Why does food lose nutritional value after being processed?
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Because processed really just means “we did something to it”, this can be small or large changes I’ll give a few examples.
If you have a cut of beef and run it through a grinder to get ground beef for burgers you still have all the protein and fats but you will lose a very small amount of vitamins due to the exposure to air, the higher surface area to volume ratio means that the chemical reactions to the oxygen in the air are happening much more often than would normally happen.
If you have an orange and cut it into slices you again run into the oxygen in the air problem because you no longer have the skin of the fruit protecting it, and the higher exposed surface area. Plus you have the cuts themselves, with each cut you are letting out some of the liquid which holds vitamins and minerals, so some of the nutrients are left on the cutting board and not in your slices.
If you have wheat berries the first thing for processing is to remove the hull, which is a loss of fiber, then often the germ is removed which decimates the vitamin and mineral content. Then you mill into flour or roll it for oatmeal, but it has no where remotely close to the nutrients it had before the germ was removed.
Anytime you are pasteurizing something you are heating it up to kill germs but that heat also breaks down vitamins.
Pre cooked such as broccoli that is “heat and eat, no cooking required” for example could have been boiled and in that case some of the vitamins and minerals were leached into the water so they’re gone from the broccoli.
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