Nutrition and food processing

Food can be made safer and more palatable through processing. Food processing therefore has a valuable role in contributing to good nutrition. However, some nutritionists advise caution.

Food processing is sometimes seen as adversely affecting people’s health: polished rice was identified as a cause of beri-beri when people realized that removing the skin of the rice was a process which removed essential nutrients.

In the late 1800s in the United States, babies started developing scurvy; there was a veritable plague. It turned out that the vast majority of sufferers were being fed milk that had been heat treated (as suggested by Pasteur) to control bacterial disease. Pasteurization was effective against bacteria, but it destroyed the vitamin C, causing a nutritional disease.

Other examples of adverse effects of food processing, together with research findings and the need to be cautious in the light of our limited and incomplete knowledge, have called food processing into question.

Today's leading nutritionists advise against the processing of food where possible, since undiscovered but possibly essential nutrients may be thereby removed, or toxins may be added or produced through processing and high temperature cooking. Also processing can replace some of the mechanical/biochemical body processes which are essential for full digestion, and hence good nutrition.

Cornell nutritional biochemist T. Colin Campbell, Professor and director of the China project stated at a symposium on epidemiology:

"Analyses of data from the China studies ... is leading to policy recommendations." He mentioned three:

• "The greater the variety of plant-based foods in the diet, the greater the benefit. Variety insures broader coverage of known and unknown nutrient needs.
• Provided there is plant food variety, quality and quantity, a healthful and nutritionally complete diet can be attained without animal-based food.
• The closer the food is to its native state -- with minimal heating, salting and processing -- the greater will be the benefit."(Cornell Chronicle 28/6/01)