What are processed foods and why are they bad?
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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
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