Eating processed foods (2024)

FAQs

What happens if you only eat processed food? ›

Processed foods, such as ready meals, baked goods, and processed meats, can have negative health effects. Consuming highly or heavily processed foods can lead to weight gain, increase the risk of type 2 diabetes, and more. Most food needs some degree of processing, and not all processed foods are bad for the body.

Buying processed foods can lead to people eating more than the recommended amounts of sugar, salt and fat as they may not be aware of how much has been added to the food they are buying and eating. These foods can also be higher in calories due to the high amounts of added sugar or fat in them.

Focusing on eating unprocessed foods, sometimes called "clean eating," has several health benefits, such as boosting your mood, helping you lose weight, and improving sleep. To do this, you may want to limit your intake of processed foods, including cheese, processed meats, sugar-sweetened drinks, and potato chips.

1. Leafy Greens (Spinach, Kale, Swiss Chard) Leafy greens are packed with essential vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants. They are rich in vitamin K, which supports bone health, and vitamin C, which boosts the immune system.

Healthier alternatives

One way to reduce how much ultra-processed food you eat is by prioritizing unprocessed or minimally processed food. Unprocessed or minimally processed foods you can increase in your diet include: fruit and vegetables (both fresh and frozen)

Examples of ultra-processed foods include ice cream, ham, sausages, crisps, mass-produced bread, breakfast cereals, biscuits, carbonated drinks, fruit-flavoured yogurts, instant soups, and some alcoholic drinks including whisky, gin, and rum.

Heavily processed foods often include unhealthy levels of added sugar, sodium and fat. These ingredients make the food we eat taste better, but too much of them leads to serious health issues like obesity, heart disease, high blood pressure and diabetes.

The worst processed foods for your diet are typically ready-to-eat and low in nutrients. They include cookies, sugary drinks, deli meats, and frozen pizza, salty snacks like chips, and most breakfast cereals. These foods may taste good, but they're loaded with added ingredients that aren't good for you.

In general, fresh vegetables, fruits, pasteurized milk, chicken, fish, beans, and eggs are considered unprocessed or minimally processed ( 2 ). This is because these foods go through no or minimal processing before you buy them or harvest them yourself.

Is canned tuna considered processed meat? ›

Processed foods: When ingredients such as oil, sugar or salt are added to foods and they are packaged, the result is processed foods. Examples are simple bread, cheese, tofu, and canned tuna or beans. These foods have been altered, but not in a way that's detrimental to health.

From your morning coffee or tea to the frozen berries in your smoothie to the yogurt you eat for a snack to the crusty whole-grain bread you serve with dinner — it's all processed. As soon as our ancestors used fire, sun and salt to cook, dehydrate or preserve food, food processing was born.

Used for oatmeal, rolled oats are lightly processed to make them edible. The oat groats (grain kernels) are steamed, flattened, and dried. They still contain all three parts of the grain—the bran, germ, and endosperm—so they retain all of the fiber and other nutrients.

CHRIS VAN TULLEKEN: It was a very severe change, so I became very unwell very quickly. I felt terrible. I stopped sleeping. I developed anxiety and became very unhappy.

Processed foods aren't the enemy when it comes to achieving your weight-loss goals. As Wallace puts it, it's all about using common sense when choosing what to include in your routine. Processed foods, including center-of-the-store canned beans, yogurt, cereal and frozen items, can fit in a balanced, healthy meal plan.

Cravings for processed food is an issue, in part, because they have high amounts of calories per bite. They often feature added sugar and/or high amount of fat. As a result, they cause strong activation patterns in brain areas associated with “reward” – – and this is part of the problem.

10 days can make a bigger difference than you think.

A recent study led by Robert Lustig, MD, showed that by simply taking fructose (from added sugar) out of the diet for 10 days, liver fat was reduced nearly 30%. There was no reduction in calories in the diet the patients were put on.