The Dangers of Eating Processed Food

“Americans are a people so obsessed with nutrition yet whose dietary health is so poor,” says Michael Pollan, author of the bestselling book The Omnivore’s Dilemma. He believes that when it comes to thinking about food, America is obsessed with “nutritionism,” which views food as just a sum of its nutritional components. 

“Whatever tentative scientific information is developed, it gets very quickly distorted by the food marketers and manufacturers,” Pollan explains. This is why Americans prefer processed foods. “A banana or potato cannot significantly change its structure. But any processed food can be changed overnight to correspond with food fads.”

Processed food comprises 90 percent of the annual American food purchases, as marketing backed by billions of dollars is constantly working to convince consumers that fast foods and junk foods are the way to go. This reliance on processed food as the main source of nutrition has caused epidemic proportions of diabetes, diet-related cancers, heart disease and obesity.

Delicious Taste, Deadly Diet

Sure, processed foods taste good but are actually “dead foods” and do not provide natural nutrition. These foods are chemically altered to make them more appealing to your taste buds and use unhealthy artificial flavors and additives like high fructose corn syrup, a common sweetener and the single greatest source of calories in the United States.

High fructose corn syrup by itself, is enough to seriously compromise your health. But it’s just one of the dangerous ingredients in processed foods. 

On the other hand, refined sugar, another common sweetener in processed foods, has been found to be more addictive than cocaine!

If you regularly consume a lot of processed foods – particularly sugar-rich ones – you are subjecting the sweet receptors on your tongue to abnormally high levels of stimulation, resulting in an overload of reward signals in your brain, which can override your normal self-control mechanisms and cause addiction.

This is the reason why raw and whole foods seem to taste bland – because processed foods are destroying your taste buds. Your body has been conditioned to think that chemically altered foods should be the primary fuel, when the opposite is true.

Throw in aspartame and other artificial sweeteners, MSG, salt, trans fats and a host of other questionable ingredients and you’ve practically scheduled a visit to your doctor in the not so distant future.

What Should You Eat Then?

Because processed foods are addicting, many people would probably feel deprived if they can’t eat their favorite junk food.  But in reality, the sooner you ditch processed foods and start eating right, the sooner you’ll be in a better mood, boost your energy levels, manage your weight better, and experience improved health in general.

Dr. Joseph Mercola’s no-grain diet will help you conquer your addiction to processed foods by severely limiting your consumption of grains and sugars. This grain-free diet can be likened to a protein diet with a strong emphasis on vegetables, which will provide you with complex carbohydrates that will sustain you with energy throughout the day.

Eating raw and in-season organic, locally-grown vegetables will deliver optimal nutrition to your body because vital elements such as biophotons, enzymes, hormones, oxygen, phytonutrients, minerals and vitamins remain largely intact. Dr. Mercola recommends that you should eat at least one-third of your food consumption raw.

It’s a big misconception that eating healthy means eating bland and unappealing food. You’d be surprised to know that there are many delicious grain-free meals and grain-free recipes that you will surely enjoy.

You can eat great meals and snacks that don’t include processed foods. It would take some getting used to but once it becomes a healthy habit, you will surely notice a marked improvement in your health.

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