While its almost certain that whole food diets are optimal, theres nothing inherent about food being processed that makes it unhealthy. Some people take anything to do with diet/fitness/wellness to stupid places like “Ugh! That protein bar is PROCESSED! These brownies are home made from whole ingredients, I dont polute my body.” Whey protein powder is processed, multi vitamins are processed and greens powders are processed… Raw milk isnt processed… my lactose free dairy products are processed and thats best for everyone.
It’s not literally any processing that’s the problem. It’s that what we generally call processed food is engineered to optimize for things other than the health of those who eat it: flavor, addictiveness, cheapness, etc. And all of those goals are so pervasive and so at odds with health that virtually anything we call “processed food” is terrible for us.
Isn’t “Processed” a really open term? Like, if I bake some veggies in my oven they’re technically processed?
Exactly. Take my preferred snack for example, a bag of oven baked pork rinds. 37G protein, 12g fat, 0 carbs. (Ok theres an assload of salt) about 250 cals. No artificial colors, flavours or preservatives… is that “processed”?
My point was more along the lines that a “processed” formed chicken breast pattie isnt somehow worse for you than a big slab of crunchy fatty pork belly because it went through a machine. Its possible to make good decisions involving processed food and terrible whole foods decisions too… delicious decadent “now I want pork belly” decisions. I do wonder how many of these studies control for calorie intake, quality of nutrition, etc.
In my honest opinion, processed things are things that are, through scientific methods, made to be addictive. Like Pringles having the perfect crunch or different chemical compounds of Red Bull (color spot on the bottom). I don’t count cured meat as processed, but I have a hard time calling a pound of deli ham anything but processed.
Yes. People have conflated the term “processed food” with the higher end processing that some foods get, more correctly called ultra processed foods.
Processing food is transforming it from one state to another. Bread is a processed food because you’ve milled the wheat. Acme® Fued lewps™ are ultra processed because the corn was dissolved in acid, reconstituted into a fiberless slurry, fortified with enough vitamins to be legally referred to as nutrition, fortified with enough sugar, salt and fats to make your body demand you eat more, then bulked with milk protein concentrates to make you feel like you’re eating something substantial and also qualify as a dairy product for tax purposes.
The conversation would often be much clearer if people didn’t use the term for “almost all food” when thet mean the more chemistry oriented type of food.
Even within the category of ultra processed foods there are items that are perfectly benign. Breakfast cereals can be perfectly healthy, but they’re necessarily ultra processed since you need at least minimal shelf stability.
Processing isn’t intrinsically bad, it’s just that the worst foods are ultra processed because that’s how they did the things that make them bad, and every transformation destroys some portion of the food, and eventually you need to start adding things back in to make it keep being food, or at least appearing to be food.
Processed unhealthy foods are generally viewed as the items that have been stripped down in to some degree and then reassembled with ingredients like sugar, preservatives, flavors, dyes, stabilizers, etc.
Many studies have shown that yes, indeed, there are processed foods that are inherently unhealthy. We don’t need to play with semantics of what “processed” means to split hairs in an effort to be right.
First thing I said was that whole foods are optimal, thats the key takeaway here. Yeah, some processed foods are TERRIBLE for you, some processed foods are “not bad” for you, some are even healthy. My point is that a food being processed isnt the defining element on wether or not its bad for you. In most cases its the ease of access combined with the hyper paletable nature of processed foods that will do you in.
The harsh reality of ultra processed food - with Chris Van Tulleken
not a study but an informative RI lecture
