On the healthiness of pre-packaged foods

This is just something I have noticed of late. Almost all of the prepackaged, refrigerated, processed food nowadays is fairly unhealthy. They have moderate to high levels of calories, sodium, fat, and or sugar (at least here in America). Perhaps this is one of the reasons why Americans are becoming so obese?

It seems that if you want to have a healthy meal, you're going to have to make it completely from scratch. And while I'd love to eat fresh all the time, I almost never have the time to dedicate an hour or two to cooking each meal.

Just an observation. What are your thoughts on how healthy processed/premade foods are?

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Depends on what you buy to be honest. Most of the Weight Watchers stuff and Healthy Choice meals aren't that bad health wise. While I tend to agree that some of the other things out there are jam packed with all kinds of bad things, most Americans tend not to worry about it.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

99.99999% of prepackaged stuff is bad for you, even the Weight Watchers and Healthy Choice stuff. It stands to reason, they have to find some way to preserve and package the food so it stays fresher longer and usually sodium and preservatives are the trick to that. Even if it doesn't have a high level of fat (trans and otherwise) and calories, doesn't mean it's not bad for you. Also a lot of the stuff is made with bad products, low quality meats, vegetables you probably wouldn't pick out of the bin for your own consumption, white refined flour and sugar, it's all about streamlining and speeding up production on the product. Oh yeah and making it taste good, which it does. I don't think anyone eats pre-packaged dinners for the health benefits, just like you don't go to McDonalds for a Big Mac because you need to lower you cholesterol.

Not that I'm knocking them, I practically live off Budget Gourmet dinners, 10 for $10 at Albertsons. Yesterday I bought a family sized Stouffers Meat Lasagana. It's death baked into a cheesey topping with a basil tomato sauce.

How ya doing, buddy?

They are convenient, I'll tell you that.
I'm so busy doing other things (like posting here and hobbies) that I can multitask cooking a meal with a simple micro box and food box. Put them together, and TADA!, meal at your computer.

Course I workout and I'm asian, so metabolism is working fine.
Although, I've been trying to find meal plans so i could avoid prepackaged food. I found that those bagged 3x washed salads are very good, yet, still very convenient. And then I've been eating more wheat grain breads with my box^2 meals. Hopefully I get healthier, but i wanna try to avoid the box meals altogether.
What meal plans do you guys have? more meal boxes?

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

Saves my time!
And I can eat it on the go - but most of the packaged stuff I eat are Nature Valley granola bars..but since getting my braces tightened this week...

Let's just say I'm not eating them anymore....

I was speaking idiomatically.

Originally Posted by samari

Perhaps this is one of the reasons why Americans are becoming so obese?

That and a natural prediliction to doing no proper exercise and the stupidly huge portions a lot of your food comes in.

Pre-packaged food is garbage and terribly unhealthy. Just look down the list of ingredients to see how much shit gets chucked in that you'd never consider eating if you thought about it.

I also find most pre-packaged food tastes horrible too.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

I don't understand why you dudes have to have a microwaved meal. I mean, how long does it take to boil a pot of pasta? Or to make a bowl of cold cereal? That's what I do. Nothing fancy, just a humble, quick meal, that does not happen to drip with grease.

FELIPE NO

I cook pasta or rice whenever I can, but honestly it gets boring, in some deep, biological way. Eventually you just like...NEED meat, or NEED candy. Meat takes way longer to prepare and takes way more effort than pasta/rice, and candy takes WAY much more time and energy to prepare.

How ya doing, buddy?

I don't eat a lot of processed foods for that very reason. I always had meals from scratch when I was younger, and I cook that way for myself these days as I live away from parents as well.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

I eat processed food only when its inconvienent for me to make my own food. Because I'm usually the first one up in the morning it would be rather bothersome if I fired up the kitchen just to make fried eggs or something and wake the rest of my family up.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Who needs to eat healthy? As long as you get enough exercise and don't eat too much of it, you should be fine. Besides, pre-made food just tastes better, especially since I don't have to make it, which, trust me, actually makes food taster better.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

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.

Still, it isn't as though any amount of fat or salt is going to be detrimental to your health. The best thing to do is to balance what you eat so that you have near one hundred percent of each item, not two hundred of one and fifty of the rest. Yadda yadda on exercise and raising metabolism to burn off what you eat, but who listens to that reasoning anymore?

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

You don't always have to spend hours to prepare a nice 'home-cooked' meal for yourself. A good way to make cooking easier and faster is to plan recipes through the week, do the shopping early, and pair things up so you can use leftovers from one recipe in another. One nights pot-roast becomes the next nights vegetable beef and barley soup.

Crockpots, single-pot meals, and make-ahead recipes are quite the awesome.

I was speaking idiomatically.

Pre-packaged food is quite awful... Often it doesn't taste the same as the real thing, but tastes too salty and just too - artificial. I am not afraid of the preservatives, because after all, they are there just to make the food last longer. Without preservatives it might be moulding or whatever... Or it goes bad in that short trip from the market to your house on a hot summer day. But really, the ingredients can be really low quality.

It doesn't take 'one to two hours' to prepare food 'from scratch'. It's not right from 'scratch' anyway, unless you make your own pasta from flour, make your bolognese sauce from fresh tomatoes and make your own mince (ground beef) from pieces of meat... But still making this simple portion of spaghetti is much healthier than if you bought it pre-packed.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

For sure, pre-packaged or processed food is totally unhealthy. Lots of preservatives. Here's proof. I live in a third-world country so i get to pass by shanty neighborhoods. People there are fat--and I mean, fat and flabby in the wrong places. Processed food did that to them. I thought poor people were supposed to be skin and bones but to be realistic, they still have the meager jobs that allow them to earn some money. However, their earnings are only enough for them to afford canned goods (which are cheap here). So it's corned beef for them everyday and that's how they end up looking like they do.

At my house, we eat as little canned products as possible but nowadays, living healthy is really expensive and all the fresh meat and vegetables are pricey. In the end, we eventually just eat whatever will sustain us in the end. Worry about heart diseases later. ^__^

FELIPE NO

I'm lazy. After I get home from work, the last thing I want to do is fix an entire meal, so more often than not, I keep deli meats, soups, freezer meals and other things stocked up. Still, I follow a balanced diet, I exercise regularly (not lazy there) and I keep up with nutrients and vitamins. I'm at a great weight for my size and I'm perfectly happy eating pre-packaged food.

As long as it doesn't taste like shit. South beach diet, Weight Watchers and Lean Cuisine are all fairly good at making freezer meals.

One thing that I can't live without though is my crockpot. Such a godsend.

How ya doing, buddy?

I thought the South Beach Diet meals were garbage. The breakfast burritos taste like dirt (may just be because I don't eat wheat tortillas), and the dinners are pretty blah. The snack bars are good though, if a bit expensive.

I blame a lot of my family's weight problems on packaged foods that are easy to cook. Both parents worked long hours and stuff like canned chicken and dumplings or TV dinners usually were what we had for dinner. Laziness wasn't really an issue--I played basketball and softball until I was 14 and I still had problems, so it's the diet/genetics for sure.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Time is not an excuse. Grab a piece of fruit, yogurt, cottage cheese, or nuts. Also, I'd be less concerned with the macronutrient profile of pre-packaged foods than with all the preservatives and crap they put in them.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

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.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

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 am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

i personally don't like pre-packaged food, i find them bland, hand made food always seems to taste better to me, even if i made slight accidents with them. but it may just be because of the way i've been brought up; family are extremely into the whole organic/free-range thing and cook everything themselves, except for my sister who just snacks and is slim via this and starvation (she rarely even eats dinner and when she does, she barely touches it).

it doesn't take long to make food once you get the hang on it, i remember when i first tried making sushi/onigiri and it took me 1-2 hours, but now that time i halved because i know how to prepare as i go. the same goes with cooking; i prepare it all first and then gradually clean up as i cook, it's about timing and organisation really. if you find you don't have much time, just made an extremely large amount to last a few days so you have your own pre-made food. my mum does this with spaghetti and curry, and i do it with curry, mabo tofu and stew.

but my weight/healthiness is probably mainly down to genetics since i don't really do much exercise apart from the occasional walk to uni instead of the bus when i have time. but i also naturally get cravings for certain food groups that i'm lacking.

I was speaking idiomatically.

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).

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?