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Nutrition

Processed Foods Are Bad, Aren’t They?

Processed Foods Are Bad, Aren’t They?

  • July 4, 2011 8:36 pm
  • 12 comments

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Author evilcyber visit my website

It’s one of the unwritten commandments of “healthy living”: Avoid processed foods. Yet half of it is blind faith and the other a lack of concept.

It’s Better, Live With It

Open any book on healthy living and you are greeted with the mantra of buying fresh and locally made foods, that have been treated in only the smallest of ways when they arrive in your hands. Walk across a farmer’s market for the first time and you can’t help the feeling that you are in some aspects an adept to a sect that adopted a certain set of beliefs and you will be left out if you don’t accept it.

Much too often we willingly embrace this with open arms, glad to have found a guiding light in a sea of uncertain lifestyle choices we could make on our own. But at the heart of it, we accept this in much the same way industrial food production forces their products down our throat with the help of a big advertising budget. It always takes two to tango: the persuader and the persuaded.

What Is Processed Food?

We should first of all ask the question what “processed food” actually is. A dictionary definition describes it like this:

Any aspect of the operations in the preparation, transport, storage, packaging, wrapping, exposure for sale, service, or delivery of food.

If we follow this definition, then the farmer taking his cabbages to the farmer’s market is processing them and if we wanted truly unprocessed foods arriving in our hands, we would have to grow the cabbage ourselves, which might induce a problem for those of us that a) lack a garden, b) lack the time or c) both.

Another example: the tap water you might be drinking from the faucet in your home has undergone quite a journey of processing. After raining down or making its way in from a glacier, the raw water is accumulated in a reservoir. At this state it is very much alive, containing a multitude of microorganisms, with possible human-made pollution on top of it.

Both can have an unsavoury effect on the human body and to make the water fit for consumption, it is, among others, filtered, chlorinated and aerated. If you ever visited a less-developed country, drank water from a pond and lived to tell the tale about the explosive diarrhea you had, you probably appreciate “processed” water.

US Army setting up water cleaning equipment

The US Army installing water treatment equipment in Uganda, where clean water is hard to come by

A Question Of Scale?

At this point I can hear the criticism I will get for this: “This is not what we mean by processed foods! It’s industrialized food production!”

Is it? Most people imagine unprocessed foods as home-made with self-grown ingredients. If we take tomato sauce as an example, we may envision Mamma Lucia sitting in her kitchen, making it from tomatoes and herbs from her own garden.

But what if I put 500 Mamma Lucias in one room and give them a garden 500 times as big? They’ll still do the same thing, just on a larger scale. Will that make what they do “unnatural”?

This isn’t as far-fetched as it may sound: The Romans used a fermented fish sauce called “garum” in much the same way we today use catsup. This demand required production on a large scale, done in massive workshops with standardized procedures. It was all manual work, yet reading descriptions about it leaves one with an image of an antique version of the H. J. Heinz Company.

Vile Alterations

If it isn’t the scale, is it the way industrial food production treats foods? Do the used preservatives, colorings, emulsifiers etc. make it vile? The truth is, we have pretty much tried to preserve food and change its flavor ever since we discovered fire.

Our forebears not only found out that cooked meat and fish are easier to digest, but also that they won’t spoil as easy. Following in the footsteps of this discovery came sundrying, salting and fermentation. And the lettuce you today buy at your local farmer’s market is the product of hundreds of years of human-induced hybridization – lettuce’s natural, “unprocessed” relative, lactuca serriola, has a rather unpleasant, bitter taste.

Lactuca serriola

Lettuce's "unprocessed" grandfather: Lactuca serriola (Prickly Lettuce)

Avoid Generalizations

Is this to say that whatever industrialized food production puts out these days is good? No. Some treatments and additives clearly should raise concern. Carrageenan, for example, is often used as a thickener or stabilizer, but leaves a big question mark.

On the other hand, a  2006 study reported that the bioaccessibility of beta-carotene from raw tomatoes was very low, while vitamin E from white bread was high – yet one is a raw fruit, while the other is a highly processed food item, in certain circles despised like few others.

In her excellent article “In Praise of Fast Food“, Rachel Laudan writes:

What we need is an ethos that comes to terms with contemporary, industrialized food, not one that dismisses it; (…) an ethos that does not prejudge, but decides case by case when natural is preferable to processed, fresh to preserved, old to new, slow to fast, artisanal to industrial.

Which is what  it comes down to: Making conscious and informed choices, without accepting anything as dogma, no matter from what camp the message heralds.

Many thanks to Mark Haub for tipping me off on the Reboul et al. study.

Pictures courtesy of Björn Rixman, US Army Africa and the U.S. Geological Survey.

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Latest Comments

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12 Comments

  1. nino says:
    July 4, 2011 at 10:34 pm

    Very interesting and enjoyable read, thanks a lot! Pretty good stuff, another article of yours I’d classify as one of your better ones (although clearly all of them are “best” 😉 )

    Reply
    • evilcyber says:
      July 8, 2011 at 2:27 pm

      I will take that as a compliment 🙂

      Reply
  2. Moon says:
    July 5, 2011 at 1:31 am

    Ec, you’re not supposed to look at this as a reasonable person… You’re supposed to show an outpouring of disgust and turn off your ability to reason. Go sub ug, maybe you’ll understand then *rolls eyes *

    Reply
    • evilcyber says:
      July 8, 2011 at 2:25 pm

      I’m sorry, it seems I just can’t turn off reason. Somewhere in my ancestry a Vulcan must be lurking 🙂

      Reply
  3. dmitry says:
    July 5, 2011 at 4:12 am

    what are the choices left in the future if we don’t embrace a process food 🙁

    Reply
    • evilcyber says:
      July 8, 2011 at 2:27 pm

      Well, the organic food movement is ever growing and more and more people also embrace home-growing (who would have thought that would happen in a world that believed in manicured lawns?). The prospects for the future may therefore not be that dim.

      Reply
  4. Steve Craig says:
    July 5, 2011 at 6:32 pm

    A very enjoyable read and an eye-opener to all! So many health enthusiasts overlook these little things, and we have dogmatic beliefs about food shoved into our brains and down our throats every day! It’s absurd! Thanks for helping to educate the masses!

    Always the best, my friend!

    -Steve, SteveCraigFitness.com

    Reply
    • evilcyber says:
      July 8, 2011 at 2:30 pm

      Well, if the Internet brought us anything useful, then it’s that small voices have more of a chance to be heard. Let’s hope it stays that way for a bit longer.

      Reply
  5. Kael says:
    July 8, 2011 at 10:30 am

    Sure, pretty much every food is processed someway, but the difference between the word processed literally and the word processed in everyday language should be noted. When people talk about processed food being bad, it usually means that very processed food is bad, and that is generally true. Sure processing something doesn’t make it bad, but the interests of processing food aren’t usually that noble. Very processed food can be identified by it having less nutrients, because that will increase the foods shelf-life and increase the foods consumption. Just for comparison 12 eggs and one 165g can of Pringles potato chips both have around 900 kcal. What happens if you try to eat a dozen eggs? Well, it’s going to be very difficult and you aren’t probably going to be hungry for half a day after that. What happens if you eat a can of Pringles? You’ll want to eat more. Sure not every processed food is the same and in food it’s quite hard to come up with accurate generalizations that are always true for everyone, But I’d still say that most of the time the more processed the food is, the less nutritious and satiating it is. Less processed isn’t always better but I think most of the time it is.

    Reply
    • evilcyber says:
      July 8, 2011 at 2:20 pm

      And that is, I think, what it really comes down to: Judging each food by its individual value.

      Reply
  6. Adrián Manuel Dorsey says:
    July 13, 2011 at 6:42 am

    As usual taking a rather mature and objective stance 🙂

    Reply
  7. julie says:
    September 2, 2011 at 7:54 am

    Some of this, indeed, is just semantics. I eat some processed foods, and use many processed ingredients, assembling it myself. I don’t grow fish sauce, cinnamon, coconut milk, olive oil, butter, but these are one ingredient processed items, not comparable to Lean Cuisine or tofu pups or pop tarts, for examples.

    Reply

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