Even if the majority of Americans don’t eat this way, most sources of nutrition advice agree: processed food is bad. 

Okay, but what does “processed” mean?  Does that mean food in boxes?  Food in anything other than its raw, natural state?  And what does “natural” mean, anyway? Is a food’s original, natural state always the best state for human consumption?  The answers, as usual, are complicated.

WHAT DOES “NATURAL” MEAN?

Let’s start with food’s natural state.  First, “natural” does not mean anything in the U.S., at least legally speaking.  You can put that word on pretty much any food product and get away with it; it’s not a regulated term.  Beyond words on packaging, though, we probably all have some misconceptions about what the term means, and even whether foods we think of as natural are ideal.

One problem with “natural” is that we sometimes assume if we can recognize the original source of an ingredient from somewhere in the general vicinity of the outdoors, then the food is natural. The thinking goes something like this:  Soybean oil is natural because soybeans are plants and we’ve seen them growing in a field.  Same with sugar.  Supermarket beef is natural because it’s from a cow.  White flour is natural because there’s that line in “America the Beautiful” about “Amber waves of grain.”  High fructose corn syrup is natural because it’s from corn, and “fructose” means “fruit” right? 

Natural?  Maybe technically originally, but not for our purposes here.  Before you start frying those doughnuts in soybean oil and rolling them in sugar, let’s go through some details about natural food, industrial processing, and traditional preparation.

Just because an ingredient comes originally from something growing out of the ground or walking around on it, doesn’t mean the ingredient is in a natural state once something’s been done to it.  Basically, it depends on what’s been done to it.  Has it been altered far beyond its original state in unrecognizable ways?  If it’s an animal product, has the animal been fed something that’s unnatural for its body?  That steak in the supermarket might look just like the one from the grass-fed cow, but it’s not natural in my book if the cow was stuffed with grain, which is an indigestible food that’s not part of its natural diet, as opposed to grass, which is natural for a cow to eat.  The meat might also have been irradiated and soon, it might have been artificially generated from a test tube.  Those vegetables and fruits in the supermarket may look natural, but it’s arguable that they’re not if they’ve been artificially ripened, sprayed with synthesized pesticides, coated with wax, or stored for years.

Raw foods are what most people think of as food in its ultimate natural state.  A lot of foods are better, or at least have certain benefits, eaten raw.  I’ve extolled the virtues of raw milk before, like inclusion of the original, absorbable vitamins and enzymes for digestion.  Raw vegetables are certainly better than over-boiled ones, which have leached their vitamins (not to mention flavor and texture) to the water.  In general, it’s a good idea to keep ingredients pretty close to the state in which they grew (or walked/flew/came out of the udder), or at least close enough to  be recognizable.  Cooked vegetables shouldn’t be so overcooked that they lose their original color.  Fruit should be ripe. 

However, foods aren’t necessarily better, or even exclusively ideal in their raw state.  I’m not a raw food evangelist.  A lot of the raw food movement’s ideas are founded in flimsy science, at least when applied universally.  Are there plenty of vegetables and other foods that lose nutrients when we cook them, and should we cook them in ways that eliminate loss of nutrients?  Yes and yes.  Should you incorporate raw, fresh, food into your diet?  Absolutely.   Are toxins and the skeletal remains of murdered enzymes going to destroy your health if you so much as sauté your veggies?  Hardly. 

In fact, some foods are more toxic eaten raw. This makes sense when you think about it, because what we think of as food (other than milk) was not exclusively designed to be food; it was designed to be a reproductive mechanism for a plant, or offspring of an animal.  Sometimes being a food too is an asset, and sometimes it’s a detriment, if your goal in life is reproduction.  It depends in part on whether eating damages the seeds, as with beans or grains where we’re chewing the seed itself, as opposed to foods where the seed is not damaged, such as a berry seed that remains intact in excrement or a stone fruit pit that’s tossed aside.  Some plants sweeten their fruits or brighten their colors to encourage consumption, especially when the plant’s seeds are hearty enough to withstand the digestive process.  Get your seeds eaten and pooped out somewhere else; it’s a pretty clever method of seed dispersal.  Other plants contain toxins or bitter flavors to ward off hungry creatures, specifically because being eaten would hinder reproduction by damaging the seed or spores. 

Some examples of these toxic-when-raw foods stand out.  Many mushrooms can be eaten cooked, but not uncooked, which isn’t a big deal since the ability to sauté mushrooms in butter is possibly humankind’s greatest achievement.  Beans, seeds and cereal grains naturally contain phytic acid (phytates), which blocks absorption of other nutrients in the beans and makes digestion more difficult; this changes when they are properly processed, as I’ll explain in a moment.

IS PROCESSING SOMETIMES GOOD?

But wait, did she just say “processed” to mean something good?  Well, yes.  To process a food simply means to treat it in a certain way.  Cooking, after all, is processing.  So is canning, fermenting, soaking, baking, and sprouting.  These processes allow us to preserve and enhance our food, and to make it taste good.

The distinction I wanted to make is between traditionally processed and industrially processed foods.  Be wary of foods that are processed on an industrial scale, to make them more convenient or to stretch an abundant source (think: corn) into something for which there is a lot of demand (think: oil, sweetener, fillers).  Generally this kind of processing creates an ingredient that’s very different from its source.

But some types of processing aren’t bad, when we look back at the traditional means of processing food.  Cooking renders food delicious, and deliciousness must not be overlooked.  Slowly-braised meats, stewed tomatoes, sautéed vegetables with onions and garlic, broiled fish... these foods are tasty and good for you. 

Beyond cooking, processing has allowed cultures all over the world to take foods that might otherwise be detrimental or spoil easily, and turn them into something digestible and beneficial, or that lasts a long time.  Virtually every culture has invented fermentation and similar forms of processing.  Traditional cultures in the Americas treated corn with a process called nixtamalization, through which soaking and cooking in an alkaline liquid reduced harmful anti-nutrients and increased nutrients.  Fermentation not only preserves food and makes it taste good (think: cheese, chocolate, yogurt, kraut, sourdough bread...), it retains and enhances nutrients.  It’s worth learning about what processes are traditional and which ones are not.  For example, tempeh is a traditional and healthful way to ferment and prepare soy.  Adding MSG and other flavorings to indigestible soy to produce a frozen veggie burger?  Not so much.

Soaking and sprouting are another example of a traditional form of processing, for beans, seeds, and grains.  This process reduces the phytic acid content.  That’s a good thing, since unless you’re a ruminant, you can’t digest phytic acid, and it blocks the absorption of other nutrients. 

Basically, don’t let a broad warning against processing detract from the importance of traditional, time-tested, and nutrient-enhancing processing methods.

 

SO, WHAT’S BAD PROCESSING?

Just because a food or ingredient starts out as a plant that grows in the earth or an animal that makes noises from the song about Old MacDonald’s farm doesn’t mean that its derivatives are something you want to eat.  Don’t be lulled by being able to picture an ingredient’s original source.

While we’ve seen that good processing is generally traditional, simple, and brings out nutrients, bad processing is often complex, dramatically transformative to an ingredient, recently developed, and damaging to nutritional value in exchange for lowered expense or increased convenience.  Most pre-packaged foods fall under this category: frozen meals with tons of preservatives, everything in the snack food aisle, sodas and sugared beverages, vegetable oils, and anything that has to tell you it’s a food (think: “cheese food product”).

Vegetable oil is a classic example of this.  Traditionally, oils have been extracted from -- get this! -- oily foods.  Amazing, huh?  Nuts, olives, coconuts and animal fats are all obvious sources of oils, and healthful ones, as long as the oil isn’t industrially processed to alter its chemical makeup.  Vegetable oil, on the other hand, is a much more recent development, because it’s much less obvious to try to get oil out of a soybean or stalk of corn or seed of cotton.  When’s the last time you had to wash oil off your hands after touching cotton or eating fresh corn?  These are not oily foods.  So, to get oil from these cheap-to-produce sources, the ingredient is treated with hexane or another chemical solvent to get out the oil.  It’s refined, deodorized, bleached and other words I don’t consider delicious things to do to my food.  Again, we have this pattern: cheap + unappetizing technology + convenience = highly processed, unhealthful food that’s far removed from its original source.

Ingredient lists themselves make me hesitant to bite into a food.  Pre-packaged foods are loaded with preservatives, additives, and things that are hard to pronounce without a degree in chemistry.  The best food is either fresh and in danger of impending spoilage, or it is preserved in a traditional or simple way (canning, fermenting, aging, drying, freezing).  Additionally, be wary of any foods that have to include MSG in its various guises to try to make them taste good.  If the food can’t produce enough flavor on its own for you to enjoy it, then it’s not real food.  The same is true of fake colors.

Water, ranch seasonings & spices (modified food starch, buttermilk, sugar, salt, sour cream [cream, nonfat milk, cultures], monosodium glutamate, cultured nonfat milk, garlic, onion, less than 2% of spice, green onion, maltodextrin, monoglycerides, lecithin, xanthan gum, disodium phosphate, calcium disodium edta added to protect flavor), corn syrup, maltodextrin, contains less than 2% of natural and artificial flavors, sugar, distilled vinegar, phosphoric acid, titanium dioxide (artificial color), potassium sorbate and sodium benzoate (as preservatives), lactic acid, xanthan gum, garlic puree, onion puree, soybean oil

Can you count the refined, processed ingredients, preservatives, colors, sugars, and forms of MSG?  Run away!  Run away!

CAN YOU SUMMARIZE THE SIGNS OF BAD AND GOOD PROCESSING?

Sure, here you go:

Here are a few signs that processing is the BAD kind:

1. 1.It results in a food product that’s so different from its natural state you have to stretch your mind to figure out how the one became the other. Hmm, oil from corn?  How do they do that?
   

2. 
   

2. 2.It results in the detriment of existing nutrients in a food. Hmm, why do they have to add artificial vitamins A & D back into processed milk?  Could it be that pasteurization destroys the naturally-occurring ones?
   

3. 
   

3. 3.Your grandma’s grandma, or someone else’s, wouldn’t recognize it. Dearie, what is that “margarine” concoction you’re spreading on your bread?  I made a horrible mistake and thought it was butter.  It’s poisonous, isn’t it?
   

4. 
   

4. 4.It’s meant to be an “innovation” that will look like, taste like, be cheaper than, or substitute for a traditional food, but it isn’t one.  Again, think of margarine, soy meats, MSG flavored foods, high fructose corn syrup, and so forth.
   

5. 
   

5. 5.It’s industrially processed, comes in a package, has an ingredient list a mile long.  Someone in a factory far away created this food product, and you feel pretty removed from how that happened.  When you pick up the box or package, and there generally is a lot of packaging, you see an ingredient list with hard-to-pronounce items.
   

Here are a few signs that processing is the GOOD kind:

1. 1.It’s pretty intuitive to understand how the resulting food came from its original source.  Hmm, that sauerkraut looks like cabbage that’s been shredded.  I can understand how sitting around and fermenting could make it look and taste like this.  Pass some more?
   

2. 
   

2. 2.It enhances or preserves existing nutrients. Fermentation brings out nutrients in food.  Eating vegetables fresh or lightly cooked does not damage them.  Soaking seeds, beans, and cereal grains removes phytic acid that prevents absorption of other nutrients
   

3. 
   

3. 3.Your grandma’s grandma, or someone else’s, WOULD recognize it; it’s traditional. Dearie, this is delicious!  Butter, fermented foods, sourdough breads, cheese, non-hydrogenated lard, schmaltz, fruits, vegetables, meats and dairy from animals that eat the things they were meant to eat...  These are all the kinds of things Great-Great-Grandma ate, and we should be eating.  Innovation and technology are not necessarily good things when it comes to food; we spent all those thousands of years figuring out what to eat for a reason!
   

4. 
   

4. 4.You processed it yourself, or someone you trust did it.  Did you soak, ferment, cook, or can it in your own kitchen?  It’s probably a good thing.  Could you have, given proper knowledge?  Check.  If your favorite local farmer smoked that salmon, pickled those vegetables, or canned those tomatoes, that’s pretty good too.
   

5. 
   

5. 5.No packaging, pronounceable ingredients.  It doesn’t come in a package with a long list of ingredients.  If it has ingredients, you can pronounce them on the first try.
   

HEY, WHERE DID I LEAVE MY GLASSES?

They’re on the coffee table, next to your tea cup and the newspaper.

Further reading:

Dirty Secrets of the Food Processing Industry, by Sally Fallon

Thanks to Stephan for coining the term “industrially processed” while musing with me about this stuff.