What are processed foods and why are they bad?
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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.
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