04/10/2025
*Processed Foods vs Ultra-processed foods:*
✍️Let's clear the Difference?!
☑️There has been a lot of misconstruing concerning the concepts of these 2 phrases in the food and health industry.
☑️Even health professionals are lost on the difference between the 2 phrases.
🌿For one, Processed foods are foods that have been changed from their original, natural state through methods like cutting, cooking, or adding preservatives, nutrients, or flavors.
🥦Processed foods, such as frozen vegetables, cooked rice, baked potato, grilled fish, plantain chips are made with minimal additives and are healthy..
🥬Food processing takes many forms such as boiling, freezing, milling grains to powder, salting and drying.
🧄Of course, you can't buy yam or potato or rice or vegetables from the market and just eat it raw?.so washing, cutting, cooking your raw foods to make it safer to eat and easier to digest is Processing! 😊
Food processing plays important roles such as:
- Preserving foods
- Improving Digestibility of foods.
- Enhance nutritional value of the food.
- Making foods safer to consume
- Reducing food waste
- Improving food security
_Meanwhile...._
🥯Ultra-processed foods, on the other hand contain excessive sugar, salt, fat, and artificial ingredients.
🍞These ultra-processed items, like sugary cereals, soda, and packaged snacks, are linked to various health problems, including obesity, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and dementia.
🥖Ultra processing involves subjecting the foods to ultra-high techniques which involves passing the foods through complex machinery, using highly synthetic additives, flavours, colors etc..
🥞These are meant to enhance the aesthetic appeal of the food to the teeming consumers and to extend the shelf life to increase commercial profits without due consideration for the health of the consumers!
🧇Ultra processed foods majorly contain synthetic additives with very minimal natural ingredients..and they are basically empty calories with no Nutritional value!
🧈Examples of ultra processing includes Hydrogenation for making seed oils, commercial breakfast cereals and snacks, noodles, pastas and sodas!
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