Let's Think About What We Know About Processed Foods

I apologize for my brief disappearance. After a crazy week, which included me taking a 4ft. x 1ft. mirror 2 inches into my knee (and the resulting ER trip, stitches, knee brace and crutches), I am finally back on blogger! Last time, I talked about using common sense to think about things we know to be true about produce. Today I want to do the same for processed foods.

Another reason for the delay is that this next topic is pretty involved, with the capacity to include a large variety of food and beverage products. To be exact, food processing is anything that is done to food before it is made available for us to eat. This could be anything from freezing a food, to prepackaged meals found on the shelf. Obviously that's a wide range of products, so it's not possible to give an opinion one way or the other on the group 'processed foods.' For the purpose of this article, I want to zero in on packaged foods with preservatives added to extend their shelf life.

Let's go back to what we know about the human body. Our body is an organism made up of several systems working in congruence to keep us healthy and alive. One of these systems is the digestive system. The definition of digest is to break down food in the stomach and intestines. In essence, digest is the exact opposite of preserve. So why would we want to put foods designed not to break down into our bodies which are made to break things down? That doesn't make any sense. The obvious result of this idiotic setup is that these kinds of foods hang out in our bodies (my body's hangout spots are my hips and thighs) while our bodies work overtime to try and break them down (possibly at the expense of other important functions?). This is where I can see the advantage to doing some kind of detox - to give the body time to catch up and digest all the preservatives I've loaded into it over time. If I just keep adding more and more preservatives, my body will always be behind. But if I do a detox, I'll give my body an opportunity to get back on track. This concept has been festering in my mind for a while now, but I am still researching. There are several different kinds of detox programs and I don't feel I know enough to start one in particular yet. So stay tuned, more on detoxes to come.

In the meanwhile, cutting out preservatives will be a big help. This is much easier said than done though. The list of different preservatives is quite long and can be as innocuous as salt or as dangerous as TBHQ. Very likely, any ingredients on the side of the package that you can't pronounce are preservatives. I found this fantastic list which has the vast majority of preservatives you're likely to find, and also indicates whether they're linked to hyperactivity, cancer or asthma. An easy guideline to go by though is the longer the shelf life, the worse it is. If something does not go bad, it should not be eaten.

This burger from McDonald's has been sitting out for 6 months:
It looks about the same as it did on day one. I've seen other pictures, though I can't find any at the moment, of fast food burgers that have been sitting out for more than a year or two with no change! Is that REALLY what you want to put in your body??? Do your body a favor and only give it foods and beverages that will make it easy to do its job. Your health and your waistline will thank you for it!!!