For the Love of Nature: Why We Shouldn’t Eat Processed Foods

Despite its essential convenience, the health-conscious world is starting to turn against processed foods. Though they still show up in grocery and corner stores all over the world, gone are the days in which people may have once seriously considered a TV dinner a viable substitute for a complete meal. Everything now has an upscale, micro-manufactured alternative, no matter how absurd or insignificant it might seem: while craft-brewed beer has been a thing for several decades now, there’s a market for designer sodas, artisan marshmallows, and countless businesses that get by only selling products like tart, almost sugarless frozen yogurt or something more practical, like locally-sourced meats from many local purveyors, which almost always yields something more flavorful than a store-bought, long-processed alternative.

A food item’s processed equivalent is virtually never better for you, piling on preservatives, additional carbohydrates, trans fats, and extraneous sodium that wouldn’t exist in the homemade (or perhaps restaurant-purchased, depending on the cook and the restaurant) alternative. For example, Swanson’s Hungry-Man series of products consistently offers obscene numbers of both calories and carbohydrates. Their “Beer Battered Chicken” product, for example, contains 820 calories (350 from fat), 26% of one’s daily value of carbohydrates, and 111% of one’s daily value of sodium. While a breaded or fried chicken product is by design going to be unhealthy if it’s going to be delicious, it’s very possible to consume far fewer carbohydrates and much less salt in the process of eating one. Processed foods also lie about their health dangers; many packages that read “Trans fat free” actually contain upwards of a half-gram of trans fat or less, as the Food and Drug Administration allows them to.

Additionally, processed foods often substitute for sugar by adding high fructose corn syrup, a consequence of subsidies that render it considerably less expensive than cane sugar. High fructose corn syrup doesn’t send off the same signals as pure sugar does, convincing the body that it’s still hungry when it isn’t, and it shows up not just in sodas but in premade sauces, pasta, bread, salad dressings, and mass-produced wines, all full of unnecessary carbohydrates and sugars and far too often a part of Neolithic eating.

But beyond carbohydrates is the increased risks of cancer and obesity brought on by consuming processed meats. Even items like mass-produced sausages and bologna have the potential to increase one’s chance of developing cancer and are full of synthetic chemicals, many of which are potentially carcinogenic. All of these factors can help lead to diabetes and liver problems.

And worst of all is the fact that by buying processed foods, your dollars go to perpetuate the existence of processed foods, rather than to support chefs, local farmers, and purveyors of meats that serve as your best possible alternative (and what we’ll all be moving towards as the world continues to shy away from processed foods, given that this knowledge is becoming increasingly obvious). For those following a Paleo diet, this means getting meats and vegetables locally, and makes good sense from both an economic and an ecological standpoint.

Note: Today’s guest post is provided by Pauline O., who is working towards her Biblical counseling degree and has written about nutrition and health on onlinecollegedegrees.net. Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Have a Namaste.