We all want our children to have the best diet, so should we feel guilty about including processed food in the diet? Well the one word simple answer is ‘no’, but the longer answer requires some qualifying!
A healthy diet should include a range of foods and that can include so called processed food but it does depend on how much and what type of processed food. Wikipedia defines food processing as: ‘The set of methods and techniques used to transform raw ingredients into food for consumption by humans or animals. The food processing industry utilises these processes. Food processing often takes clean, harvested or slaughtered and butchered components and uses these to produce attractive and marketable food products.’ So a processed food can range from dried soup mix to wholegrain organic muesli!
Processed food consumption has grown with the rise of civilisation and you could say it has freed women from having to spend all day preparing food, or at least given the meal provider the choice as to how much time they want to spend rustling up a meal! What we now think of as basic ingredients are actually termed processed food, such as flour, lentils, bread, pasta and anything else canned, frozen and dried.
But what about the nutritional value of processed food? Well, any procedure applied to food tends to destroy some of its nutrients. But some processing can make nutrients more available, for example the antioxidant lycopene is absorbed best from tomato puree and ketchup and not raw tomatoes. Freezing actually preserves many vitamins so that their level is almost the same as just picked. This means that if you cook a veg like frozen peas straight from the freezer, they probably have more vitamin C than the same veg bought in the shop unfrozen and cooked the next day. So frozen, dried and canned fruit and veg can count as one of you or your child’s five a day.
Because children can often have small appetites, the foods they do eat need to be jam-packed full of goodness – too many ‘empty’ calories are not a good idea. So bought processed food that is low in nutrient value will probably be using ingredients which are low in nutrient content to start with, so such foods should not be eaten to excess because of this.
Although manufacturers are now trying to reformulate foods to be lower in salt, saturated fat and sometimes sugar, some processed foods are still quite high in these. Childhood obesity is a real concern and although heart disease may still seem a way off if you are considering a child’s diet, the damage can start in the early years. For that reason, processed foods high in salt and saturated fat in particular should not be excessive.
Don’t forget though, it is not just processed foods that can provide excessive amount of these nutrients in the diet – adding salt at the table or in your cooking, and eating pies, pastries and fatty meats, even if homemade, does not exempt them from being a high source of these nutrients.
So predominantly choose processed foods that are rich in nutrients over those which are nutrient poor, such as peanut butter rather than jam or wholegrain bread and breakfast cereals over biscuits and cakes.
As mentioned earlier, when food is tampered with in any way, or stored for a period of time, the vitamin level of that food is reduced – just buying ready cut-up veg in the shops reduces their vitamin content. Any food that has been processed leads to loss of the some vulnerable vitamins that include vitamin C, the B vitamins, vitamins A, D and E. Some amino acids (protein building blocks) can also be destroyed. However, manufacturers take care to process food for the minimum length of time so that maximum nutrient levels are maintained. So called fresh milk is a processed food because it has been pasteurised to reduce over 99.9 per cent of the bacteria which may be present in raw milk. However, the heat treatment involved in pasteurisation is only the minimum required to kill those bugs yet retain maximum vitamin content.
When you cook food at home you are ‘processing’ the food. Here are some tips on maintaining maximum vitamin level in your food:
Early diet influences can set the dietary trend in the form of likes and dislikes for a child’s lifetime. This is why weaning is so important. Jars and packet food are convenient and great now and then when say travelling, or time is short, but they should not be the mainstream weaning foods. Get your toddler used to the taste of freshly cooked meals (salt and gluten free of course), which can quickly and easily be pureed up, but don’t feel guilty if you have to revert to the odd jar or packet food.
