Eliminate These Processed Foods, for Health’s Sake!

Why should you eliminate processed foods from your life? What is wrong with them? Processed foods are full of harmful fats, avoidable chemicals, refined starch, and white sugar and so on.  More than 6000 chemicals, some of them possessing cancer-producing properties, are used in the processed-food industry. Many processed foods are produced through procedures involving overcooking under high heat, undermining their nutritional value in the process. When toxic agents, food additives and other foreign ingredients enter the body, the human immune system tries hard to throw them out. If the task is too difficult, the immune system suffers, leading to several complications for health. This is the age of fast food, canned food, frozen food, packaged food, and other types of ‘convenience food’. All this food is tailor-made to suit the prevailing modern lifestyle that is marked by speed, convenience, comfort, leisure and pleasure. It has become such an integral part of everyday life these days that if the processed food industry were to vanish suddenly, life would perhaps just retrace its steps back into extraordinarily inconvenient bygone times. Nevertheless, you should try to eliminate processed foods from your daily life, if you wish to lead a healthy life.

In particular, try not to buy any processed foods that contain trans fats. Do look at the ingredients listed on the label of packaged processed food you intend buying, and if you notice the words “partially hydrogenated oil” or just “hydrogenated oil” or “liquid shortening,” avoid it. Partially hydrogenated vegetable oils contain trans fats, which are harmful. Trans fats increase the bad cholesterol (LDL) and deplete the good cholesterol (HDL) levels. They make arteries rigid and clog them, resulting in heart problems. They cause insulin resistance and contribute to Type 2 diabetes. Trans fats pose a serious overall health risk, much more serious than saturated fats found in meat and dairy products. Trans fats convert oil through partial hydrogenation into solid; and, the processed foods containing it have longer shelf life, but when you consume them your life is shortened.

Eliminate processed foods containing simple carbohydrates from your shopping list. Processed foods like white flour, white sugar, candy, soft drinks, and pastries contain simple carbohydrates (simple sugars), which provide instant or fast energy because the body metabolizes them quite easily. Simple carbohydrates influence insulin levels unfavorably and end up being deposited in the body as fat. They have very little nutritional value. Complex carbohydrates, which are found in fruits, vegetables, grains, rice, potatoes, beans and other starchy foods, are all right, as they give energy to the body, but simple carbohydrates found in many refined and processed foods have to be avoided.

Most of us are tempted buy processed foods that carry a label stating that they are “low-calorie” or “healthy” or “diet” and so on, but despite their assertions, they only add to your weight and your health risks. Even ready-to-eat meals supplied by the food outlets that seem to make your life comfortable and easy may have used processed food products, so be wary.

Depend more on fresh foods, although they are rather more expensive, in the interest of keeping good health. Eliminating processed foods may be inconvenient or may increase your food budget, but the extra expense you will surely save the extra expense by avoiding illness and disease.