Listening to some foodie types, you would think that anything that has been remotely industrially processed was as deadly as nerve poison. Yet even food snobs eat plenty of processed food. It's just the right kind of processed food.
A great illustration of the fact that there is nothing wrong, per se, with processed food is a little bit of self-experimentation by Mark Haub, a professor of human nutrition at Kansas State University. Last year for 10 weeks, Haub ate a Twinkie bar every three hours instead of a meal, adding variety to his diet with Doritos, Oreos and sugary cereals. He kept up some semblance of good nutrition by taking multivitamins and throwing in a few vegetables, too.
But most importantly, Haub stuck to eating no more than 1,800 calories per day - well below the 2,500 calories per day usually suggested for men. The result was that Haub lost 27 pounds. This 'convenience store diet' may not have been ideal, but in many respects his health appeared to be better. His cholesterol test results suggested he was in better condition than before, despite this diet of 'junk'.
I once tried a similar experiment myself in response to Morgan Spurlock's movie, Super Size Me. Spurlock piled on the pounds after eating every meal at McDonald's and accepting the offer of 'supersizing' every time it was offered. I tried the same idea, eating every meal at McDonald's for a week. I simply limited my calorie intake and, hey presto, I lost weight. There's nothing particular to processed or convenience food that makes it unhealthy. As long as you get a reasonable balance of the major nutrients - which is fairly easy as long as you have a modicum of variety in your diet, you shouldn't need to take multivitamins - then the mere fact that food is processed is irrelevant.
When asked about his own views on processed food, Haub rightly said this week: 'People have a hatred towards (processed) foods... I like them. I eat them. It's amazing how people believe if it's processed, it's not food.'
In fact, unless you only ever cook food from scratch, you'll be eating processed food. As food writer Justine Brian has noted, olives are processed food. Off the tree, olives are bitter, hard, inedible berries. They must be pickled in brine for four weeks to make them edible. Unless you have a handy local olive tree, you'll be relying on a mass producer to supply you with the finished product. Of course, the same applies to olive oil, spices, marinated artichokes and all manner of other posh nosh.
Instead of making stupid distinctions between processed and 'real' food, the only question worth asking about food is if it is fit to eat - not off, for example - and whether it tastes good. Anything else is just snobbery.
Processing takes all the nutrient and enzymes out of the food which our body needs to help it survive.
Reading the labels for "refined sugar",salt,fat,calories etc, these foods contain way over reasonable amounts of the afore mentioned.
Over time the processed foods will end up doing much more harm than good to our bodies
"Remember fresh is bast".
www.weighles.com
However, a true processed food manufacturer would never pickle in brine if there was a cheaper "brine substitute" available. And you might think that it's difficult to find something cheaper than brine, given that the seas are full of the stuff, but a true processed food manufacturer would find something.
Furthermore, a true processed food manufacturer's "olives" would not contain any actual olive, or they might contain 1% olive if this was necessary in order to legally justify the depiction of olives on the packaging. The remaining 99% would be filler, binder, glucose-fructose syrup, flavor enhancer, preservative, e-number cocktail, and "natural (or "nature-identical") olive flavor" which is natural in the sense that it is derived from a natural substance, petroleum.
Link: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joanna-dolgoff-md/healthier-hot-dogs_b_947390.html
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R/ PRONESE
But you're not an improvement over Michael Pollan. "Eat food, not too much, mostly plants." Or Pollan's seven rules:
1) Don't eat anything your great grandmother wouldn't recognize as food.
2) Don’t eat anything with more than five ingredients, or ingredients you can't pronounce.
3) Stay out of the middle of the supermarket; shop on the perimeter of the store. Real food tends to be on the outer edge of the store near the loading docks, where it can be replaced with fresh foods when it goes bad.
4) Don't eat anything that won't eventually rot. "There are exceptions -- honey -- but as a rule, things like Twinkies that never go bad aren't food," Pollan says.
5) It is not just what you eat but how you eat. "Always leave the table a little hungry," Pollan says.
6) Enjoy meals with the people you love. Families traditionally ate together, around a table and not a TV, at regular meal times. It's a good tradition. "Remember when eating between meals felt wrong?" Pollan asks.
7) Don't buy food where you buy your gasoline. In the U.S., 20% of food is eaten in the car.