Paths to healthy eating

The topic of healthy living by avoiding processed food has drawn renewed interest in recent months in the US because of President Donald Trump's selection of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (RFK) as the Secretary of Health and Human Services in his cabinet.

- BASAB DASGUPTA

RFK was known for fighting the major food companies in his past career as an attorney. He is a strong advocate against processed food and food additives; he also believes that USDA has been easy on the food industry allowing them to prioritize profit over people's health.

I didn't even know the word "processed food" when I was growing up in India. We had no refrigerator, and our domestic help went to the bazaar every day to buy groceries. While living in the US, I have been hearing for the past several decades that processed food is bad for our health. Now India has also entered this market. I do not know how much processed food is consumed in the country, but India reportedly exports processed food to more than 100 regions world-wide, mainly because of migration of Indians to foreign countries and acceptance of Indian food in other countries. However, processed Indian food has some nutritional value because of the use of whole grains, legumes, beneficial spices and vegetables.

The immediate questions are: What is processed food?, Why is it bad for our health? and Why do we even process the food? Here are the answers in the simplest layman's language. Processed food is a generic name to indicate that food has been changed from its natural original state. There are two main types of processing: a) altering the food, which includes cutting, peeling, chopping, grinding, crushing, smashing, freezing, packaging, and so on, and b) adding some artificial ingredient to natural food for the purpose of making it more flavourful or lengthening its shelf-life or to ensure that food retains its structure. Hormones injected into animals and birds to speed up their growth fall in the second category. Sometimes colour is added to food just to make it attractive to consumers.