What makes food processed and why is it unhealthy?

Question

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

Answer 1

“Processing” is a REALLY broad term and ranges from full chemical extraction of certain parts of the food (Taking a sugarcane plant and extracting pure sucralose from it) , to simple physical modifications such as chopping up an apple.

Processing really just means you did a process on the food before it was sold/served. Processing as a word isnt always bad, but there are many bad things you can do to food before it reaches the end consumer. In general, the more “things” you do to a food before it is served means there is a higher likelihood of one of these things being a net negative.

Lots of products, especially packaged consumer goods are a combination of a bunch of HIGHLY processed goods. For instance, High Fructose Corn Syrup is an extraction of corn that excludes any good nutrition of corn (vitamins, fiber, etc.) leaving only the harmful sugar.

Say you drink a Cola with 41 grams of HFCS in it. That is equivalent to eating rougly 6.3 cobs of sweet corn without any of the nutrition or satiety that comes with it. If you were eating a more raw diet, your body would likely stop you before you ate 6.3 cobs of corn because you would get full, yet you can easily drink 3 cans of pop in a day (~19 corn cobs of sugar!) without your body giving any indicators of excess. The more of these extractions you pack together, the more imbalance your nutrition is likely to have, and the more excess you are likely to consume without realizing it.

Natural unprocessed foods generally are in ratios where the good and the bad are balanced and your body will get full before you consume too much of one nutrient or the other.

In the end, processing often takes the bad parts of food, concentrates it, and puts it into forms that are easy to consume and are devoid of the nutrients that would have come from the food itself.

To reiterate, cutting up an apple would also be “processing” to some degree, but obviously this is no worse nutritionally than eating the apple whole. We can also process things in GOOD ways such as adding beneficial vitamins and minerals into products. Too much of a good thing can also be bad however, so again, processing has more situations that end up as a detriment than a benefit nutrition/health wise.