It is unstoppable controversy about which is better: processed and “fresh” foods. Because, nowadays, many housewives have less time to cook for their family due to lack of time, meanwhile, refined and processed foods fill up supermarket shelves, giving you, the consumer, a much wider choice of products. But, no matter what, you still should consider to choose processed or fresh foods, which is better?
The popular idea is: that packaged food can make it hard to meet your body’s diet and health, but not all processed foods are of equal quality, so the best of them can deliver lots of nutrition without doing you any harm.
“Food processing has existed for any very long period,” says Connie Weaver, head of the Department of Meals and Diet at Purdue College. Weaver says she was raised on the village “just where a childhood years activity was picking food and processing it in the kitchen place. You gather food all at one time, yet, you can’t have it all at one time,” she notes, adding much from the pick needed to be preserved thus her family could eat year-round.
“It isn’t a good recommendation to consider people might have ‘fresh’ and ‘local’ meals meet almost all their nutrient needs,” states Weaver, who spoke about the need for processed meals Sunday in the annual Food and Diet Conference and Expo from the Ada in North Park. Regardless, she says, it’s type of a moot point: Issues of seasonality and transportation allow it to be impossible for people to gain access to fresh and native meals regularly. Enjoy it or otherwise, she states, “we rely on lots of processed meals.”
Many people might think about processed food as something which comes covered with plastic from the factory across the nation. But Cooking Light magazine editor Scott Mowbray highlights that whatever you do with meals are “processing.” Therefore the question isn’t whether the food continues to be cooked, baked, fermented, canned, frozen, mashed or ground but whether it has been processed in a way that “what’s left within the package is healthy” and maintains its key nutrition.
In the October problem, Cooking Light offers its second annual roundup of the greatest packed and processed meals offered at supermarkets countrywide. The list’s 24 groups include products you may expect – gluten-free pasta created using brown grain flour – plus some you will possibly not, for example ranch dressing, frozen burritos and poker chips.
Cooking Light includes shredded wheat cereal products, both frosted and unfrosted, among its options. Indeed, Weaver notes that for most people, ready-to-eat cereal products, which she describes as “very processed,” really are a key supply of nutrition, a few of which are put into the merchandise through fortification.
So staying away from all processed meals is “ridiculous,” in Weaver’s estimation. “You have to be somewhat selective.”
In choosing the best good examples of every packed food, Cooking Light staff people “go through every label searching for ingredients” that signal a processed food is probably not the best option. Individuals include excess sodium, artificial colors, trans fats, sugar substitutes and “too many stabilizers, which portend an item it is not likely to taste of the same quality,” Mowbray states. Common stabilizers include xanthan gum, guar gum and gum arabic.
Weaver indicates checking diet labels “for disproportionate levels of body fat, salt and sugar.” That will help you discern the dietary distinction between, say, a can of corn versus. a bag of corn chips. Both of them are types of processed corn, however the latter typically has more salt and body fat than its dietary value warrants, she states.
- From: Jennifer LaRue Huget