what processed food is and why it is bad for us
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Processed food is any food that doesn’t come in its natural form.
Raw meat, apple, egg, almonds, those are unprocessed foods.
Altering the food in some way by adding something and/or removing something and/or letting some chemical processes do their thing is processing.
So, if you take that piece of meat and cure it (to make, say, prosciutto), that’s processed. Fruit jam is processed fruit. Cheese is processed milk. Yoghurt is processed milk. White flour is processed. Pickles are processed cucumbers. Even cooking is processing food. Doritos and Snickers are processed foods.
Why is it bad for us? It’s not necessarily. Yoghurt or cooked food are processed food, but aren’t bad. Pickled food isn’t bad. Cheeses aren’t bad. Many forms of processing are perfectly fine.
Some types of processing are moderately bad, like processing of white flour because it takes away the nutrients of whole wheat flour, leaving it nutritionally poorer.
The worst kinds of processed foods are so called ‘ultra-processed foods’ which have a lot of undesirable ingredients added, while at the same time being very nutritionally poor. That’s all the stuff you see in the bags and boxes in grocery stores. Foods that have added sugars, fats, preservatives, artificial flavors, food colorings, emulsifiers.
That’s the kind of processed food you want to avoid.
Why? Firstly, because it may have too much of something you shouldn’t be eating a lot of (like sugar, artificial flavors, etc.).
Second, because it is nutritionally very poor (not many micronutrients, not much protein, not much good fats). So it’s what is usually referred to as “empty calories” – food that has a lot of calories, but not many useful nutrients that your body needs on a daily basis.
Third, because those foods are generally not very satiating. Meat keeps you full for longer. Vegetables fill you up with not many calories. However, ultra-processed foods have a lot of calories, but are not very filling (because they’re mostly based on simple carbs), so it’s much easier to overeat if you eat a lot of ultra-processed junk.
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