Here’s the hard part: defining processed food. Doritos, processed. Not a tough call there. Raw potato with the dirt still on it: unprocessed. So far so good. But if we wash that potato, boil it, maybe peel it too...mix it with butter, and garlic (and then more butter, and more garlic)—uh-oh. That’s kind of processed, isn’t it? But it’s not very processed, you might say. There’s a spectrum, and if you dig a potato out of the ground and boil it in your own kitchen, that’s still on the okay side.
It's a hard job, and no definition is going to make everyone happy. Probably the most popular is the NOVA framework for determining what's processed and what's "ultra processed." I wrote more about NOVA here, and why I think it's flawed. As a tool for studying food systems, it can be useful. But it doesn't tell us which foods are healthiest.
Decide what you care about in your food, and let the rest go
If some of the names in that list scared you, you probably have a reason why: sugar, or “chemicals” (we’re getting to that), or high-calorie portions, or high levels of fat. Before you decide that highly processed food is what you need to avoid, take a minute to consider what really matters to your health goals.
They’re high in sugar, which most of us get too much of. This is easy to gauge if you check the label. There's a line item for sugars, but more importantly, since 2020 or so, there is also a line item for added sugars. That's the more important one to pay attention to.
They’re high in fat. This is true of oily snacks like chips, and often a lot of restaurant meals. Fat isn’t always a bad thing: It’s filling and arguably isn't as bad for you as sugar. Fat is listed on the Nutrition Facts label, along with its sub-categories saturated fat (probably not actually bad for you) and trans fat. Nobody likes trans fat, but it’s rapidly disappearing even from processed food.
They’re addictive. There’s no label to check for this one, I’m afraid. Companies like to make money, so they’ll do what they can to make you want to come back for more. Some ready-to-eat junk foods, like chips and candy bars, are devilishly well-designed. A high-fat/high-sugar combo is the signature move, often with a good dose of salt thrown in. Basically, you can tell which foods these are because they’re the ones you have all the empty wrappers of at home.
They’re bad for the environment and/or economy. This is a “vote with your fork” (or, you know, orange-stained fingers) situation. If you don’t like buying from big companies and you’d rather give your money to the baker down the street than to the Nabisco corporation, by all means make that choice. Or maybe you object to the abundant plastic packaging and the carbon footprint of all the trucks that brought the ingredients to the processing plant and from the plant to you. Just keep those things clear in your mind: Food isn’t automatically unhealthy for your body just because its maker is greedy or wasteful.
Now that you’ve got a plan, it’s time to figure out how to put it into place. If you often end up hungry at work when there’s nothing on hand besides the contents of a vending machine, you now have a way to evaluate what’s in that machine instead of writing off the whole thing as bad and wrong and terrible—and then feeling guilty when you get hungry enough that you give in and grab a Snickers.
Of course, the best plan is to not need to buy any of that processed food. But how many of us can cook every meal from scratch? Here’s where it’s helpful to use some of those processed-but-still-healthy things we talked about earlier: the rotisserie chicken, for example. The frozen meatballs and jarred sauce to whip up a spaghetti dinner in minutes that will also become tomorrow’s lunch. You get the idea. I have some tips on starting to eat healthy here, and a guide here to meal prepping as a normal human who doesn't want to spend all weekend cooking.
It would be great to cook every meal from scratch, from lovingly foraged free-range lentils, but not all of us have time to do that. Sure, in some parts of history, people did—but that was part of their job as a housewife or farmer. Today, cooking every single meal from scratch is more like a hobby—a fine one to have, but not a mandate for everyone. We live in a world that’s full of processed food, and it’s totally okay to—carefully, thoughtfully—take advantage of that.
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