On the healthiness of pre-packaged foods

Originally Posted by Sol

It seems like packaged foods are going to be bad for you in one form or another. If it is low in fat or fat-free, it tends to be high in both salt and carbohydrates. Sugar free foods are a little better, but usually taste terrible from whatever alternative sweetener is used.

Yeah, and normally the artificial sweetener's have some form of chemical (acenta...something) that is linked to cancer.

Originally Posted by Arienas

You're right about time not being an excuse, but kids can't do much about choosing healthy food when their diet is provided by parents that don't make good choices. I remember for a while only having snack foods in the pantry that were either Spigettio-ish or Little Debbies. Even if stuff like fruits and yogurt were available, I probably would have gone with the former just because that's what we were always given.

Same here. We used to have homemade meals until the government raised our taxes (and we were a low-income family), so my mom had to start working. Since I was 7, my siblings and I had to become scavengers since my parents were both working and we were too young to understand how to cook around stoves (and the babysitters were horrible in that region). Therefore, until college I was raised on pre-packaged foods (with the occasional home-cooked meal for the holidays).

Originally Posted by kobunicus

Whoa, this thread revive?

Anyway. I'm taking a health course in college and my teacher argues something pretty interesting about processed foods.
She argues that the fact that they are broken down and are quickly absorbed into our blood stream without any work from our bodies is what is bad about them. She says that our bodily functions are like muscles, "use em or lose em".....
The process foods are too easy and we don't have to work to break em down.

I had to take a health class like that as well, which basically said that the majority of the healthy vegetables I was eating (potato, lettuce, spinach, etc.) were not healthy. "Iceberg lettuce is just cellulose and water". "Uncooked Spinach depletes the body of calcium". I try to ignore it b/c I'm not a huge fan of a lot of vegetables and I figured any vegetable is better than no vegetables (except if they're rotten).

Jam it back in, in the dark.