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

What makes food processed is that humans have done something to it, and it’s unhealthy because it makes healthy-living advocates a lot of money to claim that it’s unhealthy.

There is a LOT of misinformation in the dietary world, most of it designed to get you to spend more money on food and everything surrounding food than is necessary. The knee-jerk rejection of “processed” food is one of them.

The simple truth is, there isn’t a simple and easy way to determine whether something is good or bad for you (barring obvious things like poisonous or contaminated food). It’s always going to be a case-by-case basis as to whether something is safe or not, and there’s a significant amount of fear-mongering that goes on in the dietary space – for obvious reasons. Eating something puts it directly into your body, in a way that maximizes your chance of experiencing harmful effects.

And many processed foods are in fact unhealthy, because some of what the processing does is make the food more palatable. That could involve something as simple as removing bitter and inedible compounds, or it could involve stripping out fiber and replacing it with simple sugars and flavorings to make the product more desirable and more likely to cause you to buy it again.

But it’s not the fact that the food was processed that makes it unhealthy – it’s what the processing was. Grinding up wheat kernels to make flour is processing it. Boiling down sugar cane mash to extract cane sugar is processing. Pasteurizing milk to make it safe to drink is processing it. Stuffing a recipe full of sugar and salt is also processing food.

Basically – don’t reject food because it was processed. Reject food because the final product that you actually eat is unhealthy. They may sound similar, but they’re two very different concepts. Processed food can be healthy, unprocessed food can be unhealthy, and the only way to know is to research the actual food in question.

There is often a correlation between heavily processed foods and health content, but it’s not a direct overlap.