5 Ways Highly Processed Foods Kill You Before Your Time

Picture this: you are indulging in a bag of flavored chips or enjoying the sweetness of a candy bar. What you may not realize is that behind the appealing taste of these highly processed junk foods lies a deadly combination of artificial additives, preservatives, and chemicals.

These ingredients are like strangers to the human diet. They are not just appetizers, in the long term, they sabotage your health and lead to an earlier grave. Does that taste sweeter? Oh, no!

What are highly processed foods?

Highly processed foods are foods that, to a greater extent, have been altered from their natural state through various processes that include the addition of ingredients to extend shelf life, enhance flavor, or change texture.

These highly processed products, like sugary cereals, sugar beverages, burgers, pizza, frozen meals, and snack foods, often involve adding preservatives, sweeteners, colors, and artificial flavors.

You can picture all sorts of highly processed foods on supermarket shelves containing endless ingredient labels.

Worth noting: Processed foods are not just empty calories; they are loaded with ingredients that have long-term consequences for your health and quality of life. They increase your risk of obesity, cancer, infertility, hypertension, diabetes, and heart disease.

They fuel insulin resistance and inflammation because of excessive sugar, salt, trans fats, and other deadly chemical additives.

Why are highly processed foods so “appealing”?

Highly processed foods are addictive. They change the chemicals in your brain responsible for appetite control, pleasure, and reward. They were designed to be highly palatable and irresistible.

Imagine how you may find yourself struggling to stop eating a delicious piece of cake. It is beyond your natural control and willpower.

These food products also damage your satiety and hunger hormones. You delay feeling fully, and you might constantly have periods of intense hunger.

What’s more? The marketing campaigns.

Highly processed foods are advertised as healthy options to trick your mind. Take a look at the billboards, television ads, and colored packages on supermarket shelves.

5 ways highly processed foods negatively affect your health

We all want to live long and healthy lives while remaining productive and vibrant. We can achieve such a quality of life by getting the optimal nutritional requirements, minimizing our exposure to toxins, and supporting ourselves with other tools such as sleep, rest, and exercise.

Eating highly processed foods deteriorates your health, makes you sick, may deprive your body of essential nutrients, and increases your chances of contracting communicable diseases.

The following are five ways that highly processed foods can negatively affect your health and kill you earlier:

1. Highly processed foods lack some essential nutrients

Your body needs a list of essential nutrients to function. Highly processed foods often lack essential nutrients that are vital for maintaining optimal health.

These foods undergo extensive processing, stripping them of their natural nutrients in the refining and manufacturing processes.

Thus, they are often loaded with empty calories, unhealthy fats, and added sugars while being deficient in important vitamins, minerals, and fibre.

A person who thrives on pizza, burgers, canned cereals, artificially sweetened drinks, and other junkies is being overfed while undernourished. That is the case with being overweight or obese while your body lacks important nutrients required by cells.

The list of ingredients in such foods contains a list of fortified vitamins. There is a concern about whether such synthetics are being fully absorbed and utilized in the body.

Regular consumption of these nutrient-poor foods can lead to deficiencies and compromise the body’s ability to function optimally, affecting everything from energy levels to immune function.

2. Effects on your reproductive health

Your diet plays an important role in reproductive health, and consuming a diet high in processed foods can have detrimental effects on fertility.

Research suggests that diets rich in processed foods, particularly those high in trans fats and refined carbohydrates, may negatively impact reproductive potential in both men and women.

These foods can disrupt hormone levels, impair sperm quality, and interfere with ovulation, making it harder to conceive, a condition known as metabolic infertility.

3. They make you prone to non-communicable diseases

For thousands of years, our metabolism and genetic makeup thrived on minimally processed and nutrient-dense foods. While we have shifted to industrially processed foods, our bodily mechanisms have not changed.

This condition has made us sicker than ever in human history.

The consumption of highly processed foods is strongly linked to an increased risk of non-communicable diseases such as obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and certain types of cancer.

These foods are often high in unhealthy fats, sugars, and sodium which can contribute to weight gain, insulin resistance, inflammation, and elevated blood pressure.

Over time, these factors can lead to the development of chronic diseases that pose serious health risks and significantly impact the quality of life.

Also, highly processed foods impair your body’s immunity against infections, making you prone to highly infectious diseases like COVID-19.

4. Highly processed foods and link to the mental health crisis

We are living in the face of a mental health crisis. 1 out of every 4 people you meet might be either struggling with depression or on anti-depressants at one time in life. Depression is the leading mental health disorder and second-leading cause of disability globally.

There are many factors that contribute to the crisis, but the current evidence has proved impaired brain metabolic health due to damaged mitochondria (part of the living cell responsible for generating energy) and disruption of chemicals within the brain as the most important factors in developing mental health disorders.

All these can be attributed to highly processed foods and linked to other metabolic disorders like insulin resistance and inflammation.

Mounting evidence suggests a significant link between diet and mental health, with highly processed foods playing a detrimental role in exacerbating mental health issues.

Diets high in processed foods, particularly those high in sugar, unhealthy fats, and artificial additives, have been associated with an increased risk of depression, anxiety, and other mood disorders.

These foods can disrupt neurotransmitter function, trigger inflammation in the brain, and impair cognitive function, contributing to poor mental health outcomes, as described by Dr. Chris Palmer in his book, “Brain Energy”.

5. Damage to your willpower as caused by highly processed foods

If you didn’t know, sugar and highly processed carbohydrates are as addictive as cocaine. They stimulate the same spots in your brain as are done by other strong and addictive drugs.

Highly processed foods are designed to be highly palatable and addictive, making them hard to resist and leading to overconsumption.

These foods often trigger reward pathways in the brain, causing a surge of dopamine and creating cravings for more. Over time, frequent consumption of processed foods can weaken your willpower and self-control, making it harder to make healthy choices and resist unhealthy temptations.

So what to do?

Understand: True nourishing and nutrient-dense foods have no ingredient labels, and they are not found on the walls of high-end supermarkets.

Choosing whole, unprocessed foods can help reduce these risks, promote long-term health and well-being, strengthen your willpower, power your brain, increase your sex and reproductive potential, and make you feel vibrant every day.

We, at Abite Afya, are committed to empowering you with science-based tools that help you improve your health and quality of life. We achieve that by creating educational content that helps you make healthy choices.

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Malonja Magaluda, MD

Medical Writer | Offering top-notch writing services in the medical, scientific, and academic realms | I share practical insights on weight loss, fasting, nutrition, sleep, productivity and longevity.