What’s so bad about processed foods?
“There’s no such thing
as junk food. There’s
junk and there’s food”
—Mark Hyman
Because of the way we choose to live our lives today, ‘processed’ foods have become very appealing, offering convenience as well as easy tastes. The introduction of food processing has without doubt had more of a detrimental effect on our health than any other factor in the last few hundred years.
Food refining has given rise to white flour, white sugar and high-fructose corn syrup, industrial seed oils and processed soy (soy milk, soy protein, soy flour etc). It has also brought us chemical additives and preservatives, the effect of which is either negative or not yet known. Most of us won’t get sick from eating a small amount of any of these, but in large quantities, our risk of developing a chronic disease rises significantly.
There is now a load of research showing the damage that processed foods are causing. For example, one study showed that emulsifiers used in many common packaged foods increase ‘leaky gut’ (Intestinal Permeability) and cause a chain reaction of inflammation and autoimmune disease. Another study showed that consuming fizzy drinks causes kidney damage and increases stroke risk – probably because of the use of phosphoric acid as an acidifying agent, which is what gives fizzy drinks their tangy flavour.
Nature has provided us with every food we need to stay healthy, active and full of energy. However, for our bodies to benefit we need to consume this food in its natural form. Processing food alters its chemical and biological structure, and the more it is processed, the more nutrient depleted and chemically altered it becomes. The problem is that we are not genetically wired to deal with these changed foods.
Apart from losing its nutritional value, processed food loses many of its other properties: taste, flavour and colour. To compensate, various chemicals are added: flavour enhancers, various E numbers, additives and preservatives. Many of these chemicals have been conclusively shown to contribute to hyperactivity, learning disabilities, psychiatric disorders and other health problems.
Natural foods don’t keep very well, so the industry has to change them to prolong the shelf life. The foods get subjected to extreme heat, pressure, enzymes, and a huge number of chemicals; fats get hydrogenated and proteins get denatured. After all that, it gets packaged nicely and presented to us as “food”, “food” made for commercial purposes where health considerations have never entered the equation.
The manufacturers are obliged to list all the ingredients on the label. But if an ingredient is used which is made from processed substances, the manufacturer doesn’t have to list what that ingredient is made from. So watch out if you are trying to avoid something in particular, such as gluten or sugar. Did you know that there are over sixty different names for the kinds of sugar found in processed foods.
If you look at the supermarket shelves you will see that the bulk of processed foods are carbohydrates (breakfast cereals, crisps, biscuits, breads, pastries, pastas, chocolate, sweets, sugar, frozen pre-cooked meals). Generally all carbohydrates in food get digested and absorbed as glucose. There are plenty of whole food carbohydrates in the form of fruit, vegetables and grains. When we eat them in their natural untampered form, the carbohydrates in them get absorbed slowly, producing a gradual increase in blood glucose, which our bodies are designed to handle. However, processed carbohydrates get absorbed very quickly producing an unnaturally rapid increase in blood glucose. Our bodies go to great lengths to keep our blood glucose within a certain range, because both high and low values are harmful. A rapid increase in blood glucose, called hyperglycaemia, puts the body into a state of shock, prompting it to pump out lots of insulin very quickly to deal with the excessive glucose.
About an hour later, and as a direct result of this overproduction of insulin, that person will have a very low level of glucose, called hypoglycaemia. Then what happens? That person will usually reach for a sweet drink or a biscuit or something that is going to speedily put glucose into their system - and the whole cycle of hyper-hypoglycaemia begins again. This up and down blood glucose rollercoaster is not good news for your health.
According to Dr Natasha Campbell, whose book Gut and Psychology Syndrome is a godsend for parents of children with autism, ADD or ADHD, “It has been proven that a lot of hyperactivity, inability to concentrate and learn, aggression and other behavioural abnormalities in school children are as a direct result of this glucose roller coaster. The hyperglycaemic phase produces a feeling of a ‘high’ with hyperactive and manic tendencies and self-stimulation in autistic children, whilst the hypoglycaemic phase makes them feel unwell, often with a headache, bad mood, tantrums, aggression and general fatigue with excessive sweating.”
Another important point about processed carbohydrates is their detrimental effect on the gut flora. You probably already know the crucial role played by the gut microbiome in our health. Processed carbohydrates feed the bad bacteria and fungi in the gut, promoting their growth and proliferation. Apart from that, they make a wonderful glue-like environment in the gut for various worms and parasites to take hold and develop! All these micro-creatures produce toxic substances that pass into the blood stream. The more processed carbohydrates you consume - with or without gluten - the more toxic you will become and the worse you will feel.
Lastly, by negatively altering the gut microbiome, processed carbohydrates play an important part in damaging the person's immune system, 80% of which resides in the gut. There is ample evidence showing that processed foods, particularly processed carbohydrates and sugar, directly weaken the functioning of macrophages, natural killer cells and other white blood cells and undermine your body’s ability to resist infections. For anyone who is in any way immune-compromised, daily sugary drinks, biscuits and crisps will significantly worsen their immune condition.
Rather depressingly it is estimated that a third of today’s children will get diabetes in their lifetime, and almost half of all adults will get cancer. We MUST start looking at the effect our modern diet is having on our health – and change it. Why not start by taking processed foods out of your diet?
Addendum
If you have the energy to read on, I received this recently from Mark Hyman. It is clearly written about the US market, but much of it is relevant to us over here in UK.
“The SAD (Standard American Diet) is over 60 percent ultra-processed food mostly from commodity crops—wheat, corn, and soy turned into hundreds of thousands of food-like products that bear little resemblance to our evolutionary diet. Those who eat the most of these addictive foods are the fattest and sickest among us. This nutrient-depleted diet not only makes us obese and sick but drives us to consume more and more “food-like substances,” looking for the missing nutrients.
Only 11 percent of our diet is nuts, seeds, fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and beans. Only 3 percent of our cropland is used to grow fruits, vegetables, and nuts. Destructive agricultural techniques have destroyed our soil—where plants get their nutrients. Your broccoli today has 50 percent less nutrients than it did 50 years ago.
Today our vegetables have been bred for yield, starch content, disease resistance, drought, shape, shelf stability, and hardiness for transport; not for flavor, nutrient density, or phytochemical richness. Ever taste a store-bought cardboard-like, perfect-looking tomato in the middle of winter, then try an organic, heirloom tomato picked from the vine in late August? You will know exactly what I mean.
There are about 6,000 cultivated edible plant species, yet nearly all crop production comes from just nine species (sugar cane, maize, rice, wheat, potatoes, soybeans, oil-palm fruit, sugar beet, and cassava). Most of those foods are the raw materials for the food industry to produce highly-processed, disease-promoting foods and are not eaten in their original form.
Food, it turns out, is the biggest driver of imbalances in your biological networks, and the biggest lever for rapid change, reversal of disease, and creation of health. While most doctors have not seen the power of food (mostly because they were not trained in how to use food as medicine), I have seen miracles over decades. And so have thousands of my Functional Medicine colleagues. Except they are not miracles.
They are the result of applying the latest advances in understanding how our bodies actually work, not how we were trained in medical school. Autoimmune diseases disappear, depression vanishes, migraines evaporate, psoriasis and eczema clear up, Alzheimer’s patients improve their memory, type 2 diabetes is gone in a few weeks. These are not anomalies or spontaneous remissions, but reproducible results based on applying food as medicine with the model of Functional Medicine.
How does food work to change disease and to create health?
There is no other activity you do every day that has more power to change our biology than what you eat. You literally ingest pounds of foreign material into your body daily. If all calories were the same, it would not matter what you eat. But they are not. Food carries information molecules, instructions, code that programs your biology with every bite for better or worse. Industrial food drives inflammation, oxidative stress, imbalances in hormone and brain chemistry, overloads your detoxification system, depletes your energy, damages your microbiome, and changes your gene expression to turn on disease-causing genes.
Real whole nutrient and phytonutrient-rich food does the opposite—turns off inflammation, increases antioxidant systems, balances hormones and brain chemistry, boosts detoxification, increases energy, optimizes your microbiome, and turns on disease-preventing, health-promoting genes.”