You constantly hear about how processed food is bad for your health and should be avoided. But what is it and why is it so bad?
In: Biology
Almost anything you do to a raw ingredient technically makes it “processed.” Pasteurizing it, heating it, flash freezing it, mixing it, dehydrating it, or adding anything to it are all “processes” when it comes to food.
Cooked meat, whole wheat bread, pickled vegetables, and plain yogurt are processed foods that are generally healthy. Raw lima beans, raw kidney beans, raw rhubarb, and puffer fish are all foods that are highly unhealthy when unprocessed.
Processing food doesn’t inherently make it unhealthy. But certain popular processes are very likely to make a food unhealthy. Additions of excess salts, sugars, and fats; preservatives meant to keep things shelf stable for a long time; deep frying; or additions of other additives that may be unhealthy or trigger reactions. In particular, ultra processed convenience foods such as soda, candy, chips, etc. Another consideration is that these processes may not be inherently unhealthy on their own (a lot of those preservatives and stabilizers sound scary, but aren’t terribly harmful), but make nutritionally empty food hyper palatable. One serving of potato chips isn’t going to hurt you. It’s just potato, oil, and salt. But the chips were likely processed in a way that you don’t want to eat just one serving, even if you aren’t really hungry. And it *is* unhealthy to shove a whole bag of Lays down your gullet.
Processed, and even ultra-processed, foods aren’t *inherently* unhealthy just by virtue of being processed. But they’re a lot more likely to be bad for you than unprocessed or minimally processed food, and it’s harder to keep track of what’s going going on with the food. The latter can be especially important if you have food sensitivities or allergies (though usually isn’t what people talk about when they say processed food is unhealthy). If you eat an apple off a tree and break out in hives or get explosive diarrhea, you will easily be able to figure out “ok, I can’t eat apples.” But if you are allergic or sensitive to some obscure stabilizer that goes by 5 different names, you might be constantly eating it from different sources and never really connecting where your symptoms come from, never really realizing that you are reacting to something and not generally a sickly person.
Latest Answers