Silent Killers in Your Food: The Dangers of Processed Foods

We've all heard about processed foods and how they're unmistakably bad for our health. But what most citizen are not aware of is that there are practically hundreds if not thousands of assorted types of processed foods that are incommunicable under obscure names. When they hear the term "processed foods" what immediately comes to mind for most citizen is fries and burger at a fast food joint. Yes, they're partly right but if they'd just have a look at their cabinet at home they'd scrutinize that at least 80 to 90 percent of what they have there can be thought about processed food.

How to recognize Processed Foods

The Food Pyramid

How can we tell if whether it's processed food? Generally, if the food is canned, bagged, jarred, boxed then it's processed.

There are some food processing methods and they include:

- Canning,
- Dehydration,
- Refrigeration,
- Freezing, and
- Aseptic processing.

Processed foods have been chemically altered foods so they can have longer shelf life. What it all comes down to is that processed foods are more favorable to use. The thing is your cake mix, pancake mix and all other mixes where all you need to do is add water and get instant food are unmistakably doing harm to your body.

The problem is most Americans don't even know that practically 90 percent of their food purchases are on processed foods.

Trans Fat Kills

Trans fats are vegetable oils that have been chemically modified. To produce them they have to go through a chemical process called hydrogenation. This transforms liquid oil into solid fat.

Trans fats are used in ready meals, cookies and sweets. In fact, they're found in practically all types of processed foods. The calculate why food manufacturers use trans fats is that they make food manufacturing cheap, which translates to huge profits for these clubs and high-priced hospital bills for consumers. Trans fats also add bulk and give products a long shelf life. However, they have zero nutritional value.

The process of hydrogenation infuses trans fats with hydrogen. In this altered state, they decrease good cholesterol and growth bad cholesterol.

Trans fats are slow killers. They embed themselves between cells and act like plastic and insulate our cells so that they cannot delineate with each other. This upsets our hormones and is followed by rapid weight gain, increased risk of cancer, heart disease, stroke, and infertility.

You're not going to see it written as "trans fat" in commercially fried and packaged foods. But, you should look out for the term hydrogenated. It means the product contains trans fat. The sad thing about all this is that the Fda has allowed products containing half a gram of trans fat per serving to be marketed as trans fat free. This means we can't unmistakably trust these labels.

Healthy, Natural, and Nutrient-Rich Foods

What must one do to avoid the evils of processed foods? We must go back to the basics and focus on healthy natural foods. There are so many versions of natural diet. One example is the Mediterranean diet plan. Other natural food based diets include primary Japanese, Korean, Indonesian, Vietnamese, and Thai diets. Easy Diet Plans for Women and other weight loss meal plans based on the primary diet of Asia have been shown to reverse the effects of aging, sacrifice body fat, heighten the health of the cardiovascular system, fight cancer and detoxify the body.

Silent Killers in Your Food: The Dangers of Processed Foods