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# On Processed Foods
by: Owen Gunden

2016-03-18

tags: nutrition
* * *

In response to:

> "Oh but isn't that processed?" Yep so is beer, wine, bread,
> pasta...processing isn't what matters. Number of ingredients and whether you
> can pronounce them are not important either. What matters is nutritional
> content.  That's a fact.  Not an opinion. Can we as a culture just get over
> this pseudoscientific food snobbery please? Thanks.

"What matters is nutritional content" perhaps, but I would be sure to add some
caveats to that. We don't have a complete index of nutrients nor their impacts
on the body. For example plant polyphenols in berries, we're just starting to
understand<sup>[1][]</sup>, and there is evidence that eating these nutrients in their
"unprocessed" state is more effective than just eating the nutrients
directly<sup>[2][][3][][4][]</sup>. Why would that be? It's possible that we just don't know
what all the co-nutrients are yet, but it is more likely that there are
countless interactions between body and food that we haven't even scratched the
surface of explaining.

A second caveat I would include is that food is a "package deal". You have to
eat something. If you're eating a lot of processed foods (or a lot of animal
foods), the likelihood of you getting the nutrients you are talking about goes
down<sup>[5][]</sup>. Also, the likelihood of getting toxins that you don't want goes up.
For example, potatoes, which are generally fairly healthy when steamed or
boiled, create acrylamide when cooked at high heat a la french fries<sup>[6][]</sup>. So
even if we ignore my first caveat for a moment, it can be misleading to tell
people that how processed a food is doesn't matter, because that will most
likely lead them to get fewer of the nutrients that we agree are important and
more of the bad things.

Given these caveats, if you actually want to eat healthfully, it makes more
sense to step back and look at the whole diet, rather than individual
nutrients. This means you're basically stuck with epidemiological studies of
populations, and dietary intervention studies, neither of which is capable of
establishing a sure-fire causal relationship. However, the evidence from such
studies is pretty strong<sup>[6][]</sup> in favor of eating more foods of plant origin *and*
in less processed form<sup>[2][][3][][4][][7][][8][]</sup>.

[1]: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22475317
[2]: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15113149
[3]: http://nutritionfacts.org/video/treating-asthma-with-plants-vs-supplements/
[4]: http://nutritionfacts.org/video/broccoli-sprouts-vs-supplements/
[5]: http://nutritionfacts.org/video/what-are-the-healthiest-foods/
[6]: http://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/diet/acrylamide-fact-sheet
[7]: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25035143
[8]: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8172116

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