What are processed foods and why are they bad?
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“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.
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