Is there any regulated/"official" definition to the word "processed" in this context? I see the word so much in the context of food in general and I've never known exactly what it means.
Buy foods in bulk, not boxed or in plastic. Make food from scratch from whole grains, veggies, peppers, spices. Avoid all of the seed oils.
My Dad is 101 and doing OK, and he has always preferred large salads, small amounts of lean meat. I feel better whenever I hit the Fuhrman Diet for six months.
For frying, I usually use a mixture of olive oil and butter. The oil slows down the process of the butter burning. It's certainly not as good as ghee, but ghee tends to make stuff greasy.
If you put butter into a pan that is too hot and it starts burning, it can be useful to cool things down by adding some oil. But the milk solids will always burn at a given temperature. A mixture of olive oil and butter won't let you cook at a higher temperature than just butter.
I don’t know if peanut oil is considered a seed oil or not, but it has one of the highest smoke points. (I’m aware peanuts aren’t seeds, but not everyone is.)
Coconut oil varies a lot in its smoke point; unrefined its similar to butter but refined can get up past 400 F / 204 C(similar to canola oil).
I do like cooking with it despite the low heat limitation because it's good for things you can cook at lower temps like eggs and if you get good high quality oil then it will be near tasteless. Which means you can actually taste the egg instead of whatever oil / lard you fried them with.
So the stock photo for "processed food" in MSM reports seems to be a picture of a hamburger. As far as I'm aware, the only processed things in a hamburger are the bun and the cheese. Oh - maybe the secret sauce; but I tell them to hold the cheese and sauce.
For me, processed meat means rubbery hotdog sausages; reconstituted chicken meat; doner kebab; TV dinners; fishcakes, and so on. [Edit: ham and bacon, of course, but only a crazy person eats a quarter-pound of bacon.] I imagine some of those are fine, but if you can't see the unprocessed ingredient, then the 'Lemon Market' rule says it's probably not what it's supposed to be.
> Processed meat refers to meat that has been preserved by smoking, curing, salting or adding preservatives. This includes sausages, bacon, ham, salami and pâtés.
> If you currently eat more than 90g (cooked weight) of red or processed meat a day, the Department of Health and Social Care advises that you cut down to 70g.
Scanning the article, I do not see any definition, except that at one place "fresh" is also mentioned.
I assume that "unprocessed" meat refers to meat that is cooked at home, as opposed to buying sausages, ham or any other industrial meat products, which may contain various additives or impurities from techniques like smoking.
This new study still shows an increased probability of cancer when consuming more than 200 g of unprocessed red meat per day, which is indeed more than should normally be eaten.
I have always been skeptical about these claims about the effects of eating meat, because they do not differentiate between the different methods of cooking the meat. I doubt that eating meat that was fried in oil has the same health effects as eating meat that was baked in an oven.
Other than the pedantic both cured and fermented count as chemically preserved in a broad sense, I think the general modern understanding of "processed foods" means that "ultra-processed foods" per the webmd definition https://www.webmd.com/diet/what-are-processed-foods#:~:text=....
e.g. foods that are doped with additives that don't necessarily occur in the food's base state, including dyes, preservatives, added flavors generated in lab environments, etc.
To be fair I'm not advocating either way, since I'm sure I ate some form of ultra-processed food this morning just by having grocery store brand jelly on my toast, but I think the argument is that by mixing these into the diet frequently there are unknown long-term side effects on the human body by eating these in excess.
Yes. It went through process of cooking, which causes that proteins in the meat will fall apart due to heat - denaturation. So it is processed by definition.
Yep. Removing the skin is a process, and the carrot underneath is then exposed to oxidation.
No clue if there is a health effect due to it. Just pointing out what processing means. Though usually processing is totally destroying the physical structure of something and applying heat/freezing/chemical exposure for preservation or transformation.
Maybe "processed foods" is a completely useless term.
I'm pretty sure it's a backformation from "heavily processed foods," which is a useful way to compare foods that have been picked and washed to foods that have been picked and washed and etc, and etc, and etc. Being meaningful makes is less useful for making grand purity pronouncements, though.
All food is processed, all of it is impure, it will make you dirty on the inside, and make you sick. The food that won't make you sick is the food that humans haven't sinned on between God's hand and your mouth.
Slippery, sloped, and in the case of carrots, roasted with olive oil and some kind of herb (dill, rosemary, thyme, or basil. The "or" is important here), perhaps some onion and garlic. Or on top of salad with balsamic vinaigrette.
The other comment on gradients is a good thought too.
Unless you're paying EU100 per litre, your "balsamic vinaigrette" isn't made with proper balsamic vinegar. It's made from regular vinegar mixed with colouring agents, flavouring agents and preservatives.
Proper balsamic vinegar is made using a solera system, and takes a number of years. I doubt any restaurant chef would use real balsamic vinegar to make a "balsamic vinaigrette"; the real thing is for sipping.
I'm not really being fair. It's just that the standards are terribly confusing. There are two main standards; one is ultra-strict, and the other is so relaxed as to be meaningless.
Well, that's how I see it. I didn't mean that the lower-grade stuff is 'knock-off'; I've never so much as seen a bottle of the 'proper' stuff, except in photos. But I'm sure I wouldn't take snifters of normal deli balsamic vinegar.
I don't generally want to eat food that's already been chewed. Arguably things like applesauce have been industrially chewed though.
When you eat food, your body processes it, exposing it to all sorts of nasty physical and chemical processes.
The objection to 'processed foods' is mostly about when the processing significantly changes the content of the food, whether that's from significant additives, or strucural changes like breaking down fiber. If you're ok with eating meat, nobody much cares about processing that removes parts that people don't eat and don't want to see, but if anything much is added, that's flagged (dye, water, preservatives, etc)
We semantically agree. There is a starting point to "processing" and the commentator's question for whether something applied falls into scope. Whether the connotation is agreeable to denotation is sort of a separate discussion, IMO. Separation of degree, not kind.
Yes. Everything that isn't raw is processed. If processed isn't what you mean by "processed," maybe you should say what you mean, e.g., smoking, adding sulfites, nitrates, sodium, and/or sugar.
I don't need to provide a definition for what is a nebulous term like "processed" in order to argue that the one provided in the original comment is both ridiculous and not congruent with what most other people would consider processed.
You only do if you want to make that argument successfully.
>> Everything that isn't raw is processed.
> Likewise, this is a circular definition.
No, it is not. A circular definition is that everything that is processed is processed, the one you're carefully avoiding in favor of argument by calling something ridiculous.
Except that it was clear that I meant "processed" in the way that it is generally used in the context of "processed food" and not in the sense of "having had something done to it".
I'm not in it for the rightness and wrongness and virtue and exercises of justice to the carrots, I'm in it for your request as to whether peeling a carrot counts as processing, which it does, as sometimes the most banal of examples illustrate a tapestry of lived complexity.
No, that's a meaningful definition. When food is transformed through a process, it becomes processed.
The alternative definition seems to be to throw the word around randomly, and to vaguely mention something like a tv dinner from the 50s as a counterexample.
It's annoying. I wish when people were talking about "processed meats" they'd talk about which meats and which processes. They're not fungible. Once you've learned one process, you haven't learned them all. Whether I'm using sodium chloride or sodium citrate makes a difference if we're doing science.
I don't think that's reasonable because there are certain categories of food where cooking makes them healthier/edible. I'm not sure that eating raw eggs is statistically healthier than boiled ones and would be surprised by such a study concluding as such. I would be very concerned about people insisting on eating raw beans? Lentils? Potatoes?
