by Gordon Hamilton

Created on: April 07, 2009

The dangers of processed foods are many and often all but hidden but with a little knowledge we can minimise the risk of our falling victim to the nasty surprises which processed foods may contain.

The most obvious danger associated with processed foods is that in order for the food still to be "edible" when it reaches our table from the processing plant or factory, it is going to have to be laced with some form of preservative. These preservatives are usually artificial in nature and identified on the list of ingredients by a code number or scientific and chemical name. This means that the vast majority of us have essentially no idea what this substance or these substances may be and are therefore putting something unknown in to our bodies.

The second danger with processed foods is that they can be extremely high in salt and sugar content. Although salt is of course a chemical compound which our bodies require to survive, too much salt in our diets can have significant adverse effects. By eating processed foods, we lose the ability to a very large extent to control the amount of salt which we consume and therefore eat what we know to be a healthy and balanced diet.

It is not only what has been added to processed food which presents a danger essentially to our health but what has at the same time been lost. It is inevitable in most instances that when food is processed that it will lose a sizable percentage of its natural vitamins and nutrients. We may therefore be consuming the food with the best intentions of getting our daily requirement of said vitamins and nutrients, unaware that we are essentially only obtaining a tiny fraction of same, if indeed any at all.

The health dangers of processed foods are of course the most important and the most significant in the long term but we should not lose sight either of the fact that processed food will simply not have the flavour, the texture and the eating pleasure that fresh food will provide for us. We may purchase processed food only to get home and perhaps serve it up to our guests to discover that what we have in fact bought is very different from what we thought we were buying.

The dangers of processed foods can therefore be seen to be not only numerous but extremely varied and the message all round should be that, wherever possible, we should be buying food as fresh as possible and cooking it ourselves, to benefit both our health and our taste buds.

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