Andy Bellatti talks to Melanie Warner, author of Pandora’s Lunchbox: How Processed Food Took Over The American Meal:
The term “processed food” is ubiquitous these days. The food industry has attempted to co-opt it by claiming canned beans, baby carrots, and frozen vegetables are “processed foods.” Can you help explain why a Pop-Tart is years away from a “processed food” like hummus?
You have to ask yourself, could I make a Pop-Tart or Hot Pocket at home, with all those same ingredients listed on the package? I don’t know anyone who could do that in their home kitchen. How would you even go about procuring distilled monoglycerides and BHT, for instance? These are highly-processed food products loaded up with sugar and sodium, subjected to abusive processing conditions, and assembled with a litany of additives, many of which nobody ever consumed prior to a hundred years ago.
Warner talks about how vitamin supplements are processed. It’s not very pretty. Key message:
The most obvious way a nutrient made in Shenyang differs from one engineered by Mother Nature is that nature’s vitamins always come packaged with all sorts of other helpful stuff, like fiber, additional nutrients and antioxidants. This synergy may be the key to vitamins really helping us stay healthy. They may need other components to help them work most effectively.
Read more of this interesting interview at the Huffington Post here.