The Natural Debate

Cheez-whiz, the ultimate offender of over processed and unnatural food. Or so we may think.

Here’s the thing, it’s not any more processed than anything else you’re going to eat and in reality there happen to be fewer ingredients in the bright orange American favorite than most restaurant dishes. This blog makes an amazing argument.

There’s always that person that blasts processed, cheap, manufactured food and toots their own horn about how “natural” the food they eat is and that is the way to go. Obviously outlined in my previous post, all-natural may not always be the best.

But did you know there is absolutely no FDA guidelines for the term “natural?” a prime example being the poultry industry which labels its chicken as “all natural” even though the chicken has been injected with a saline solution of around 25 percent of its weight.

Maybe it’s just me but if I’m eating a seemingly natural chicken dinner I don’t want a saline solution to be a part of it.

Long story short, natural is anything that the producer, grower or manufacturer of food wants it to be. For our purposes though, we’re going to assume natural food doesn’t contain any additives. We’ll say similar to organic but not quite as strict with its guidelines.

Organic foods have extremely stringent requirements to bear the label of all organic. The food in question must not include any additives or chemicals, and it can’t be produced using pesticides or processed in any way that is synthetic. Unfortunately, the term natural can be used without such ANY restrictions whatsoever.

To put in perspective, Hostess could smack an “all natural” sticker on every box of Twinkies and probably be all the richer for it.

So now you know what organic is and what natural isn’t but what exactly is processed food? Well, it’s defined as “any raw agricultural commodity that has been subject to processing, such as canning, cooking, freezing, dehydration, or milling.” So, to get sassy with the hardcore all natural eaters out there, you eat processed food everyday of your life and you probably really like it.

Obviously there’s more to the debate of natural versus processed food than the simple process of cooking, and it namely concerns the fact that many of the processes take away much of the original nutritional value. Here you can find an entire list of ways food lose nutrition when processed.

For example, the well loved loaf of white bread. During the grain’s refining process it is stripped of its fiber husk, rending basically anything made with it nutritionally defunct. The stripped starch is almost immediately converted to sugar without the bran to slow down its conversion within the body.

But there are always two sides to a story, and many processes actually help bring out valuable nutritional elements like antioxidants or help the body to absorb the nutrition more effectively. Namely, tomatoes, corn and other vegetables benefit from canning or cooking. Additionally, cooking food can kill off bacteria and help in breaking down proteins for digestion.

Now you’ve got all the facts. You know that natural foods can contain some out there ingredients and that there is no sound way of determining just how natural any food is with that label. You know that processed/manufactured food is merely the way in which it is prepared and can both help and hurt in terms of nutritional value. And you know organic is a class all its own.

I guess it comes down to what is better for you. Is eating naturally more beneficial when it comes to health? According to experts, no. There is absolutely no scientific evidence today that says eating natural or organic or processed food is better over the other.

Yes, someone who eats all processed food all day for their entire life may be overweight. But it’s all about moderation, as with anything. And moderation in what you eat is a subject all its own. Hardcore natural and organic believers would stop me here and scream while tearing out their hair thinking I forgot all about additives and pesticides in processed food.

I haven’t forgotten, but again, the presence of those in manufactured and processed products is still nutritionally comparable to those that are organic or natural.

So, go out and take an organic cracker and spread some cheez-whiz on it while drinking all-natural milk. Why not? It’s all the same anyway, right?