Is All Processed Food Bad? Here’s Where to Draw the Line

Processed food gets a bad rap; even I’ve written about avoiding highly processed or what is often referred to as ultra-processed food.

But the truth is that most food goes through some sort of processing before it enters our mouths – cooking could be classed as a form of processing, for example.

So, where do we draw the line between processing that’s ok and still healthy for humans and ultra-processed food that the body doesn’t want?

The problem is that “processed food” has become far too broad to be useful. It lumps together foods humans have made in simple ways for generations with modern factory-made products that barely resemble food at all.

And those are not the same thing.

That matters because if you don’t know where the line is, it becomes easy to fear the wrong foods while giving a free pass to flashy packets with health claims all over them.

So rather than asking whether a food is processed, a better question is this: how has it been processed, why, and what has been added along the way? And, the big one… could this food have been processed before our modern world of technology?