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
Normal food spoils, separates, has non-uniform colour and shape, can taste different from batch to batch. By substituting ingredients with unnatural ones or altering the chemical structure of existing ones, longer shelf life and consistency are achieved, but at a cost to our health. Chemically modified sugars and hydrogenated or ultraprocessed oils like cottonseed or corn are things the human digestive system isn’t ready for, and we haven’t evolved to consume these things.
In the cases of white rice and white bleached flour, nutritious parts of the grain are stripped away, and the end product has less nutrients other than starch.
An example of “processed” is refined sugar. You won’t find concentration of sugar in any natural food as you get in many processed food. High levels of sugar that is so easily absorbed by your blood and body leads to all sorts of health issues, when not in moderation.
Everything you do to food from the point that it comes out of the ground / off the tree or plant is processing, so it’s important to avoid pop-sci journalism headlines and dig into the nuance a bit.
Some types of food processing are vital to our survival. Humans, as a species, are the only animal to use fire to cook their food. This allowed our ancestors to broaden their diet, and survive on a wider variety of foods. For example, cows and other ungulates have multiple stomachs, just so they can extract the necessary amount of nutrition from grasses.
Instead of specializing in something so specific, humans just cook the food to help with nutrient extraction. Some nutrients are lost along the way, but cooking also helps us to digest things that we otherwise wouldn’t get sufficient nutrition from.
So what’s with all this talk about processed food being bad? Cooking is just one, very simple, method of processing food. Food is also processed mechanically, like grinding it up, and chemically, which can include heating things up or introducing other chemicals.
Some food processing results in higher caloric density. For example, if you were to sit down and eat an ear of corn, you’d eat a lot of fiber and water along with the corn kernels, which is where all the nutrition is. When we process corn, we dry it out, grind it up, and press it in to smaller pieces. These smaller pieces are much more nutritionally dense. This is good, but also bad. We don’t need *that much* corn in our diet. So by processing corn mechanically in a way that packs more into a smaller package, we introduce a lot of opportunities to over-consume it.
Chemically, we process foods to either make them last longer or to change their properties. One popular form of food processing is pasteurization. Pasteurization heats and/or pressurizes a food item in order to kill pathogens. On the whole pasteurization is a good thing. It makes food much safer, because it kills pathogens. It makes certain foods less healthy though.
For example, some foods contain beneficial bacteria. The pasteurization process can’t selectively kill microorganisms though. It just kills everything. So we lose some of the beneficial bacteria along the way. On the whole though, pasteurization is good processing.
One popular form of food processing that is extremely bad for you is hydrogenated fats/oils. This chemical process takes cheap food oils that are liquid and turns them into a solid at room temperature. These chemically engineered fats are very stable, meaning they will keep at room temperature for long periods of time. Hydrogenated fats are the reason you can buy a can of frosting off the shelf, and it will keep in the cupboard for months. Unfortunately, they’re also linked to an increased risk of heart disease.
The reality is that eating healthy requires you to stay on top of current scientific knowledge about diet and to avoid trendy pop-sci articles about foods that are good/bad for you. The easiest way to eat a healthy diet is to simplify what you eat. At one point, scientists heralded things like hydrogenated fats as a triumph of science. They soon learned that they were very wrong.
A simple diet that avoids processed foods and sticks to core dietary items that have been known to be good for us for decades is the easiest way to eat healthy. This means eating mostly vegetables, avoiding refined sugars and calorie-dense foods/snacks, limiting sodium/salt intake, and enjoying meat in reasonable portions.
The trifecta of bad health due to diet is obesity, high blood pressure, and high glucose (diabetes). Junk food is the epitome of highly processed bad foods and is super high calories without being filling resulting in over eating (obesity) while typically very high in salt (can lead to high blood pressure) and/or sugar (contributing factor along with obesity to diabetes).
“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.
Not all “processing” is bad. You want the pesticide washed off your food and your milk pasteurized. Unhealthy food is often “highly processed”. For example, beets are pretty good, they are tasty vegetables; but if you process them to remove all the vegetable and only have table sugar left you’ve turned them into a highly processed food that’s not good for you. Corn is good, high fructose corn syrup is bad. …
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.
Just curious is a can of tuna considered ‘processed’?
“Processed” is right up there with “chemicals” and “GMOs” when it comes to fear-mongering buzzwords. As others have pointed out, there’s nothing inherently wrong with “processing” food, it’s really the end result and how much of it you eat that matters. Baby carrots are a processed food, but offer the exact same nutrients as carrots you pull directly out of the ground. American cheese is often used as the default “processed food”, but ALL cheese is processed- American cheese is just cheese that’s then taken through an additional process, often with positive increases in vitamins and minerals that some could even claim make it “healthier”.
Processed food is any good that has been altered in some way so pretty much all food is processed save for fresh fruit/vegetables and things like that, the thing is processed food is not inherently bad, in fact it can be better if you add vitamins or something like that. IMO the main reasons for people saying processed food is bad are that they tend to refer to junk food or fast food as processed food and those are unhealthy also claiming that non processed/organic food is better allows people to charge a lot for things that you can get for cheap
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