Minimise Processed Foods

"The further we move from the way our Nanna’s Nanna did things, the less healthy our food becomes" - Rach Condon

The goal is not to avoid processed foods, the goal here is for you to find your comfort-zone within the world of processed foods ie how much processing of your food are you comfortable with?

Traditional processing that Nanna’s Nanna would have done in her own kitchen or that she would have been familiar with include things like:

  • Baking bread and cakes
  • Churning butter
  • Fermenting pickles
  • Making relish & preserves
  • Cooking meat & vegetables
  • Making cheese
  • Distilling vinegar

Processing that happens in our modern factories that Nanna’s Nanna would not have been familiar with is the kind of processing that the MAMA Diet recommends you minimise. Things such as:

  • The Bleaching and deodorizing seed oils
  • Ultra-high temperature (UHT) pasteurization of milk to sterilise it
  • Genetically modifying plants and animals to increase desired traits
  • Adding synthetic flavours and colours to make things more appealing
  • Hydrogenation of oils to convert them from liquid to solid

And Forcing grains out of a tiny hole at high pressure to make them ‘puff’
 

3 steps to minimise the downsides of modern food processing:

  1. Go back to the question ‘would Nanna’s Nanna have eaten this?’
  2. Read the ingredients on the packet and avoid things you don’t understand or that you know are an additive, flavour or preservative.
  3. Use the shopping guide! 
     

NEW RESEARCH: "Highly processed foods meet the same criteria as tobacco for addiction, and labeling them as such might benefit public health, according to a new US study that proposes a set of criteria to assess the addictive potential of some foods"