“Never take sweets from a stranger.”
Basic advice we get while growing up. Yet, one that no one follows.
Think of how your day starts. Coffee and a croissant, or a muffin? Or maybe you are the healthy type who has yoghurt and granola breakfast?
What these foods have in common is their unknown origin. Unfamiliar companies with undefined values are preparing them. Their packages loudly promise ‘natural’, while the ingredient lists consist of hard to pronounce terms. Quite a contradiction! This brings me to the question of what are these companies’ agendas: your health or their profit?
We live in busy times, where processed food is easy, convenient, and cheap. Our bodies are, however, the ones to pay a high price for what on the face of it, looks like a good deal.
What we eat is our fuel. And our bodies, minds, and moods are all influenced by the fuel we get. To be productive and healthy requires high quality fuel of known origin. We need nutrients, only whole food diet can provide us with. So follow your mother’s advice and know where your food comes from.
Whole food diet is the healthiest
Whole foods are neither picture friendly, nor they have identical shapes and sizes. They don’t come in eye-appealing packages, and no one programmed them to appear all the same. And yet, their incorporation in our diet is what all nutrition experts claim to be the most healthful choice.
As Cambridge dictionary defines whole food as “food that has not had any of its natural features taken away or any artificial substances added”.1 In other words foods that stay as close to their natural state as possible. They also don’t have any added sugars, flavorings, hydrogenated oils, colorings or preservatives.
The naked truth- let the stripping begin
All the foods we consume today are less nutritious than they used to be few decades ago. It all starts with the soil depletion, caused by extensive modern agricultural techniques. Eroded soil gives us less nutritious crops. The crops provide us with less nutrient dense food. They are also food source for the animals, which in turn give us less nutritious animal products. And this is only the beginning of the food stripping process. Every step on the way to your plate takes more nutrients away. The only reason why food manufacturers are depriving food from its nutrients is profit. And I will explain why by giving simple example.
What we all know
Let’s examine the production process of one of the world’s most consumed processed food- refined flour. The wheat kernel goes thorough few steps cleaning process. Cleaning leaves all impurities away and wheat is ready for milling. The milling process is separating the bran and germ from the endosperm. The endosperm goes through further grinning until all particles are uniform in size. The flour is now ready and it goes through final steps of bleaching and enrichment. This is the mechanical explanation of flour production. But I want to highlight few important details people from the industry don’t want us to know.
What we SHOULD know
Most of wheat nutrients are in the bran and germ. Bran contains the largest amount of fiber, vitamin B, and trace minerals. Germ is reach in unsaturated fats, trace minerals, B vitamins, phytochemicals, and antioxidants. The flour is however left with the endosperm only, which is essentially- an empty starch. In other words long chains of sugar with lots of energy and insignificant nutritional value. Around 80% of the nutrients are lost during flour production process. “So why all this deprivation of nutrients”, you may ask.
Fat content is what makes germ nourishing, but also the reason behind germ removal. It limits flour shelf-life. Removing the bran leaves the flour with its white color and makes the texture of the dough fluffier. Refine flour also cooks quicker than the whole one.
Flour needs to mature and oxidize to yield high quality baked products. Nowadays time means money, and it this case money lost. So modern flour producers substitute the time consuming maturing process with time-efficient one- bleaching. Flour is exposed to chlorine gas or benzoyl peroxide. This makes it whiter, and also increases baking quality. Enrichment of the flour follows. It’s an attempt to bring back some of the nutrients lost, and also makes the product more appealing to the consumer.
Disguised as Healthy brings sells up
Similar techniques are applied to the production of all processed foods. These artificial additives are bad for our bodies, but our taste buds love them! Manufacturers know this and they will not compromise on a bad ingredient, if this is going to bring the sales up! Processed food is a poison that comes in a nice package. Everything is crafted so we can admire it on the shelf, enjoy grabbing it from there, and start exercising our salivary glands before we even taste it. It all wouldn’t sound as a scary movie plot, if it wasn’t for its negative effect on our bodies, minds, and moods.
I hope this example answered your question of why is processed food deprived from nutrients. The reason behind adding artificial substances is also clear. Some of them improve the texture and the taste of the final product. While others are added in an attempt to substitute for the nutrients lost. Have in mind, however, that artificially added substitutes would never provide the same result as whole food. This is because they may be short of phytochemicals. Or may not contain them in the right combinations.2
Sources:
1. https://dictionary.cambridge.org
2. J.Thompson, M. Manors, L. Vaughan, “The Science of Nutrition”, Second Edition, 2011
