What are processed foods and why are they bad?
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“Processed” means that the things have had stuff done to them (the process is whatever is done to them). Not foods right off the vine or whatever; food that has been treated and changed into something else.
There are a lot of processes that are done to foods, many are quite useful (like pasteurization or homogenization of milk) but the “bad” label of “Processed food” is used for foods that are so treated that they lost nutrients and are so treated by mixing with additives, flavorings, preservatives, salt, and whatever that they are actually bad for you, or at least worse for you than fresh foods.
Overcooking, mixing of poor quality ingredients, adding unneeded and sometimes potentially harmful ingredients (especially sugar and salt) are all “processes” that can make for food that is not very nutritious and even could be bad for your health if eaten frequently.
It turns out that people like food with too much sugar or too much salt, and they like food that doesn’t go bad (so filled with preservatives). It turns out that the human system isn’t designed to deal with lots of salt and sugar or preservatives. So, even though we know that such foods aren’t the best for us, we still love to eat it. We shouldn’t.
Lets use an example many of us know and love (sorry to allergy sufferers): Peanut Butter.
Raw, ‘unprocessed’ pure PB (quotes because the nuts had to be shelled and ground) is not the consistency or flavour I grew up with. It is simultaneously grainy and oily. It has instructions to stir well as it settles, and to put in the fridge to help maintain freshness.
Processed PB does not have these qualities. To aid with the runny consistency the healthy Peanut oil is removed and replaced with less healthy and more saturated oils which make it more like a butter than an oily paste. To prevent it from going rancid so quickly salt is added. To temper the saltiness and enhance the flavour sugar is also added. Finally, to prevent the peanut from settling emulsifiers are added.
In sum, a perfectly healthy (and more expensive despite the additives because it doesn’t last as long) variant of a common staple has much of it’s healthy content stripped out and replaced with unhealthy fat, salt, sugar, and artificial ingredients to make a more pleasant, cheaper, and long lasting product for the consumer. Processed.
Nutritional Comparison (per 30g)
|Nutrient|Unprocessed|Processed *(reduced from 33g)*|
|:-|:-|:-|
|Total Fat|14g|14.5g|
|Saturated Fat|2g|3.2g|
|Dietary Fibre|2g|1.8g|
|Sugars|2g|2.7g|
|Protein|8g|6.4g|
|Calories|190|172|
Typically they puff up some cheap ingredients to seem to be better.
There has to be some reason processed box of ‘dinner’ costs less than the ingredients to make that meal yourself.
The least amount of processing is injecting sodium, sugar and sometimes fat into something. Lunchmeats for example. Processed cheese food product is when they take some cheese and blend fat into it (milk fat solids, they took the fat from the skim milk, dried it, mixed it with real cheese) Lots of products have seaweed mixed in, starches.
THen you have complete deconstruction of the ‘food’ down to the near molecular level and reconstructing a product…IE: the pink slime method of making chicken ‘nuggets’ and now hamburgers and other mystery meat products. You can tear apart a chicken nugget and it looks like actual chicken, the meat splits like chicken with strings etc…but it was extruded in layers with some artificial meat glue (literally) the ‘meat’ is all the odds n ends of the carcass, not sure if that includes the entrails but do know they have to bleach it to kill the pathogens from fecal matter mixed in…so…yeah…. so all this stuff from tons of chickens are ground and blended to a vat of goo and this flavorless mush is ‘chicken’ only so much as it is made from chicken genetic material and has to have chicken flavor added back. So ultimately people, kids in particular, enjoy it for the same reasons we like ramen, salt fat sugar and chicken flavoring.
Processing food = manipulation of food.
You can eat an apple and it has vitamins, phytochemicals and nutrients along with fiber that help make you feel full. If you juice the apple (a process) and just drink the juice, you are no longer getting that fiber, which in turn means you’re getting a lot more sugar at once from the juice going into the bloodstream and that can make your blood sugar levels rise.
Processing foods can mean a large number of things and there are many levels. Usually foods are processed to take away the nutritional aspects and leave the less healthy parts.
A wheat grain has 3 parts- the germ, the bran, and the endosperm. The germ and the bran hold the most nutrients while the endosperm is just simple carbohydrate that our bodies process like sugar because there is little chemical difference. White flour/white bread is taking just that endosperm, stripped of all its nutrients. Whole wheat flour/bread uses the whole wheat grain including the germ and the bran with all the vitamins an nutrients. Removing these is a step of processing and the result is less healthy for us because we don’t get all the nutrients in addition to getting more simple carbs/sugars into our body quickly which can cause blood sugar levels to spike and over time results in insulin resistance-> a factor of diabetes.
There is so much more to nutrition, but a 5 year old wouldn’t understand. I tried to simplify as much as I could
Processed food is kind of a meaningless catchall buzzword. Unless you’re eating raw fruits and veggies right off the plants, all food you eat is processed to some degree.
However typically what they mean by this is it’s chemically preserved.
Historically removing moisture, and adding salt were how to chemically preserve food. Humans have been doing that at least 7,000 years. There’s also smoking, which also imparts *a lot* of chemicals into your meats. But again, humans have done for millennia without issues. Smoking meats is actually coming under fire lately because, yes, it technically contains carcinogens. You are eating meat with a little bit of tar and other stuff.
Anyway, fast forward to industrial food and you’re still facing the same issues. How do you preserve food. It all comes down to making it inhospitable to microbes. Which to this day still means salt or dehydration. However we have found other salts that can be used to greater effect. That don’t ruin the taste as much. But are worse for us. We’ve also found that enough sugar produces the same effect. So sugar frequently gets added to extend shelf life and improve flavor. But of course that’s terrible for you. Finally we’ve also found that if you can substitute water moisture with fats/oils you can keep the food feeling “moist” without actually having any water in it, which also dramatically increases shelf life.
So basically when someone says “processed” what they mean is “preserved”. But our modern preservation techniques, while very effective at preserving, are not good for us.
Although they’re still better than starving.
“Processed foods” is a marketing term.
They are “bad” because they are less expensive than marketable alternatives.
… that’s the cynical view.
In general processed foods refers to foods which have undergone considerable transformation from their “natural” state, like bread flour which has been refined, bleached, has nutrients added back, etc., to provide a consistent and nutrient dense product.
The “processed foods are bad” generally stems from marketing to that effect, but is expanded from a subset of foods that are pretty unhealthy especially consumed daily, like sugary sodas.
Who’s marketing that “all processed foods are bad”? Well, health food companies that want to sell you the exact same products, which are cheaper to manufacture cause they involve less “processing”, but cost several times as much.
The reality is most of the health benefits of “unprocessed” foods are not studied at all, and the claims of being healthier or worse for you have to be examined on a case by case basis.
However there’s a few good rules of thumbs regardless of the source being “processed” or “raw” or “healthy”:
1. Anything with large quantities of added sugar (e.g. 10g+) is not going to be healthy except in small amounts, rarely. And that doesn’t mean a different sugary product each day of the week.
2. Anything involving extremely high sodium and deep-fat-frying, especially frozen products (also most restaurants), is not going to be healthy, and again should only be consumed rarely.
3. Any products that involve nutrient replacement, like common white bread, most children’s breakfast cereals, and others, are probably empty calories and should just be avoided. Nutrient replacement generally is just marketing, and our bodies do much better with full spectrums of nutrients found in foods.
Would really recommend listening to the first series of ‘A Thorough Examination’ on BBC sounds. (Might need a VPN to view it in your country) 2 doctors who are twins attempt to give up ultra processed foods and explain really well what they are and how it all works.
Processed meat is bad because the processes we mean by processed meat: salting, curing, smoking increase the risk of cancer. Cooking and cutting are processes too, but they are not considered when we talk about processed meat.
For processed plant food, what’s bad is anything that removes fiber. So juicing or removing fibers to get white floor or white rice and anything cooked from white flour. Having a lack of fiber increase cholesterol problems, colorectal cancer, constipation, and IBS. Most people don’t eat enough fiber because they don’t eat enough unprocessed plant food. Again, any process that doesn’t remove fibers, like cutting for example, aren’t considered in the word processed plant food.
“Processed foods” is a terrible way of saying “refined foods”, as in foods where the original ingredient has been purified from it’s original source into a refined ingredient. We refine pure sugar from beets and sugar cane, for example. We take corn, and separate out the starch; wheat, we remove the coating from the kernels to make white flour, etc.
The reason refined foods are bad is because they often have lots of calories (think sugar and starch), or undesirable properties (think purified fats that tend to clog arteries), with not much in the way of other nutrition (vitamins, fiber, etc.). Most naturally-occurring food is a big jumble of chemicals that our bodies can get nutrition from, but refined foods pick out a small fraction of the material and make them the main ingredients — mostly just things that give us calories to make us fat with very little else.
Why do we do that? Refined foods don’t spoil easily. If you make something from them to put in a package and sell, the ingredients are always consistent and your product comes out the same every time. And, of course, people like sweet, starchy, and fatty foods.
The reason “processed food” is a terrible name is that “process” could mean anything. Dicing a tomato is processing, but it doesn’t change the tomato’s nutrients. Cooking it does, but only a bit. Any sort of cooking or preparation of food is processing, and that’s not what makes nutritious or not.
“Processed” foods is kind of a misnomer.
The issue isn’t so much the fact that the food was processed, but more about what kind of processing it went through and what was added to it. And to a large extent, how we’re manipulating food for sale instead of nutrition.
Take, as an example, a box of Twinkies versus a can of corn.
The can of corn is just as processed as the box of Twinkies. It’s cut, cooked, canned, and pasteurized. Sure, the nutritional content might not be *quite* as good as fresh, but it’s pretty close and the processing does a lot to make sure the food is available when people need it, even if it has to go into long-term storage.
But the Twinkies… they’re just as processed, but they’re also filled with unhealthy levels of sugar, tweaked to promote appetite and maximize pleasure, almost entirely devoid of nutrition outside of raw calorie count, and all of that is done in the name of maximizing sales.
So when you hear “processed foods,” what people are really talking about are the kinds of foods where the processing aims to maximize shelf life and marketability at the cost of nutrition.
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