Processed foods

What foods are considered to be heavily processed? I get that I should eat less processed foods, but that can be hard to avoid sometimes and I don't mind a treat every once in a while. However, I'm having trouble defining processed foods that I should avoid versus processed foods that are okay in moderation (if there's such a thing). 

Any help? Thanks!

In general, prepackaged foods that have too many preservatives goes in my book as heavily processed.  Plus foods that have WAY too many ingredients, like fiberone cereal, where in order to make them healthy, they have like 10 lines of ingredients on the box =/

That's a good approach.... try to get 80-90% of your food from 'real foods', wholefoods and home cooking and then you've got a little wiggle room to enjoy the occasional junky treat!

I rather like Michael Pollan's rules of thumb for how to spot a 'food-like substance' from his book 'In Defence of Food'

• Don't eat anything your great grandmother wouldn't recognise as food
• Avoid food products containing ingredients that are a) unfamiliar, b) unpronounceable, c) more than five in number, or that include high fructose corn syrup
• Avoid food products that make health claims
• Shop the peripheries of the supermarket and stay out of the middle
• Get out of the supermarket whenever possible

I think I use the second point more than anything else

Think about trying to eat as many foods in their natural form as possible.

That means choosing a real piece of fruit over "real fruit gummies" or something like that. Boil your own pasta and steam your own veggies to create a healthy dinner instead of eating a lean cuisine that probably has loads of unneccessary preservatives.

Almost everything not fresh/raw and EVERYTHING you buy at a restaurant is PACKED with sodium.  I am not aware of any restaurant that serves truly fresh food (except the meat, maybe).

And even fresh meat is usually seasoned and tenderized to a fare-the-well and almost always this means, you guessed it, sodium.

Some very high-end restaurants have healthy food, but usually not.

It's depressing that to get healthy food, you have to buy it, and make it yourself.  (I'm from Houston - sorry Houston restaurants.)

why are processed foods bad?

The preserving and cooking processes of foods often depletes the nutrients,  replacing them with things like fat sugars and/or sodium. For example, whole wheat bread is better than white bread, because the process of making white flour removes a good portion of the natural fiber content. With canned fruits; often times they are packed in syrup with additional sugars added.  These are just a few very simple examples. If you do a little research, you may find some very unsettling facts that will make you reconsider your food choices.

hhm, thanks, i like the bread+fruit examples but like, i eat chicken nuggets, fishsticks, i dunno, lots of processed stuff and im not sick and its more convenient than living in the kitchen, which i dont have time to do.

It's a myth that you have to live in the kitchen to enjoy fresh home-made foods... a myth largely created by decades of 'you don't have time to cook' advertising by the people selling convenience foods.   

You can create a lot of really lovely dishes in well under 20 minutes with a little practice.   Pastas with fresh sauces, simple grilled meat/fish, stir-fries with noodles or rice, chunky omelettes, interesting salads.  Takes 5 minutes to steam through some greens or other veggies.  And if you spend more time - say at the weekend - allowing a casserole to cook for a few hours, simply make several portions and freeze the spare ones as a quick microwave meal another day.

You don't get 'sick' eating processed foods straight away but, over time, the cumulative effect of our lazy Western Diet is pretty evident.

Having a bit of processed food in your diet is okay, just as having a balance with everything else. But as Jane said it is very easy to make meals you can pre-prepare, freeze, or just cook in a short amount of time. One pot meals like stews, casseroles, bakes, chillis, soups and so on can be made all at once of an evening or a weekend, and whatever you don't eat can be frozen and stored for when you want to take it out and reheat it again. And then there is, of course, pasta, noodles, stir-fry, omlettes, salads, grilling, flash frying and such that again do not take a lot of time.

But it doesn't hurt to have SOME processed goods. It's when we begin living on them that there's a problem. Amazingly, many people who live on the (as dubbed) "Western diet" of 90% processed foods are often also malnourished.

some of the Chicken nuggets are not made from chicken breast like ppl want to believe and there is no telling what else is added to that fish stick. l grill a chicken breast or salmon fillet on my george foreman in the same time it takes to heat up store bought fish sticks and chicken nuggets.

so i really like cereal. i eat it a lot - is it okay? i try to stay away from overly sweet ones, but is that the main criteria for overly processed cereals?

also, what would be good snack ideas not involving packaged foods and the like?

thanks for the answers everyone!

Here's a hint for steaming veggies quickly.  Buy ziploc Zip'n Steam bags.  I'm sure its not as good as steaming over the stove, as you are microwaving it (yeah, I've read about how bad a microwave is, but I need it) but it is fast and easy, which helps me make better choices, I think.  You can use fresh veggies and get them to the table fast with very little clean up.  And I second the george foreman grill thing.  I use mine a lot now!