Mobilenews24x7 Bureau (Special)
Heavily processed foods often include unhealthy levels of added sugar, sodium and fat. These ingredients make the food we eat taste better, but too much of them leads to serious health issues like obesity, heart disease, high blood pressure and diabetes. Lacking in nutritional value.
What do we want the ease and availability of processed food or health. The answer is obvious-health.
But it is downright decline of health if we toe the line for processed food and packaged. Let’s be careful.
But it is clear that Indians have taken a plunge into this craze of such foods for the sake of ease of availability and for the makers the ease of preparing them.
Convenience food, as the name suggests, is food associated with great ease of consumption, such as food is available off the shelf and is usually ready to eat without much further preparation.
Generally processed to tertiary levels for long shelf life, many ingredients like salt, sugar , or saturated fats are added to make convenience food more palatable, but often in quantities that far exceed the recommended daily allowance.
Disappearing cooking skills
And with time, convenience foods have become the way to go for people who cannot spend much time in food preparation because of their rushed lifestyle as well as for people with little to no culinary skills.
Now the truth which is inconvenient to listen. These foods have contributed to the current epidemic of obesity and lifestyle diseases like diabetes and hypertension as most convenience foods are laden with trans fats, sodium, and sugar, and provide little nutritional value.
There is emerging evidence that increasing cases of Inflammatory Stomach Disease .
These diseases were virtually unknown before the advent of the multinational fast-food chains in India. In fact, it is not an exaggeration to say that any thing that is processed, preserved, and packed is not healthy at all.
“Most packaged foods have colours and chemical preservatives besides excess salt. At least some of these have been shown to be potentially carcinogenic.” said Dr J M Rao, Specialist
Several of these packages are lined with Per Fluorinated Compounds (PFC) or their variants which, when heated, release chemicals that can cause cancer.
Most fast foods in India available today originated in the western food culture, which in any case is not well suited for the Indian body and genetic composition.
The advertising gimmicks labelling them as ‘fat-free‘, ‘low fat’, or ‘low calorie’, which in most cases do not stand scientific scrutiny.
Baked beans!
For instance, baked beans are projected as healthy. But did you know…
A 400 g tin of baked beans was found to contain 20 g sugar and a good deal of salt, while soup powders, pickles, and most of the other ready-to-eat processed foods are loaded with salt to extend their shelf life.
This eventually leads to a level of salt intake that is far in excess of the recommended allowance of 2400 mg per day and is associated with diseases like high blood pressure, cardiac diseases, and even stomach cancer
