“The unhealthy characteristics of processed foods.”
So, you decided to take good care of your nutrition to stay healthy or become healthier? That is fantastic! What about your healthy-looking breakfast cereal claiming ’high fiber content’ on the box, and the fruit yoghurt you eat with? What about other processed foods? Do you think they would pass the health exam?
With a very few exceptions, they do not. For this reason, the best you can do is to change for as simple and natural products as you can by always checking their ingredients list, and prepare simple and healthy foods for yourself from scratch, anytime you can manage.
Well, you could ask if preparing a colorful raw salad at home by chopping the fresh, green salad, red tomatoes and peeling the carrots, then adding some nice spices, cold pressed oils and vinegar is not processing? Yes, it is, and indeed, even raw salad mixtures and canned legumes fall into the category of processed food. Logically, there is no (or much less) problem around these ones, moreover, they can help busy people to eat healthy by reducing the preparation time of a dish.
When I am talking about the importance of avoiding
processed food, I am referring to the highly processed food like ready-to-eat foods such as cookies or crackers, or the most heavily processed ones like pre-made meals usually are, such as microwavable foods, frozen meals (pizza, lasagna, fish-fingers).
The reason why you should avoid this group of processed food, is because they contain high amounts of added sugar, excess sodium (salt), unhealthy fats and flavor enhancers. Most of the times a lot more than you would ever suspect so without being aware you are putting inside your body more amount of something that you should not ingest at all.
Nr1 enemy: sugar. Sugar, maltose, brown sugar, corn syrup, cane sugar, glucose-fructose syrup, sucrose, dextrose (everything with the end in the word ’ose’ are forms of sugar). You can see some of these different forms of sugar in almost every piece of processed food. Not only in the ones that are supposed to taste sweet but in all kinds of food since sugar improves the taste and consistency and makes the aliment more enjoyable. The first problem with this is that you are eating refined sugar which itself is bad for your health (no, we are not talking about the sugar that is in fruits or carbohydrates along with many valuable nutrients. Those are naturally occurring sugars and are totally fine and necessary to eat.)
The second problem is that this is extra sugar in your diet, that means extra calories so you are going to get fat. Lot of producers already realized that their consumers are more aware of their sugar intake and started to replace the sugar in their products with artificial sweeteners (sucralose, saccharin, aspartame, acesulfame) They do supply less calories but some artificial sweeteners can be dangerous in large quantities. The same is true for artificial colorings that are often added to snack foods, fizzy drinks and candies, especially the ones that target children.
The third, serious problem is that sugar is addictive so the more you eat, the more your organism craves for. That is one of the reasons it is added to everything, to make you eat and buy more of the certain product. A lot of pasta sauces or salad dressings for example are high in added sugar, and even healthy-looking aliments like yoghurt (the plain one is indeed healthy, but not the flavored ones), or breakfast cereals suggesting being healthy by their image. And now, the fourth, serious problem is what happens with your taste if you eat these processed foods regularly. Your taste will adapt to the flavor enhancers and sugar added to the processed foods so anything else outside of this version of a meal will taste nothing for you. Real food will no longer satisfy you. Instead, you will crave for the ready-made products going deeper and deeper into this vicious circle.
Nr2 enemy: trans-fat and saturated fat. What about the fats in the processed food?
The biggest problem is their trans-fat content, since this kind of fat lowers the good cholesterol (HDL) level in the body while raising the bad cholesterol (LDL) in the same time.
So, they are very bad for your heart and cardiac system, causing high blood pressure and raising the risk of strokes and heart attacks.
Trans fat is produced by a process of hydrogenation of vegetable oils so that the oil stays solid at room temperature. Trans fats are added to the products with the aim to be crispier and increase their shelf life so the final product - imagine, a nice cookie – stays in the same shape and texture, and can be consumed for two-three years easily… nothing suspicious, right? For this reason, products with ’hydrogenated vegetable oil’ or ’partially hydrogenated vegetable oil’ listed among their ingredients, should be avoided in a healthy diet. Trans fat is mostly found in margarines, fried foods, baked commercial goods (cookies, crackers) and processed foods.
The other problem is the too much saturated fat in processed food.
We should consume all kinds of fats (saturated, monounsaturated and polyunsaturated) but saturated fats in much less proportion than the other two (less than 10% of the daily consumed calories). The reason is that too much saturated fat can raise the bad cholesterol level, and leads to weight-gain since this kind of fat is more likely to be stored as fat reserve in the body, unlike monounsaturated fats (such as olive oil without heating) that are used easily as immediate energy sources for the cells. Animal foods like milk, cheese and meat have saturated fat (red meat has more than fish and poultry), as well as tropical oils such as palm oil, coconut oil and cocoa butter.
How can you avoid eating too much processed food? Process the food yourself, in other words: COOK from scratch! If you use the ingredients in their most natural form, you maximize the control over the added substances that your final dish will have.
Obviously, using mostly raw material would mean hours in the kitchen and this is half of the truth about keeping yourself away from processed food. Yes, you need to do it yourself instead of buying ready. But the other half is that you can help yourself with smart slight changes in your diet. Learn to do simple but healthy dishes, like a satisfying salad containing canned beans, and as snack options turn to fresh fruits, dry fruits, nuts, natural yoghurt, and so on. Or prepare simple but real food to take-away.
The other magical weapon that you need in this battle is already in your hand. You have it since you learned to read. Now you can go to the market, take the product you supposed you need, and turn it to see the ingredients list. Do it with all single products, even if it seems stupidly time consuming, and seems to make no difference since you do not know about everything in the list what they are. Does not matter, you will get to know more and more with time. For now, make it a habit to check.
Filter first for the most basic things like added sugars, trans fat and flavor enhancer content. Remember an important rule, that the ingredients are listed in descending order of predominance in the product. So, if you look for example at the label of Nutella, you will see that the first ingredient is sugar, the second is palm oil. So, the components this hazelnut cream has the most of are sugar and saturated fat, hazelnuts come only at the third place, with 13%. Read the ingredients. That is what the given product really is, not what the image suggests.
Next step: remake the healthy, home-made version of the food you put back onto the shelf after seeing the ingredients list. I can promise you, that will be much more fun, creative and healthier for your body and mind.
Wishing you a neat and healthy life,
Pedro Proff
"For a Neat Life."