What are processed foods and why are they bad?
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“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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