What are the main reasons processed food is bad?

[MarkKol]

So a food goes through a process like cutting, packaging, additives for flavor/smell/texture/color. It’s then considered a processed food because It’s natural state has been altered, so what? What makes it so bad that most medical professionals speak against it?

By that logic, I could turn my chickpeas & beans at home into homemade legume tofu, does that mean I just turned my healthy beans into an unhealthy processed food simply by boiling it and frying it in some olive oil? What changed?

Edited October 17, 2023 by MarkKol

[Schizophonia]

This makes them less nutritious, but there are some foods you definitely don't want to eat unprocessed (raw legumes).

As long as your diet isn't based on twinkies it should be ok.

[Alexop]

I think the aditives and chemicals added for preserving and flavouring, the palm oil, sugar....

[Jason Actualization]

Americans consume 4-5 tablespoons worth of highly oxidizable, industrial seed oils due to their processed food consumption, per day. It would be practically impossible to consume the amount of linoleic acid contained therein by consuming whole, minimally processed food. This linoleic acid incorporates into the cell membranes throughout our body and facilitates oxidative stress, giving rise to cardiovascular disease and dementia not the least of which.

[Princess Arabia]

The body is designed for food not processed junk. You don't give your car orange juice you give it gas. That's what it was designed for. Processing certain foods alters the natural structure of the food and the body doesn't know what to do with it. If you google foods and their body parts you'll see tons of images of foods that resembles body parts. E.g ginger/stomach, sweet potato/pancreas, avocado/womb, tomato/heart, walnut/brain and more. 

The body is a very sophisticated machine and needs the proper environment to function properly. Not every food in it's natural state, tho, is suitable for all body types and blood type does play a factor in this, so these are just generalized statements.

[Applegarden8]

From Ayurveda tradition it's bad, it's had lost all it's energetic value and eating it will make you tired, frustrated and bored more easily.

If you cook, refine or boil the food it's enzymes are denatured but these enzymes and some thermoliable compounds are helping to digest that food instead of your body synthesizing large amount of enzymes and that process makes you sleepy. There is more to it ofc.

Also it's usually too dry and you are essentially not adding water and taking out water from the body in the parts where it needs it and would have been replenished if you ate a lot of fruits and vegetables that are high in water content.

Additives we have really no clue about until it will show the negative effects and questionable production quality and decisions is also something that is concerning.

Edited October 21, 2023 by Applegarden8

[Salvijus]

The basic logic is that if you cook food and leave it. By the end of the day or next day it's no longer good to eat. But if you process it with chemicals it can last for years. So that's the amount of bs is being put into it. It's basically fake food. Probably without all those sweeteners and flavor enhancing chemicals the food would taste like paper. 

Edited October 21, 2023 by Salvijus

[undeather]

On 17.10.2023 at 8:33 PM, MarkKol said:

So a food goes through a process like cutting, packaging, additives for flavor/smell/texture/color. It’s then considered a processed food because It’s natural state has been altered, so what? What makes it so bad that most medical professionals speak against it?

By that logic, I could turn my chickpeas & beans at home into homemade legume tofu, does that mean I just turned my healthy beans into an unhealthy processed food simply by boiling it and frying it in some olive oil? What changed?

You have to delineate between processed food and "processed food". 
There is no clear cut definition outside of "altered in some way during preparation", which is a rather vague description. That would involve anything from making a homemade legume tofu to adding a shitton of additives, salt & preservatives to an already unhealthy product. 

When we colloquially talk about processed foods, then we mean the kind of chemically fortified, high energy density, low nutritional value, high saturated-fat, high salt, simple carbohydrate based Frankenstein creations that are so ubiquitous in our current dieatry environment. The products that are engineered to be hyper-palatable and therefore come with a shitload of ingredients that will increase our chance of death over the long run. 

 

[LSD-Rumi]

• Use of nitrates 
• High fat content and low quality meat
• Cooked at high temperatures which causes the generation of carcinogens 

[toasty7718]

The developed world has borne witness to diseases whose primary cause is that of over-consumption.
 

While the causes of disease are multifactorial in nature, with each individual case involving thousands of complex mechanisms interacting with each other, the vast majority of health experts have determined that auto-immue diseases like cardiovascular disease and cancer show similar causal pathways of deterioration, like with apoB for CVD.

The ratio between macronutrients and micronutrients has changed with the advent of industrial processing mechanisms, and human genetics are ill-equipped to handle the modern nutrient surplus.
 

Modern processing mechanisms have sacrificed essential micronutrients, like fiber, vitamins, enzymes, minerals, for more palatable, macronutrient options like basic-carbohydrates and saturated fats with a higher caloric density. 
 

To do so, you must find the derivative of a highly-hybridized part of a plant or animal product and extract the parts that evolution has developed reward-circuitry pathways for.
 

All forms of ultra-processed foods are elaborate combinations of fat, sugar, and salt. There wasn’t an abundance of fat, sugar, or salt in an evolutionary environment. The infrequency in which our ancestors had ready access to a food high in fat, sugar or salt, produced a strong dopaminergic and opioid-like response as incentive to find more of it.

 

In addition to nourishment, dopaminergic responses to certain micronutrients doubled as a survival-necessity in times of scarce famine.
 

TLDR; Nutrient surplus is genetically maladaptive in the wake of ready access to ultra-processed food in the twenty-first century. 

[Leo Gura]

Lowest quality ingredients humanly possible, and all the matter is long dead, or wasn't ever alive in the first place.

Whole foods all contain living cells and matter. Processed foods don't.

Edited October 21, 2023 by Leo Gura

[Starlight321]

@Leo Gura what is the reason for how long it is dead matters?  If it's frozen for example?

[Girzo]

@Starlight321 Frozen is okay. Frozen veggies is a very different thing than a meat-soy burger patty from a supermarket.

[Rigel]

What about dried stuff? I eat tons of dried mushrooms, rice, beans & oats. I seem to be doing fine. Is there even living cells in those? Doesn’t seem like it.