Our Daily Bread

When we think about a regular tea-time for kids, we can pretty much count on a few regular staples being on the table. Things like chicken, chips, ketchup and so on are what most modern children eat — the same staples our parents fed us, more or less. I’m not throwing shade at parents here. Most parents are time-poor and cash-poor in modern Britain, and we feed our children based on what we can find quickly, cheaply and conveniently at the supermarket. But I do want to look at how that landscape has changed over the years. This isn’t about what’s in your trolley. It’s about what changed in the food itself between the childhood most of us had and the one on offer to our children now.

I want to talk about bread — most kids eat it daily, and it’s a great example of how the nutritional landscape has changed over the last generation or two. Toast and sandwiches form the basis of many breakfasts and packed lunches for millions of kids every day. It is a foundational food in our daily diet. But it has changed. The bread that parents ate as kids is almost certainly not the same as the bread we give our children today.

In 1961, British bread manufacturing was rebuilt around something called the Chorleywood Bread Process — high-speed mixing, added fat, sugar and emulsifiers, fermentation time cut from hours to minutes. It solved an industrial problem: how to make bread fast, cheap and shelf-stable from lower-protein British wheat. It worked. It also took bread from four ingredients — flour, water, yeast, salt — to a supermarket loaf that can now run to a dozen or more, several of them additives whose job is to extend shelf life, not nourish a child.

Bread isn’t the exception. It’s the pattern. A UK study of the supermarket food supply found emulsifiers — the additives now under scrutiny for what they do to the gut — in 51.7% of all food products analysed: 95% of pastries, buns and cakes, 82% of milk-based drinks, 81% of industrial desserts, 77.5% of confectionery. This is the default architecture of the food most children eat every day.

And children eat a lot of it. British children have the highest ultra-processed food consumption in Europe. Toddlers get 47% of their calories from ultra-processed food by 21 months, rising to 59% by age seven. By adolescence it’s around two-thirds — 63.4% at eighteen, 65.6% at eleven. At school it’s worse: UK lunches average 72.6% of calories from ultra-processed food in primary schools, 77.8% in secondary. Packed lunches — the ones parents pack thinking they’re the healthier option — run higher again.

“I ate it as a kid and I’m fine” doesn’t hold up against that. This isn’t a story about children eating more junk food by choice, or parents getting worse at feeding them. The food supply has been re-engineered, and the reengineering has reached staples — bread, cereal, yoghurt — still wearing the packaging of ordinary food.

So what’s in the reformulation, and what does it do to a developing brain?

Let’s start with the law. In 2007, a UK government-funded trial at the University of Southampton, published in the Lancet, tested mixtures of six artificial food colours and the preservative sodium benzoate and found they increased hyperactivity in three-year-olds and eight-to-nine-year-olds. And since July 2010, any food sold in the EU containing those six azo dyes has been legally required to carry the warning: “may have an adverse effect on activity and attention in children.” That label is sitting on supermarket shelves in this country right now. Most parents will have never noticed it.

The newer research goes further, into territory that I’ll explore deeper in forthcoming issues: the gut-brain axis. Roughly 90% of the body’s serotonin is made in the gut, not the brain. Emulsifiers — the additives in 51.7% of the food supply — are among the compounds shown to shift gut microbiota in ways that disrupt that signalling, and children’s still-developing microbiomes are more vulnerable to that disruption than adults’ are. Researchers are now directly studying links between UPF-driven gut changes and mood symptoms, impaired learning, and attention problems in children — not as a moral failing, but as biology.

But like most aspects of childhood today, it’s a postcode lottery, because UPF consumption isn’t evenly spread. The Cambridge/Bristol study of UK adolescents found intake was highest among adolescents from deprived backgrounds. This is the school meals argument from Issue Five again: the children with the least buffer — the least stable income, the least parental bandwidth, the most exhausted nervous systems — are also the children eating the most reformulated food, in the food category most linked to the exact symptoms — poor attention, dysregulated mood, behavioural volatility — that get labelled as the child’s problem the moment they walk into a classroom.

We are not short of evidence that what children eat affects how they think, feel and behave. We are short of a system willing to treat that as a policy problem rather than a parenting one. Nobody is asking a nine-year-old to read an ingredients label. Somebody decided, at boardroom level, what goes into the bread.

And yet the scrutiny always lands on the parent — feeding your child badly, not trying hard enough — when the food most available to them was engineered by people who will never meet their child.

The wrong question is still why a child can’t sit still, concentrate, regulate. The right question is what we are feeding them while we ask it — and who decided that was acceptable.

If this landed, you know where to find more of it — Willow is built for exactly the kind of parent reading this newsletter. You can explore Willow here: www.squarepegkids.com

About Rebecca

I've spent 35 years in classrooms with neurodivergent children and their families — and I'm neurodivergent myself, raising two neurodivergent sons. I'm not a clinician. Everything I write comes from the classroom, the coaching room, and living it.

I’m the founder of Square Peg Kids, Willow, and Willow Schools, leaving teaching at the end of August 2026 to run Willow Minds Ltd full time. The Willow Schools pilot launches September 2026. I’m currently writing my second book.

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