PROGRESS - THE NUTRITIONAL PRICE

For years, the modern world that we live in has been pushing us more and more toward the consumption of processed food, whether we are aware of the fact or not.
Processed food is easy and convenient.

But don’t be fooled into thinking that processed foods like ready-meals and microwave-meals (to name but two) are produced with your health as a priority: if they were then it’s likely that you wouldn’t be reading this and you would look and feel a lot healthier than you do now. Processed foods are produced for the benefit of the manufacturer and retailer in order to prolong shelf life and to cash in on the growing demand for easy meals for people that live in a busy world; not to mention the fact that they’re cheaper to produce.

A 400ml can of chickpeas in my local supermarket contains 2g of added salt which is there, not for the benefit of my health, but to extend the shelf-life of the product. 2g of salt represents one third of the recommended daily intake for an adult, and this is before you’ve even added salt to season while you cook or as a condiment at the table. You can see how easy it is to exceed recommended allowances without even realising it. Let’s compare this can of processed chick peas to a packet of dried chickpeas. Looking at the ingredient list on the dried product we will see that the only thing it contains is ‘chickpeas’. You’ll no doubt discover that in addition to the ingredients being natural and unadulterated, that the price is much less. For the sake of a little inconvenience of, for example, soaking the chick peas in water overnight and then boiling for a while, you will have a wholesome and perfectly nutritious product with no unwanted additives.

Let’s look at another example. Pasta is generally considered to be a healthy food, but the white pasta which most people buy is made of ‘durum’ wheat which has gone through a process which includes bleaching. This processing depletes the flour of 70% of its vitamins, 90% of its minerals and reduces the amount of dietary fibre. Yes, pasta is a healthy food, but only the un-processed, wholemeal variety.

Sugar, on the other hand is considered to be an unhealthy food. It certainly can be, but sugar contains the mineral chromium which is used by our bodies to regulate blood sugars. The refining of sugar removes this chromium and it is this that is responsible for hunger pangs between meals as your blood sugar level drops. The dropping of blood sugar levels is a signal that tells your body that it needs to eat and the normal ‘craving’ at this point is to something sweet; but if you only eat more refined sugar, then after the initial sugar-rush the blood-sugar levels fall away dramatically once more and so the cycle repeats. If you also find you are becoming aggressive, hyperactive or have trouble concentrating, low blood-sugar could be the reason. So the answer here is when you use sugar, it should be unrefined sugar which is readily available from supermarkets.

Even the apparently healthy option of fish hasn’t escaped the processing juggernaut. Wild salmon’s flesh is pink due to the colour of its natural food (it’s the same mechanism that makes flamingos pink.) Farmed salmon don’t have access to their natural diet which results in white flesh. The salmon farmers realise that nobody wants to eat white salmon and so the farmed fish are fed processed pellets containing a pink dye to produce the desired colour. Feeding dye to farmed salmon is much cheaper than providing their natural diet and is one of the reasons that farmed salmon is much cheaper than the wild variety.

Hydrogenated vegetable oil is cheap to produce and is used extensively throughout the food industry. It is the result of a process which hardens liquid vegetable oil by the addition of extra hydrogen atoms and is used to produce items such as margarine, potato chips/ crisps, chocolate, sweets/ candy, ice cream, biscuits/ cookies and pastries, to name the more commonly consumed products.

When you have eaten them and the process of digestion begins, these hydrogenated fats become ‘trans fatty acids’ which sabotage your metabolism and break down the good fats, the essential fatty acids (EFAs) that the body needs to keep us healthy. As a result they cause you to gain weight because they increase the amount of bad cholesterol and reduce the beneficial cholesterol.

We have seen how the processing of food can remove many of the beneficial components such as fibre and minerals and how other things such as salt can be added to an undesirable degree. In addition to this there are over 3,000 other additives used in the food processing industry in the form of chemicals, colouring agents, sweeteners, artificial flavourings, dyes, nitrates, nitrites, preservatives, acids, bleaching agents and emulsifiers. No wonder reading the ingredients labels can be so confusing! Nature has given us natural, unprocessed foodstuffs to enable us to keep healthy and we are ignoring them in preference to faster, more convenient but ultimately unhealthy substitutes.

A very apt quote comes to mind from the Roman poet ‘Juvenal’; he said, “Never did nature say one thing and wisdom another”. In other words, in this case, natural foods are always better than processed ones.