The idea is you process the food yourself via cooking it at home versus the food being processed at a factory and subjected to the engineering described in the original post: addition of preservatives, excess salt and sugar, etc.
Comment on YSK What are you eating
amino@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 days agomost food you cook at home is gonna be processed through heat, chopping, washing and rinsing anyways. you can’t retain a healthy diet if you eliminate processed foods, mostly because a lot of unprocessed ingredients are unsafe to consumea
Phantom_Engineer@lemmy.ml 2 days ago
amino@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 days ago
what peer reviewed source can you provide that says preservatives are harmful?
Tar_alcaran@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
“preservatives” are not inherently unhealthy. But some specific ones are, depending on dose, quite bad for you.
Salt is a pretty preservative, as is sugar, citric acid, vinegar, etc. You can eat those in pretty huge (for additives) quantities before you notice anything.
Other stuff, like BHA/E-320 is banned from EU babyfood becuase it’s very low dayly limit (.5mg/kg) is a risk for babies. If you’re the kind of person who snacks on cereal all day, you’re absolutely in the risk group for it. Sodium Nitrate/Nitrite is not dangerous most of the time, but if you’re eating lots of beef jerky, that can absolutely form a cancer risk increase (It’s in IARC group 2A)
Of course, you can construct argument like this for pretty much every substance in food. The main difference is that some are entirely avoidable.
YesIAmHoomanNoCat@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 days ago
Are you purposefully misunderstanding that comment?
amino@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 days ago
no, I’m just trying to demonstrate how the popsci view of processed foods as bad is unscientific. we’re not cows, we need processed foods to survive and we evolved as a species to live as such
YesIAmHoomanNoCat@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 days ago
‘Processed food’ usually refers to industrial processes often requiring different ingredients or production stepa compared to homecooked
Eg. Homecooked soup Vs. Instant package soup.
Both are soup, but homecook has usually less salt, less sugar, less preservatives, kcal and shorter cooking times for the ingredients.
That’s why ‘avoid processes food’ is such common advice.
amino@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 days ago
if someone can only afford to survive on instant soup then they have bigger health problems to worry about such as poverty and risk of homelessness. aka social determinants of health. framing it as a diet issue when your diet is shaped by what your class afford you to buy is asinine IMHO