How to Eat Healthy in a World Filled With Processed Foods
Imagine a healthy meal: lots of vegetables, maybe some pasture meat or free-range eggs, lovingly cooked from scratch at home. Quickly calculate how many of your meals last week looked like this. Close to zero? You’re not alone.
Either way, our world is full of processed foods. It’s easy to sit at my keyboard and tell you to avoid it and eat foods in the form that comes closest to natural: apples, not apple pie. But just because something is “processed” (whatever that means) doesn’t automatically do it badly for you. It’s time to lose your guilt and sometimes admit to eating processed foods – and perhaps we’ll see that this isn’t all that bad.
Don’t get hung up on how processed each food is.
Here’s the hard part: identifying processed food. Doritos, crafted. This is not a difficult challenge. Raw potatoes with still dirt: untreated. So far, so good.
But if we rinse these potatoes, boil them, maybe peel them … mix it with oil and garlic (and then more oil and more garlic) – oh-oh. It’s kind of handled, right? But this, one might say, is not very processed. There is a whole spectrum, and if you dig the potatoes out of the ground and boil them in your own kitchen, it’s still okay.
The problem arises when you try to draw the line to say that these things are being processed and these are not. Where would you place a cow that was cut into steaks? Frozen vegetables? Canned beans? Bread baked by a local baker? Factory baked bread?
To understand why this is a tough question, take a look at how Megan Kimble describes her year without processed food:
During my year, the food was raw, if I could theoretically cook it in my own kitchen … If I wanted to make table sugar at home, I would need a centrifuge, bleach, and a few anti-caking additives. ; all that was required was to figure out how to collect the plant nectar, which the bees regurgitate on the combs. I didn’t brew beer, but theoretically I could; I gave up the soda and bought myself a SodaStream soda for making bubbles.
Of course,processing sugar requires a lot more work and equipment thancollecting honeycombs and extracting honey , but that’s not exactly what’s good for your health. There is not much difference in nutrition between the two. And if her SodaStream drinks were healthier, it would have more to do with the syrup ingredients than the fact that it was made at home. SodaStream offers everything from zero-calorie seltzer water tohomemade Pepsi .
If taken to an extreme, the “processed is bad” mentality would ban a lot of things that shouldn’t be. Frozen vegetables are just as healthy as fresh ones, and sometimes even healthier . Pasteurized milk is processed and it is better for this . There is no nutritionally compelling reason to avoid canned pasta sauce, carton-wrapped egg whites, or grilled chicken.
But wait, you say. These are healthy, processed foods. What about Twinkies? Doritos? McDonald’s? Hungry man?
Decide what you care about and leave the rest alone.
If some of the names on this list scare you, you probably have a reason: sugar, or “chemicals” (we get to that), or high-calorie servings, or high levels of fat. Before you decide that you should avoid highly processed foods, consider what is really important to your health .
Here are the most common accusations against processed foods and how to avoid each one:
- They have a lot of sugar, which is clearly bad for you . Sugar is not only found in chocolate bars and muffins, but also in more innocent-looking foods like bread and pasta sauce. However, this can be easily avoided if you read it carefully – it should be indicated on the labels. Until then, you need to take a look at the “Sugar” section of the label. If the FDA gets its way, “Added Sugars” will soon be on its own .
- They are high in sodium. Many of them: Highly processed foods are a greater source of sodium in our diets than what we add when cooking or sprinkle with a salt shaker. Delicacies and restaurant dishes are the main sources. (For some reason, I hear people all the time say that carbonated drinks are high in sodium. They’re not .) You can find out about sodium by looking at its position on the Nutritional Facts label. However, if you are not sensitive to salt and do not have high blood pressure, this is probably not a bad thing for you .
- They have a lot of fat. This applies to greasy snacks such as chips, and often many restaurant dishes. Fat isn’t always a bad thing: it’s filling and probably not as bad for you as sugar. Fats are listed on the Nutrition Facts label along with subcategories of saturated fat (which are probably not bad for you ) and trans fats. Nobody likes trans fats , but they disappear quickly, even from processed foods.
- They will give you a carbohydrate coma. This may be true of foods high in sugar (refined carbohydrate) or other refined carbohydrates such as white flour. For example, twizzlers and pretzels fit all of these requirements. Anything that does contain fat, like potato chips, actually causes a little less coma because fat slows down digestion.
- They are addictive. There is no shortcut to this, I’m afraid. Companies love to make money, so they’ll do whatever they can to make you want to come back again. Some ready-to-eat unhealthy foods like chips and chocolate bars are damn well thought out . The combination high in fat and sugar is a signature trick, often with a good dose of salt added. Basically, you can tell which foods they are because you have all the empty wrappers from them at home.
- They are full of chemicals. Everything is made of chemicals, of course: check out the list of banana “chemical” ingredients . It is true that some foods have long lists of ingredients and that many of the ingredients are difficult to spell or spell. But there is no connection with how difficult it is to read the name and whether it refers to something dangerous. Heck, ascorbic acid and tocopherols are used as preservatives and look pretty cryptic on labels, but these are just technical names for vitamin C and vitamin E. (They are antioxidants in your body and in foods). Colors, flavors, and preservatives are not automatically bad. Even those that sparked controversy are likely to remain safe. However, if you need a list of things to worry about, the Science in the Public Interest Center has one here .
- They are harmful to the environment and / or the economy. This is a fork-voting situation (or, you know, orange-spotted fingers). If you don’t like buying from big companies and would rather give your money to a baker on the street than Mrs. Fields, be sure to make that choice. Or maybe you object to the abundance of plastic packaging and the carbon footprint of all the trucks that brought ingredients to and from your processing plant. Just keep this in mind: food isn’t always bad for your health because the food manufacturer is greedy or wasteful.
With these factors in mind, you can now wander the aisles at the grocery store (or count the numbers for your favorite fast food ) to better understand what you are trying to avoid. If you’re trying to avoid sugar, for example, you might have to ditch this super healthy-looking fruit drink sweetened with agave, but you can eat whatever pork skins you want … thing.
Prepare for tough decisions
Now that you have a plan, it’s time to figure out how to implement it. If you often end up hungry at work when you have nothing but the contents of the vending machine at hand, you now have a way to evaluate what is in that machine, instead of blaming it all as bad, wrong, and horrible, and then feel guilty when you’re hungry enough to give in and take the Snickers.
For example, if you are trying to cut out sugar, a pack of fresh mix may be a good choice for a vending machine, but it will be high in fat. Lunchable can be recycled at a gas station, but it has protein and won’t send you into a carb coma – unlike, say, a Pop-Tarts package.
Of course, the best option is not to buy processed foods. But how many of us can cook every dish from scratch? This is where it comes in handy to use some of those processed yet healthy foods we talked about earlier: grilled chicken, for example. Canned frozen meatballs and gravy for a spaghetti dinner that’s also a breakfast in minutes. You get the idea.
It would be great to prepare each dish from scratch, with free-range soft-grown lentils, but not all of us have the time. Of course, in some parts of history, people have done this, but it was part of their job as a housewife or a farmer. Today, cooking every dish from scratch is more like a hobby. Nice to have, but not for everyone. We live in a world full of processed foods, and it’s perfectly okay – be careful, thoughtful – to take advantage of it.
Illustration by Kevin Whipple.