Quote:
Originally Posted by Larry H
Do you mean like pasturizing and homogenizing milk or freezing vegetables and meats as commercial processing? How about cheese? It does not occur naturally. Should we stop eating all bread or using any kind of flour 100% grain or not? After all it has to be commercially processed.
Once again, I think you are overthinking this.
Is it a food, or isn't it? Is it something that your great-grandmother would have recognized as food, or is it a food-chemist's thesis project that has been engineered and manipulated to alter nutrient content, replace expensive natural ingredients with cheap synthetic ones, extend shelf life with synthetic additives, make for cheap shipping, etc?
These are rules of thumb, not etched-in-stone bright-line definitions that you will be punished if you literally infract. That's all. Thinking beyond that is, as I think you can see from this thread, counterproductive.
Here are a few examples of applications of this rule of thumb to foods which are "processed" in the overly broad sense you are clinging to here.
* Whole grain bread handmade in your local bakery: pretty recognizable as food, despite some literal "processing".
* Wonder Bread: flour so denuded of nutrients that the product is factory "fortified" with vitamins to pretend it has some value. Artificial additives to soften the product and extend its shelf life for months. This is not food. It is a processed food product.
* Real cheese: some salt added, perhaps some cultures added or encouraged, but this is still recognizable as food.
* Low-fat cheese: Fat removed, often replaced by gelatin and sugar so the product has some flavor and stands up and melts properly. In this case, I would check the ingredients carefully before deciding. Not all low-fat cheeses are created alike. One whose ingredients are low-fat milk, salt, and rennet is pretty basic food. One whose ingredients include gelatin, emulsifiers, sugar, and preservatives, I'd stay away from.
The above examples are meant to show that if you apply your common sense, it's not rocket science to tell the difference between what is a clean food and what isn't.
Of course, reasonable minds can differ, and not everyone is going to agree on what is worth eating and what is not. So don't think so hard, read labels, and eat what your common sense tells you is closer to the ground.