The term ‘processed food’ is often used on this forum in the context of stuff to avoid. A little while ago I had an argument with my daughter who has been living with us off and on and as a professional carer cares about our health! She won’t eat Lurpak Slightly Salted because she rates it as ‘margarine’ even though it is a mixture of vegetable oil and butter, preferring to eat salted butter. She also frowned at Cup Soup which we sometimes have to complement a sandwich for lunch although it has no nasty additives.
So I thought I would find out the scientific definition of ‘processed’ and discovered it covers a lot of what we usually eat as it means anything that isn’t exactly as it came from the animal, tree or plant eg milk (pasteurised), pickles (fermented), bacon (preserved in some way), canned fruit, dried fruit, frozen veg, milk subs such as soya milk, bread….So a lot of processed food is good for you!
My definition of ‘processed food’ was food which had been changed in a harmful way such as meat with preservatives, fruit ‘drinks’ with additives including sugar, baked goods with a long list of ingredients (‘natural’ or not), any food with chemical colours or sugar substitutes, butter subs with trans fats, and anything with a high proportion of ‘bad fat’, sugar and salt.
I’m interested to know if there’s a consensus on this because otherwise our advice to avoid ‘processed food’ can mean what you want it to mean and we should be more specific.
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Buffafly
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Because of my PVCs I eat as much of my food unprocessed as possible .. unprocessed foods are foods that are as close to their natural state as possible. With few exceptions. Most Fermented foods are great for you. If I eat bread on Occasion I will eat a sprouted grain organic bread. If i want to eat soup I make a homemade soup. I would never touch vegetable oils or margarine I only eat grass fed butter. ( I eat that sparingly) the big one to stay away from is processed carbs.. ie: most breads, crackers, rice, noodles, processed wheat,chips , fries, cakes, pastries etc
I am just a 'mere male' and know nothing of foods - except those that poison my gut. Foods and the dark arts of cooking etc I leave to Mrs CarnEuny.
That said, if I had to put hand on bible, your third para and the definition you use defines processed food exactly.
John
I believe that all of you will jump over me, but I will still write what I am up to... Nowadays, too large significance is attributed to food at all, and also to "processed food". There is no bad food, there are bad stomachs. When I look at the English people, and also at the Americans, 67% are overweight or obese (official data). Most of you will say that it is because of "bad food", but it is not so. You are overweight because you like to eat. Eating once was a need in the course to survive. In the past decades, eating has more and more become the way to have pleasure and to compensate for negative events during the day. Whenever you sit to watch the TV, with something to snack near you, you are a sinner!The things develop in the following way:
Eating for the pleasure brings your weight up.
This causes your stomach to get out of order (including all the trouble, from diabetes 2 to IBS).
Disturbed stomach makes you feel that some of the food causes you trouble, so you conclude that this food is bad.
In fact, even an old person can eat any food if the stomach is OK. I am almost 70 and never avoid any food, despite in my country the food is not always of good quality (we get sometimes imported meat of bad quality etc.). I consume white sugar, bread made of white flour, diary products of all kind, sunflower oil but also animal fat, bacon on regular basis, cakes of all kind.. In the morning, I have my coffee with 2 full teaspoons of white sugar and never have any problems... I even drink Coca Cola sometimes. But... I never overeat!
My intention was not to offend anybody, but to help understand the situation which is more than alarming.
What country are you in ? A lot the the processed food in America is far worse than other countries .. for example a nutragrain bar in America is literally chemicals and over processed crap carbs in Europe it’s fruit and grains lol still processed but WAY healthier in Europe 🤷🏻♀️ Americans are fat and suffering malnutrition.
Hello, American! I live in the wild country of Serbia. Where I was young, I would get a portion of food and that was it! Had no right to additional food, since the food was scarce... I am thankful for it, since I have grown to be pretty healthy person, even at the late age. Nowadays, we have in Serbia more and more fat children (maybe 30-40% at the moment). There is a lot of diabetes 2 among the kids, all because of malnutrition. The food should be considered as a kind of drug, causing the people to get addicted to it and causing more trouble to people than all the infectious disease together. Best wishes!
• in reply to
Hiya Steelheart,
Glad to see that you, and Buffafly too, are not afraid post on here an issue which is directly unrelated to AF ... and yet ... for so many of us is so relevant to the degree to which our AF kicks off. Me in particular. All of you who replied to Buffafly are mostly more knowledgeable than I in the dark arts of good food/bad food. Yet arising from my consultation with a Nutritionist back in the early days I've managed to control my AF events or manage to control the impact of food on the severity of AF events. To the extent that these days (11 years down the track) I might have 3 major AF events during a year and none are serious enough to put me in A & E.
I suppose for me it is the old English saying ( like my grandmother used to recite, and probably her grandmother too) it is ............... "one mans meat is another mans poison". In other words food that is good for some of us is a disaster for others of us. I am sure your homeland has a similar saying too.
😊 By the way, next month I'm 77 and was 65 when AF mugged me and I do have to say many of the foods/ingredients you can consume are no good for me.
Thanks for the post.
John
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Hello, John! Thanks for taking time to reply! I envy you for being able to write in such a polite way... I know that my writing is clumsy and sounds awful, but I am doing my best to get better. Though, the life is too short (the remnants of it, lol) as to be able to learn it, as it should be. To confess, I was translating from English and German for the past 45 years and should be ashamed not to have learned these two languages better. I can use them, but they will remain at the level I am not satisfied with. In my opinion, it is necessary that a person lives in the country where the language is spoken for at least 5 years, as to get to know it "perfectly well". And I have only spent moth and a half in Australia, in 1990.
I also have to agree with everything you said... Almost all of us here are elderly and it means with a lot of knowledge and experience. It is so true that "we are all different" and there is no one solution to fit everyone. But... to be honest, before we get ill, we are all almost the same, since the nature has had no many recipes how to make us, the people. After we get ill, and it happens sooner or later, we start being different for one single reason - the complexity of Autonomous Nervous System is sooo large (infectious disease excluded), that there are not two same cases. Only the Vagus nerve, with the diameter of couple of millimeters, contains millions of isolated conductors, leading signals to and from the stomach. Which portion of it is going to get disturbed and what consequences will it have for the body, is quite individual. That is why we all get different when we start having trouble with our health.
Hi SteelheartWow, I have totally the opposite opinion about good foods and bad foods.
I am a big fan of Prof Tim Spectre, who is leading the Zoe Covid Symptom Study.
For several years now he and his international team have been studying the gut biome and its link to the immune system. Their results are convincing and fascinating.
I have no doubt that eating highly processed foods such as burgers, buns, cured meats, highly sugared drinks etc is harmful for the gut and thus the body.
It is difficult to avoid lightly processed foods such as milk, milk alternatives , olive oil because they have gone through some sort of process to get from the field to your plate. However, eating highly processed foods is a matter of choice and availability but sadly often price and convenience. The link between convenience foods, fast foods ie highly processed foods and increasing morbid obesity, diabetes, heart disease etc is indisputable.
Saying you have eaten whatever you like with impunity is like saying You smoked every day of your life and didn’t got lung cancer IMO .
All I can offer is my own experience. When my wfe was working as a carer she usually came home pretty exhausted so most meals were bought in aoart from an occasional roast dinner. Things like fish fingers or bought in pies were common. Two years ago she finally realised she was being taken for a mug and walked away form teh industry since when we/she shop for food which she prepares. Result:- apart form saving about £60 a week I have lost a stone in weight.
You think about that.
John, I simply have to agree with you! There are chemicals in the food of which some are specified and some are not, so we have not the way to know about them. This is one more reason to eat less food. "Eat to live, don't live to eat!", is an old saying.
My idea was to enlighten how people get to the point, not to be able to tolerate some kinds of food (diary, gluten containing food etc).
As for the cancer, I know that the chemicals and radioactive stuff are very much blamed for the onset of cancer. In one occasion I have heard another theory, which seams to me to be plausible. In our bodies, cancer starts forming many times during our lives, but our immune system kills it successfully. Only in the situation where the immune system fails to do its duty, the cancer fully develops. The question is, why would the immune system fail?! And the answer is the same as for the stomach disturbance - disorder of Autonomous Nervous System. It is the greatest problem of our species in the 21. century.
Hi Buffafly,Yes, of necessity the term 'processed' has to be subjective, because actually most foods go through at least a minor processing. Chickens are usually plucked and drawn before being sold to the public and we often peel potatoes at home prior to use. Both of these things are processes. The food didn't start out that way. Of course if potatoes are commercially chipped, coated in fat, part cooked, or turned into potato mush and reformed then they are much more processed.A chicken too can be mulched, reformed, coated in batter or breadcrumbs and sprayed with fat, prior to being placed in a box for sale. So I guess it's about how many processes food has gone through and I think we can probably all work out that the more processes, the less good for us it's going to be. (And often less tasty too). We can all take a pretty good stab at whether a hot dog sausage is a heavily processed food or not, without much thought. So I'd say treat the term as subjective and work with just roughly calculating out how many processes something has gone through and try to cut down to the least number of processes.
Interestingly enough I watched a TV show recently about foods where one of the presenters spent a month eating nothing but ready meals for lunch and dinner. He had medical checks before and after and went from a healthy individual to one who was obese and approaching type 2 diebetes IN ONE MONTH!!!! He also commented that his mental capacity seemed reduced.
I am with your daughter. When you find the right food (and that's not easy to afford either) direct from the farm you instinctively no its good (listen to your stomach) & you don't waste a scrap. Examples here in the South East of England would be tablehurstandplawhatch.co.uk
When I stopped eating meat, cheese, oil, processed foods for beans, potatoes, fresh and frozen veg, my food bill dropped drastically. With all the savings, I started buying the 'expensive' fruits and veg that are so healthful. Funny thing is, all those 'expensive' fruits & veg cost less per pound/kg than do flesh and cheese I 'gave' up
Really interesting discussion. I smiled when you said you often have a Cup Soup, my parents often had that at lunch too and my mother thought they were marvellous after years of making soup from scratch in her faithful old pressure cooker. A very cheap cut of meat would be cooked slowly in with the soup and that would be served afterwards with potatoes and veg. But it was so time-consuming, along with all the other meals she made from scratch she completely embraced ready-made food when it became more widely available.
So in answer to your question, I check the packet when I buy food and avoid most of the baddies that you mentioned in your third paragraph. So yes, I do eat some processed food but carefully. We eat very little meat, lots of fish and some dairy. For me it is all about balance.
Regarding Steel Heart’s comment that we are all the same to begin with (if I understand him correctly) - no we aren’t. As in AF there is often a genetic component affecting our response to food. My second daughter told me an interesting story about a chef who realised he was eating an unhealthy diet - mostly meat and reformed to eat a ‘healthy plant based diet’. He soon became very ill and after a while it was discovered that he had a genetic intolerance to fruit sugars so he was ruining his digestive system. I am intolerant to dairy products so have to eat them sparingly, also can’t tolerate whole grains and my hospital diet sheet does instruct me to avoid them. My friend’s husband can’t take ‘anything to do with cow’ including beef but is ok with goat’s milk. Some intolerances/allergies are acquired but some are genetic and whichever it can take some trials to find out what doesn’t suit.
BTW I don’t think this is off subject because so many of us have found that diet adjustment has benefited our AF, reducing episodes.
I live in a country where good food used to be the be all and end all of life- it still is important but highly processed food is creeping in more and more. Children are becoming obese - when we came here 20 years ago there were virtually no obese children and very few ready meals in the shops. The sections of prepared meals and confectionery are ever expanding. Young people are not learning to cook as much. I cook our meals from scratch . My husband makes wholemeal bread with added nuts and seeds. I make my own granola . But we eat beans on toast with a sausage ( French sausages are IMO much better than standard English ones) for breakfast every 4 days and a tiny amount of bacon once every 8 days. I use some prepared foods like aioli , mayonnaise and hollondaise sauce as I just don't want to spend the time making them from scratch. I do not feel guilty about this nor do I think that small amounts of even highly processed food are going to harm you a lot. There is altogether too much purism about food these days. But I do think that a diet of almost exclusively HPF makes good health impossible to attain.
I live in the USA and was raised in the South. I had a fairly normal relationship with food till I was run over by a school bus at age 6-7. After that, I ballooned probably due to a lack of exercise and my mother comforting me with food. She too had a poor relationship with food.
Fast forward 40 years, I got morbidly obese and heavier than my scale could register at 330 lbs / 150 kg . I carried that weight on a truly large frame think football linebacker / rugby forward. I was a mess and had a massive heart attack and beat the 88% probability of dying.
Thanks to my GP, not my cardiologist, I transformed my diet and now eat truly low processed which I take to mean can I recognize my food as it was grown in nature. I eat mostly leafy-greens, beans & lentils, potatoes (white and sweet) but without butter, sour cream, bacon, cheese etc. If I cook food, it's usually with wet heat (steam/pressure cooker). Once a week, maybe, I'll air fry/bake veggies/tofu as a treat.
I avoid all oils, even heart-healthy [sic] olive oil because it's clinically shown to inflame the arterial endothelium. Oil is also the poster child for empty calories... 4,000 Cal/lb / 7,600 kJ/kg and no nutrients, only energy. Sugar has the same problem though its numbers are 1,800 Cal/lb / 3,400 kJ/kg.
I also avoid all ground flours because all that surface area causes the body to react as if you were eating white sugar. Thus, no cakes, no soft-bread, no cookies (which trip so many dietary tripwires). The only bread I do eat (maybe a slice or two a week) is Danish rugbrød on the principle that I can see the whole grains that came from the plant... It's much closer to true whole food and is much more loaded with fibre than 'whole grain' health breads.
That's not to say I eat no fat, it just comes with my food (e.g., I eat fresh ground flax seed every morning with my porridge, and will add an avocado wedge to a salad, or less than an ounce of raw walnuts). I also sparingly use tahini (oil drained off) because again, it's more processed than I like. We need a lot less oil and protein than we think we do.
To wrap things up, I've so far lost over 100 lbs/45 kg, lost 14 in/36 cm off my waist and never felt better. While my diet avoided a second heart attack, I didn't expect I'd develop AFib/Quiver which thankfully was ablated two weeks ago. I've now got bradycardia instead of tachycardia but my heart seems to be handling the slower rate well. I'm waiting to see how things are after the three month 'blanking period'.
If you want to explore minimally processed eating, I'd recommend searching for
• Dr Greger (Nutritionfacts[.]org/topics/plant-based-diets/)
• Dr Barnard (PCRM[.]org/veganstarterkit) or
• Dr Fuhrman (drfuhrman[.]com/blog/210/beginners-guide)
It's a major shift in diet, but it's been lifesaving and life enhancing for me.
if a food didn’t exist 1000 years ago, it’s processed. Seed oils we buy are rancid as are most nuts. Oils are treated with all sorts to make them shelf stable. Cup soup contains crap like Maltodextrin and monosodium glutamate which affects us - in my case insomnia. Buy organic from the fruit and veg aisle, meat and fish aisle. Give up gluten and sugar and anything longlife. Your daughter is right about spreadable butter, I only eat organic proper butter and I only drink water. This is how people ate just a few generations ago. Cooking from scratch is a chore but so is poor health. Genetically modified food is alien to us. Try it for a month, you’ll lose loads of weight and feel fantastic.
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