Hi everyone this is Monica Reinagel and you're listening to the nutrition

Divas quick and dirty tips for eating well and feeling fabulous welcome this

week we're talking about processed food and how or whether it fits

into a healthy diet.

Last week I had the pleasure of spending some time with the wonderful physicians, nurses, and administrators of a health care company called Health by Design in San Antonio, Texas.

And in one of my presentations to this group, I said that as processed foods have come to make up more and more of our food intake, the nutritional quality of our diet has suffered.

And in the Q&A after my presentation, one of the doctors asked

what exactly it is about processing that makes foods bad for us. My mother cans vegetables from her garden every year, he said. Is this

processing making those vegetables unwholesome? And I realized that I have been

guilty of using the word processed in a sort of lazy way as a blanket term to describe foods that don't add much or detract from the nutritional quality of our diet,

as if all processing is the same

and all processed foods are bad,

but of course this isn't the case at all.

Some forms of processing strip nutrients

from foods and add undesirable chemicals creating more concentrated sources of

empty calories. But processing can also do many desirable things such as removing

impurities, killing pathogens, adding or creating beneficial compounds, and making nutrients more bioavailable.

Take yogurt, for example.

To make yogurt, milk is first pasteurized, which kills harmful bacteria,

and then it's inoculated with active cultures and warmed to

promote the growth of probiotic bacteria. As they multiply, these bacteria

break down much of the lactose in the milk, making the milk more digestible.

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