an animal, which were turned into sausage skins. Then people would bulk out the sausage with local grains, like oats in Scotland, which made haggis.”

These days “the quality of the meat in sausages has declined drastically, because the companies making them want to cut costs as much as possible,” Hope explains. “They’re often padded out with ingredients like dextrose, nitrates and preservatives, which seem to be causing the biggest issues when it comes to bowel cancer.”

Sausage skins, meanwhile, are now less often animal intestine than plant-based casings made with vegan ingredients such as algae gum or cellulose, and as for the mash on the side, packets of instant mash “will have vegetable oils, maltodextrin and preservatives, which you want to be wary of,” Hope says.

Not all is lost. “Some sausages contain as little as 40 per cent pork, but you can find many more that are higher quality,” says Dr Amati. “Having high-quality pork sausages once a week is fine.” Even some shop-bought mashes are fine too, says Hope, “just check them for their butter and salt content and veer away from instant powdered packs”.

Rancid oil in fish and chips is raising our cholesterol

“There’s a long-standing theory that fish and chips were invented in Jewish communities living in London’s East End in the 1800s,” Prof Earle says, “but people really have been deep-frying things forever – take tempura in Japan, which people now think may have been brought to the islands by the Portuguese in the 1500s.”

We all know that fish and chips is a treat food, traditionally reserved for Fridays, but the quality of this occasional treat has changed drastically.

“Nowadays a lot of chip shops and restaurants use rancid oils, and eating a lot of those can contribute to oxidative stress in the body, raising your levels of bad cholesterol,” says Hope. “Most fish-and-chip shops will also buy in pre-prepared fish that’s already battered, so these will be higher in preservatives and emulsifiers and contain a lot more salt and sugar.

Supermarket options can be no better, with a battered fillet of cod containing dozens of ingredients including raisers and stabilisers. That said, “fish and chips can be a healthy meal if you have the time to bread some fish yourself and bake it in the oven,” says Hope. Though even then “it’s better to make your own breadcrumbs from a good-quality bread than to use the ready-prepared kind you find in a tub”.

Sandwiches are made from bread full of preservatives

People have been putting foodstuffs between two bits of bread to make up a meal ever since bread was invented (about 12,000 years ago). In Britain, though, we regard the sandwich as having been the invention of the fourth Earl of Sandwich, John Montagu, in the 1700s.

A newer invention is the supermarket meal deal, which was first launched by Boots in 1999. More than a third of Britons eat a meal deal for lunch once a week, the starring ingredient of which is a sandwich, “which is likely made from very low-quality bread with lots of preservatives, and lots of salt and sugar in the ingredients,” Hope says.

The best option is to make your own sandwiches at home, says Hope. “Sandwiches can be very nutritious if you use good-quality bread and ingredients. Try buying cooked chicken breast without any added coatings, which you can still get from a shop, and some roasted vegetables, perhaps cooking these in a batch at the weekend if you can.”

Cottage pie has become a convenient microwave meal high in fat and salt

Convenience has always played a big part in our diets, hence the cottage pie: a mix of whatever vegetables you have to hand, with whichever mince you can find, and topped off with mash potatoes, which have been grown in Britain since the early 1600s.

But today’s super-convenient microwaveable iterations are often high in fat and salt. “Cottage pie from a shop is not going to be very healthy,” says Hope. “They are going to contain more hydrogenated oils, which increases low-density lipoprotein [‘bad’ cholesterol] and decreases good cholesterol. The quality of the ingredients used will also be much lower.”

A homemade cottage pie, on the other hand, “is definitely still very healthy” if done right, Hope says. “You can throw a tin of lentils in with your mince, which will make it go farther while adding fibre and counterbalancing the red meat in the pie, as well as all the vegetables you like,” Hope adds.

Cornish pasties are eaten too often

As potatoes only came to Britain in the late 16th century, “the first pasties contained a mix of root vegetables like turnips and carrots” inside a pastry case, says Prof Earle.

Thought of as a Cornish food, pasties as we recognise them were cooked by the wives and mothers of tin miners in south-west England in the 1600s and 1700s “as a really filling portable lunch”, says Dr Amati.

“We have to remember how lifestyles differed then,” Dr Amati says. “A pasty then would have been very nutritious, being high in fat and protein if filled with meat, because the people eating pasties then would have been much more active, working hard manual-labour jobs rather than having our sedentary lifestyles,” she adds.

Picking up a pasty from a high street bakery chain or a supermarket and eating it at your desk, however, is a bad idea for your health if done regularly. “The supermarket meal deal ones especially will be high in saturated fat and unhealthy oils like rapeseed, sunflower or vegetable oil,” Hope warns. They are best made at home or reserved as an occasional treat.

Baked beans contain more sugar and salt

Eating a full English breakfast every day has never been good for your health. Beans in a tomato sauce would once have been super-healthy, but modern iterations “unfortunately often contain a high amount of sugar and salt,” Hope says.

And though there’s plenty of protein in bacon, sausages and black pudding, we know that bacon and sausages are often ultra-processed and that black puddings also “contain a lot of ingredients that we’d regard as ultra-processed,” Hope says.

But there’s reason to indulge – if you’re careful, Hope says. “Try to opt for low-sugar baked beans and wholegrain toast, with good-quality sausage and bacon,” she says.

All in all, “a full English is still not something to consume regularly,” Amati says, but with some intelligent swaps, a fry-up is fine as a treat and can be a balanced meal.

Roast dinner is made with meat that’s pre-prepared with added salt and sugar

These days, we take a family-sized joint of meat for granted. But while there’s surely no dish more British than a roast dinner, things were not always this way.

“Joints of meat had always been a thing for rich people, but shortly before World War One, the British government started importing large amounts of frozen lamb from Canada and New Zealand,” says Prof Earle. “This made good-quality cuts of red meat much more widely available than they had been before.”

Today we still have a taste for meat, but supermarkets have found ways to cut costs and avoid importing lamb from the other side of the world. “Joints of meat are often pre-prepared with added salt and sugars, and flavourings and preservatives too,” says Dr Amati. There’s a similar story with the trimmings: “Frozen roasted potatoes and pre-roasted vegetables are often loaded with unhealthy fats and flavourings.”

It’s no surprise that “a traditional roast dinner can be really healthy if you cook it all yourself, buying a joint of meat that hasn’t been overly processed and roasting everything yourself in healthier oils,” Dr Amati says. But it’s a mammoth effort: even Yorkshire puddings, originally made up of only eggs, flour, milk and animal fat, “can sometimes now contain dozens of ingredients”.

The average person in Britain eats 37 beef burgers every year. Try switching some of those to home-made cottage pies: with healthier kinds of red meat, more fibre, and far less saturated fat.