Natural vs Processed Foods

Comparing Natural vs Processed Foods

It’s difficult to directly compare natural vs processed foods because there aren’t good, consistent definitions for either of them.  What do we mean by natural or processed food?  Unless you stand out in the field to eat your veggies, you are eating food that has been processed in some way.  Even washing the veggies is processing them, and it removes potentially helpful probiotic microorganisms. What we usually mean, though, when comparing natural vs processed foods, is foods that are minimally processed vs foods that go through several steps of processing.  We are primarily talking about natural vegetables, grains and legumes.

It’s important to note that each and every processing step removes nutritional substances from food.  Therefore, the more natural and less processed foods are, the more nutritious they are.  

One of the biggest problems with the Standard American Diet is that it contains a lot of highly processed food, such as white flour, white sugar, and processed and hydrogenated fats.  Remember that each processing step removes nutrients, and you can see that these foods are “empty calories.”  They have caloric value, but not much else in the way of nutrition. 

When planning meals for a family, you want to get the most nutrition possible, so you want the most natural foods possible.  There are a couple of easy standards for comparing natural vs processed foods when it comes to your family’s nutrition.

The first rule of natural vs processed foods is, the closer the food is to the way it is grown, the more nutritious it is.

The second rule of natural vs processed foods is, if you can make it yourself in your kitchen, it’s more nutritious than if it takes a chemical plant.  For instance, you can make butter, but it takes a chemical plant to make margarine.  Which do you think is more nutritious?

It is difficult to compare natural vs processed foods precisely, but you can still use good guidelines to make sure your food is as nutritious as possible.