What is Processed Food?

[Piebald]

Can someone explain what "processed food" means? I'm really ignorant on the subject of food, but I am about to undergo a very serious weight loss program and this is one thing I want to find out about. Thanks in advance.

[Cyrus Johnson]

Can someone explain what "processed food" means? I'm really ignorant on the subject of food, but I am about to undergo a very serious weight loss program and this is one thing I want to find out about. Thanks in advance.

Any food that is not prepared fresh from raw ingredients is processed. Unless you live on a farm, if you have a typical diet, this will probably include most of the things you eat.

[Xavier]

Here's a small relavent paragraph from the Wikipedia article on Food:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food#Food_manufacture

[technomage]

Can someone explain what "processed food" means? I'm really ignorant on the subject of food, but I am about to undergo a very serious weight loss program and this is one thing I want to find out about. Thanks in advance.
And then you have "Pasteurised, Processed Cheese Food," which is the stuff they feed to cheese to make it grow big and strong. :teeth:

Seriously, some of the worries with processed food is a lot of processed food has extra salt and fat in it. But there's also a lot of hype out there. If you talk to your doc, he/she can give you a good heads up on what's good and what's bad.

[Xavier]

Isn't the real problem with OVER-processed food? Things like the microwave dinners and such.

[Taran Wanderer]

Isn't the real problem with OVER-processed food? Things like the microwave dinners and such.
Hey, there's nothing wrong with those!! I'm about to eat one right now ...

[Harald]

I don't know exactly how people in the USA define "processed food". As for me here in Scandinavia here are some items I would label processed food:

- white (table) sugar
- table salt (as good as pure NaCl)
- white flour and white flour bread
- food made especially for cooking in a microwave oven
- hydrogenated and partially hydrogenated vegetable fats, especially such as contain trans-fatty acids
- milk and whey powder, egg powder (all these reportedly contain the damaging oxy-cholesterol)
- commercial soy products (e.g. soy ice-cream, soy yogurts, soy milk etc.)

These were just some that come to mind.

My thought is that processed food is almost always unhealthy food, unhealthy on a long term.

Processed foods are most often characterized by their having more or less
a) damaged fats,
b) damaged proteins,
c) inferior quality carbs,
d) decreased mineral and trace mineral content,
e) decreased vitamin (C, B-complex, etc.) content.

One of the better sites on the whole WWW for information on the processed/unhealthy food vs. healthy food problematic would be the Weston A Price Foundation site.


Harald