Processed Food Explained
How Does Processed Food Affect Your Health?
If you’re serious about your fitness goals, then a good diet can enable you to reach those goals faster. But, at the same time, the fastest way to derail your success is by following an irregular eating routine. This applies when you don’t eat on time and when you don’t eat the right thing on time.
In the modern age of convenience, it’s simple to walk into a store and walk out with a packet of processed food. And when it comes to the kind of food that is bad for you, highly processed foods pretty much top the list.
What Are Processed Foods?
Processed foods are any foods that have been modified in any way before being sold. This includes everything from bagged or frozen vegetables, to ready to cook hot dogs.
Processed foods themselves aren’t the problem. In fact, everyday foods are often lightly processed. These include bread, cereals, bagged vegetables, and more. However, consuming these don’t probably affect your health or fitness, and they are often promoted as healthy foods to add to the diet.
Highly processed foods are significantly different and often contain more salt, sugar and fats than their lightly processed counterparts. Despite this, highly processed foods like chips, sodas, and more, continue to be regularly consumed. Other highly processed foods include frozen pizza, frozen fries, and anything else that’s ready to eat and belongs in the freezer.
How Do Highly Processed Foods Affect Your Health?
A certain amount of low processed foods is safe for consumption, and many people enjoy these days. On the other hand, highly processed foods offer no nutritional value and can add to existing or future health problems.
This is how highly processed foods can negatively affect your health:
- Fats: Fats are added to processed foods to extend the shelf life. While a certain amount of fat is good for the body, an overabundance of fat can cause health problems as well.
- Added Sugar: Sugar is sometimes added under a different name as well. It can be found under several different names, such as molasses, corn syrup, honey, molasses, and more.
- Salt: Salt is often added to foods to extend the shelf life of the food product. However, the body only needs a certain amount of sodium daily. Any more, and you could feel sick.
The reason why highly processed foods are often full of sugar, salt, fat and other additives help to extend the shelf life of the product. Sometimes, the taste and texture of a product can be improved with these additives.
Conclusion
Eating healthy and balanced meals is necessary if you want to be fit and get into your ideal shape. Unfortunately, obesity, type 2 diabetes, Crohn’s disease, and more are associated with bad diets and highly processed foods.
Instead, eat fresh fruits and vegetables. If you feel like eating processed foods, then stick to lightly processed items. Lean protein, eggs, legumes and beans are other great sources of protein.
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