Most of the food consumed in this country passes through a factory or processing plant before ever reaching our tables, and for simple reasons: food needs to be safe, transportable and to stay sellable in the supermarket. Minnesotans want to eat canned peaches in January and working parents want to buy a loaf of bread at the store instead of spending all day baking it themselves. The result is that less and less can be called "unprocessed" anymore. A growing number of voices question whether extreme processing is just making modern food safe and convenient or if it may actually be creating a long-term threat to our society's nutritional health.
"During processing, a lot of beneficial nutrients like fiber, minerals and antioxidants are lost—especially in highly processed, refined-grain products," says Frank Hu, an epidemiologist at Harvard School of Public Health who tracks the effects of food on diseases in the American population. "Manufacturers also add a lot of sugar and trans fats back in to enhance the taste," he says. "So you get rid of the good stuff and add a lot of bad stuff and that's the reason those kinds of foods are really detrimental."
The $450 billion food industry packs superstores full of 40,000 different food items in cans, boxes, pouches and packages. "This food has become so much a part of the culture that we don't even realize it," says Loren Cordain, professor of health and exercise science at Colorado State University. "If you're an average American and you're not really too health conscious, you eat these foods every single day, and you've eaten them every single day of your life."
As food journeys from farm to table, most of it, shares one important side trip: a high-heat experience. Besides the obvious cooking, heat is necessary to kill micro-organisms, reduce oxidative changes that cause rancidity and prevent other chemical reactions that may produce off-flavors. Breads have been baked in industrial ovens. Milk and juices are pasteurized in huge stainless-steel vats. Pasta is dried in vast machines that circulate hot air
Along with changing flavor and color, thermal processing takes a toll on nutrients, says food scientist Steven Schwartz at Ohio State University. His laboratory frequently scrutinizes cooked vegetables to determine just what has been lost or gained during processing. In canned peas vs. fresh peas, for example, the nutrient content has faded as much as the color. Vitamins, especially water-soluble vitamins like C and the B vitamins, are heat-sensitive and some leach into cooking water in the factory, which is why steaming or microwaving, not boiling, vegetables is the best cooking method at home. Peas from a can have 72% less vitamin C, 59% less niacin, 56% less B6 and 17% less potassium than the same amount of raw peas. The food industry tries to find the best balance between safety and nutrition, but the longer and hotter the cooking, the more a food will be altered. Frozen vegetables, plunged briefly into boiling water and then cooled, have a much better track record for keeping their nutrients. In fact, they can exceed the nutrition of "fresh" vegetables, depending upon how long produce has been traveling and waiting in the grocery bin.
Taste is also lost during refinement & heating. Manufacturers often try to add it back in the form of salt, also an aid in preservation, but the result is devastating to our health: most Americans get 75% of their total salt from processed foods. Meanwhile processing robs fruits and vegetables of potassium, a mineral that helps to keep sodium's damage at bay.
"Potassium helps to mitigate the adverse effects of salt on blood pressure," says Lawrence Appel, a Johns Hopkins researcher who studies the effects of diet on blood pressure. "Processing tends to remove potassium and add sodium—a bad combination." In fact, while 95% of men and 75% of women regularly exceed the recommended salt intake, most adults consume less than half the recommended potassium, one reason that 50 million Americans suffer from hypertension.
It all started back in the 1960s when the public began to suspect that saturated fat threatens the heart. Manufacturers responded by replacing animal fats in their products with partially hydrogenated vegetable oils, which were low in saturated fat, extended shelf life, tasted good & provided great texture to processed foods. But these oils contained trans fats, the result of heavy processing to make them more shelf-stable, and trans fats have now been conclusively linked to heart disease & premature death. Harvard's Frank Hu thinks trans fats may be the worst part of eating processed foods.
"One of the most important things to do is to get rid of trans fats," says Hu. "We found a very clear association between trans fats and diabetes & heart disease." By increasing bad (LDL) cholesterol, reducing good (HDL) cholesterol & causing systemic inflammation, trans fats contribute to heart disease. While many food processors are reforming their products in anticipation of the mandatory labeling rule on trans fats in the U.S. in 2006, others continue to add trans fats liberally to their foods. Hu's colleagues at Harvard estimate that replacing partially hydrogenated oils in the U.S. diet with non- hydrogenated vegetable oils would prevent at least 30,000—perhaps up to 100,000—premature coronary deaths each year.
Loren Cordain at Colorado State recently published data that show just how much processed foods dominate our diet today. He found that 57% of most Americans' calories come from only 3 foods: refined grains, vegetable oils and added sugar.
"This mixture is ubiquitous in the Western diet. You can call it a slice of bread, you can call it a doughnut, you can call it a pizza, you can call it a cracker, you can call it a pretzel, you can call it whatever you want, but it's basically a mixture of those same three ubiquitous foods—vegetable oil, refined flour and sugar, with a little bit of flavoring," says Cordain. "Sugars are devoid of any micronutrients, refined oils are also devoid of any nutrients except for vitamins E and K. And then when you tack that onto white flour, you've basically got a diet that can easily produce nutritional shortfalls."
He lists concerns for nutrient after nutrient—73% of Americans didn't meet requirements at last count for zinc, 65% weren't getting enough calcium, 56% were short on vitamin A, 54% didn't consume enough B6, 39% lacked sufficient iron, & the list goes on. What is the future for these people? "They will become a statistic," says Cordain. "If they continue eating those kind of foods throughout their lives, they will become a statistic, if they aren't already."
.No health expert will tell you that eating a heavily processed food on occasion will kill you, but they do agree that relying on them for most of your calories & nutrients is a bad idea. A degree of processing can be found in almost any food at the supermarket. Simply choose among them wisely, suggests Minnesota's Slavin.
Frozen fruits & vegetables should have only 1 or 2 ingredients on their label; make sure the first ingredient begins with "whole" in any bread or grain-related food. When choosing cans, meals-in-a-box or frozen dinners, choose low-salt varieties.
Avoid foods with "partially hydrogenated oil" on the ingredient list & foods that have several layers of processing: refining, drying, freezing, preserving, additives & salt. Instead choose foods that limit processing and contain a minimum number of ingredients, all of which you recognize. Tomato paste, for example, needs only tomatoes, not "tomatoes, high-fructose corn syrup, partially hydrogenated vegetable oil, salt, natural flavor."
To prevent widespread nutrient deficiencies caused by a national diet dominated by refined goods, the FDA requires that many, but not all of the nutrients removed during refinement be added back, a process called "enrichment." Iron, thiamine (B1), riboflavin (B2) and niacin (B3), all lost in the making of refined flour, are replaced with synthetic versions at the end of the manufacturing process. Other lost nutrients that we're aware of, such as magnesium, zinc, vitamin E and selenium, are not replaced. "Fortification," on the other hand, occurs when nutrients not naturally found in a particular food are added to that food. Some fortification, such as the addition of folic acid to cereals and other grain products, or vitamins A and D to milk, is mandatory because a nutrient shortfall has been identified as a public-health problem. Other fortifications, such as the addition of calcium to orange juice, iodine to salt, or multiple vitamins and minerals to breakfast cereals, are optional. — Sylvia M. Geiger, M.S., R.D.
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