Is there any regulated/"official" definition to the word "processed" in this context? I see the word so much in the context of food in general and I've never known exactly what it means.
Buy foods in bulk, not boxed or in plastic. Make food from scratch from whole grains, veggies, peppers, spices. Avoid all of the seed oils.
My Dad is 101 and doing OK, and he has always preferred large salads, small amounts of lean meat. I feel better whenever I hit the Fuhrman Diet for six months.
For frying, I usually use a mixture of olive oil and butter. The oil slows down the process of the butter burning. It's certainly not as good as ghee, but ghee tends to make stuff greasy.
If you put butter into a pan that is too hot and it starts burning, it can be useful to cool things down by adding some oil. But the milk solids will always burn at a given temperature. A mixture of olive oil and butter won't let you cook at a higher temperature than just butter.
I don’t know if peanut oil is considered a seed oil or not, but it has one of the highest smoke points. (I’m aware peanuts aren’t seeds, but not everyone is.)
Coconut oil varies a lot in its smoke point; unrefined its similar to butter but refined can get up past 400 F / 204 C(similar to canola oil).
I do like cooking with it despite the low heat limitation because it's good for things you can cook at lower temps like eggs and if you get good high quality oil then it will be near tasteless. Which means you can actually taste the egg instead of whatever oil / lard you fried them with.
So the stock photo for "processed food" in MSM reports seems to be a picture of a hamburger. As far as I'm aware, the only processed things in a hamburger are the bun and the cheese. Oh - maybe the secret sauce; but I tell them to hold the cheese and sauce.
For me, processed meat means rubbery hotdog sausages; reconstituted chicken meat; doner kebab; TV dinners; fishcakes, and so on. [Edit: ham and bacon, of course, but only a crazy person eats a quarter-pound of bacon.] I imagine some of those are fine, but if you can't see the unprocessed ingredient, then the 'Lemon Market' rule says it's probably not what it's supposed to be.
> Processed meat refers to meat that has been preserved by smoking, curing, salting or adding preservatives. This includes sausages, bacon, ham, salami and pâtés.
> If you currently eat more than 90g (cooked weight) of red or processed meat a day, the Department of Health and Social Care advises that you cut down to 70g.
Scanning the article, I do not see any definition, except that at one place "fresh" is also mentioned.
I assume that "unprocessed" meat refers to meat that is cooked at home, as opposed to buying sausages, ham or any other industrial meat products, which may contain various additives or impurities from techniques like smoking.
This new study still shows an increased probability of cancer when consuming more than 200 g of unprocessed red meat per day, which is indeed more than should normally be eaten.
I have always been skeptical about these claims about the effects of eating meat, because they do not differentiate between the different methods of cooking the meat. I doubt that eating meat that was fried in oil has the same health effects as eating meat that was baked in an oven.
Other than the pedantic both cured and fermented count as chemically preserved in a broad sense, I think the general modern understanding of "processed foods" means that "ultra-processed foods" per the webmd definition https://www.webmd.com/diet/what-are-processed-foods#:~:text=....
e.g. foods that are doped with additives that don't necessarily occur in the food's base state, including dyes, preservatives, added flavors generated in lab environments, etc.
To be fair I'm not advocating either way, since I'm sure I ate some form of ultra-processed food this morning just by having grocery store brand jelly on my toast, but I think the argument is that by mixing these into the diet frequently there are unknown long-term side effects on the human body by eating these in excess.
My Dad is 101 and doing OK, and he has always preferred large salads, small amounts of lean meat. I feel better whenever I hit the Fuhrman Diet for six months.