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Which processed foods are better than natural?
- dcolkitt 5y agoI don’t think there’s anything intrinsically unhealthy about processing foods. The issue is that if humans are exerting effort and money to process food, it’s almost always to make it more hyperpalatable, calorically denser and faster to digest. All of those features are strongly associated with low satiety and overconsumption.
- er4hn 5y agoA big one mentioned at the start of the article is pasteurized milk. I'll add another one that the article skipped - water. Processing and distribution of clean water has been a major boon throughout the world. You can see a regression away from it in the "raw water" movement and the associated diseases that raw water fans sometimes contend with.
- kazinator 5y agoRemoving non-water from water is literally processing, but it's not what people imagine by "processed food" which involves chemically altering ingredients, adding something, or taking away something essential (along with, or rather than, an impurity). Slicing bread is "processing" in the strawman sense, and so is putting it into a plastic bag.
- ezconnect 5y agoHamburger is the best processed food ever.
- darth_avocado 5y agoI think it is very disingenuous to have a headline "Which processed foods are better than natural?" and then talk about food that is cooked, pasteurized, frozen or fermented. Sure it is "processed" in a sense, but most of these things hardly fit the modern definition of what most people picture "processed foods". I mean at that point, if I cut my apples with a knife, they are in a way "processed" and better than the natural apple since I can avoid eating the bad parts without biting into them.
- duxup 5y agoI'm not sure what people picture as processed foods even makes sense at times... I think there's a lot of unknown about what our foods even are, what 'natural' means and so on.
- jka 5y agoHow could/should you visualize the way that a particular food product has been prepared in order to represent this? (it's going to be hard in the context of a blog post or article title, because you need to pick a single word or two there; but I think that for individual food products, there could be methods to illustrate fairly clearly what types of processing were involved for people who would like to inspect the details)
- endisneigh 5y agoObviously processed food, e.g. cooking, is necessarily in many cases. However sometimes certain levels of professing are unnecessary and bad for you, e.g milk chocolate filled with extra sugar and candies embedded vs say an 80% dark chocolate with no added flavors other than milk.
- vixen99 5y agoNo, these foods are not of themselves bad for you. What's bad is likely to be the amount consumed. Given the vast amount of information available from trustworthy sources including the packaging on the food itself, it's not difficult to get sensibly informed regarding one's own nutritional requirements. Sadly, taking the necessary steps to meet them seems to be an incredibly difficult task for huge numbers of people. This is an observation not a moral judgment.
- endisneigh 5y agoThere are definitely foods that are bad in any quantity. Whether the bad food harms you obviously depends on the quantity consumed and there I agree with you.
- rdiddly 5y agoThis reads like a food-processing industry pamphlet. Suspiciously so.
- kazinator 5y agoSome fermented foods are better than the original ingredients. Some sun-dried foods, likewise. That sort of thing. Though I'd still count that as "natural".
- jareklupinski 5y agothis, the beneficial organisms in the more healthy fermented foods are difficult to find in other places and can have good effects on your gut flora if yours isnt in the best place
- kazinator 5y agoSome foods (like certain mushrooms or fish and the like) are actually poisonous unless prepared properly. Those are obviously better after that processing since okay is better than sick/dead. :)
- Koiwai 5y agoEverytime I hear the term "processed food", imagine eating "unprocessed" wheat.