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Processed Foods: The Pros and Cons: A Balanced View

In food processing, harvested crops or slaughtered animals are used as raw materials to manufacture and package food products that are attractive, marketable, and have a long shelf life.

Attractive means that the product tastes and looks good. To be marketable, it must match the types of food that consumers demand. Food products that have a long shelf life reduce waste costs for producers, distributors and retailers.

Development of food processing.

Food processing dates back to our prehistory, when fire was discovered and cooking was invented. The various ways that food can be cooked are all forms of food processing.

Food preservation also began in prehistory, with the first ‘extended shelf-life’ foods being produced by drying foods in the sun and preserving them with salt. Salt preservation was common among soldiers, sailors, and other travelers until canning was invented in the early 19th century.

Ancient Bulgarians invented the first instant food (bulgur) almost 8,000 years ago, when they found a way to parboil and dry whole wheat so that the grain only had to be reheated before it could be eaten.

One of the earliest ready-to-eat meals was devised by the ancient Celts when they invented haggis and what is now known as the Cornish pasty.

Another processed food, cheese, was invented by the nomads of Arabia when they noticed how milk curdled as they ran around all day on their camels and ponies.

Prehistoric methods of cooking and preserving food remained largely unchanged until the industrial revolution.

The development of modern food processing technology began in the early 19th century in response to the needs of the military. In 1809 a vacuum bottling technique was invented so that Napoleon could feed his troops with it. Canning was invented in 1810, and after can manufacturers stopped using lead (which is highly poisonous) for the lining of cans, canned goods became common throughout the world. Pasteurization, discovered in 1862, significantly advanced the microbiological safety of milk and similar products.

Chilling slows down the rate of bacterial reproduction and therefore the rate at which food spoils. Cooling as a storage technique has been used for hundreds of years. Ice houses, filled with fresh snow during the winter, were used to preserve food by chilling it from the mid-18th century onward and worked quite well most of the year in northern climates.

Commercial refrigeration, which used toxic refrigerants that made the technology unsafe in the home, was in use for almost four decades before the first home refrigerators were introduced in 1915.

Home refrigerators gained wide acceptance in the 1930s when non-toxic, non-flammable refrigerants such as Freon were invented.

The expansion of the food processing industry in the second half of the 20th century was due to three needs: (a) food to feed the troops efficiently during World War II, (b) food that could be consumed under conditions of zero gravity during raids. to outer space, and (c) the search for comfort demanded by the busy consumer society.

To answer these needs, food scientists invented freeze-drying, spray-drying, and juice concentrates, among a host of other processing technologies. They also introduced artificial sweeteners, colors, and chemical preservatives. In the last years of the last century, dry instant soups, reconstituted juices and fruits, and self-cooking meals (MRE) so beloved by the military, but not by grunts, were invented.

The ‘quest for convenience’ has led to the expansion of frozen foods from simple bags of frozen peas to juice concentrates and complex TV dinners. Those that process foods now use the perceived value of time as the basis of their market appeal.

Benefits of processed foods

Initially, processed foods helped alleviate food shortages and improved overall nutrition by making new foods available throughout the world. Modern food processing offers many additional benefits:

  • Inactivating pathogenic microorganisms found on fresh vegetables and raw meats (such as salmonella) reduces foodborne illness and makes food safer.
  • Because processed foods are less susceptible to spoilage than fresh foods, modern processing, storage, and transportation can deliver a wide variety of foods from around the world, giving us options in our supermarkets that would have been unimaginable to our consumers. ancestors.
  • Processing can often improve the flavor of food, although it can also have the opposite effect.
  • The nutritional value of foods can be increased by adding additional nutrients and vitamins during processing.
  • The nutritional value can also be made more consistent and reliable.
  • Modern processing technologies can also improve the quality of life for allergy sufferers by removing proteins that trigger allergic reactions.
  • The mass production of food means that processed foods are much cheaper to produce than the cost of preparing meals from raw ingredients at home.

Processed foods are also extremely convenient. Households are freed from the laborious tasks of preparing and cooking foods that are in their natural state… the food processing industry makes everything from peeled potatoes ready to boil to ready meals that just have to be heated in a microwave. oven for a few minutes.

risks

Processed foods are undoubtedly a great help. But not everything is sweetness and light.

Generally speaking, fresh, unprocessed foods will contain a higher proportion of naturally occurring fiber, vitamins, and minerals than the same food after it has been processed by the food industry. Vitamin C, for example, is destroyed by heat, so fresh fruit will contain more vitamin C than canned fruit.

In fact, nutrients are often deliberately removed from foods during processing to improve taste, appearance, or shelf life. Examples include bread, pasta, and ready meals.

The result is empty calories. Processed foods have a higher ratio of calories to other essential nutrients than fresh, unprocessed foods. They are often energy dense and nutritionally poor.

Processing can present hazards not found in unprocessed foods, due to additives, preservatives, chemically hardened vegetable oils or trans fats, and excess sugar and salt. In fact, additives in processed foods…flavors, sweeteners, stabilizers, texture-improving agents, and preservatives, among others…may have little or no nutritional value, or may actually be unhealthy.

Condoms used to extend shelf life, such as nitrites or sulfites, can cause health problems. In fact, the addition of many chemicals for flavoring and preservation has been shown to cause human and animal cells to grow rapidly, without dying, increasing the risk of a variety of cancers.

Cheap ingredients that mimic the properties of natural ingredients, such as trans fats made from chemically hardened vegetable oils that replace more expensive natural saturated fats or cold-pressed oils, have been shown in numerous studies to cause serious problems of health . But they are still widely used due to low cost and consumer unawareness.

Sugars, fats, and salts are often added to processed foods to enhance flavor and as preservatives. As diabetics, we are all well aware of the effects of excess sugar, and fat on our already damaged systems. Eating large amounts of processed foods means consuming too many sugars, fats and salts, which, even if you are in good health, can lead to a variety of problems such as high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease, ulcers, stomach cancer, obesity and of course diabetes.

Another problem with processed foods is that when low-quality ingredients are used, this can be hidden during manufacturing.

In the processing industry, a food product will go through several intermediate steps in separate factories before being finalized in the factory that finishes it.

This is similar to the use of subcontractors in automobile manufacturing, where many independent factories produce parts, such as electrical systems, bumpers, and other subsystems, according to the manufacturer’s final specifications. These parts are then sold to the car plant where the car is finally assembled from the purchased parts.

Because processed food ingredients are often made in large quantities during the early stages of the manufacturing process, any hygiene issues in facilities that produce a basic ingredient that other factories use extensively in later stages of production it can have serious effects on the quality and safety of many final food products.

Despite the dangers, everyone today eats processed foods almost exclusively. As a result, people eat faster and no longer seem to be aware of the way food is grown and that it is a gift from nature.

It also seems to me that food has become more of a necessary interruption in our busy lives and less of a social occasion to enjoy.

eat processed foods

You can’t stop eating some processed foods…convenience is irresistible.

When you eat processed foods, you reduce your chance of getting poisoned or getting a foodborne illness. The nutritional value of what you eat may be more consistent, and you are likely taking in more nutrients and vitamins than you would from eating only whole foods.

On the other hand, by eating processed foods, you expose yourself to a potential loss of heat-sensitive vitamins and nutrients that are removed to improve shelf life, taste, and appearance. You also expose yourself to the possible adverse effects on your health of various additives and preservatives, some of which can be very serious.

The calorie-dense nature of processed foods, due to the large amounts of sugars and fats they contain, makes them extremely problematic for diabetics and those with high cholesterol and blood pressure.

The only solution is to choose the processed foods you buy carefully, reading the labels on the packages, and centering your diet on fresh or frozen produce as much as possible.

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