Coronavirus: Don’t Let Highly Processed Foods Weaken Your System

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older person with maskWe’re all aware of the dangers of contracting COVID-19, and we’re aware too that those most at risk are the elderly and those with underlying health conditions. If you’re overweight or suffer from any conditions such as high blood pressure, cancer, COPD or diabetes you’ll know that you need to take extra care.

But there’s something else we should be aware of, and it concerns the vast majority of us; the dangers in our modern diet. Let’s be honest, most of us don’t have a perfect diet (even supposing there is such a thing!). In fact, many of us just don’t take all that much care about our diet. Oh, we might eat a little more fruit occasionally to boost our vitamin and fiber intake, but apart from that we generally stick to a fairly common diet, which actually means one that includes a lot of processed food.

The dangers in our modern diet

processed foodWe get our bread ready baked. Our breakfast cereals come out of a box. We get our pasta sauce out of a jar. We get our soup out of a can. We get our pizza out of a box. Do you see the theme here? Our foods come ready-made and pre-packaged, which is a boon for most of us since we’re not all trained chefs and we certainly don’t have all day to prepare meals from scratch.

But the downside of ready-prepared meals is that you don’t have any say in what goes into them (and you probably don’t know what’s in them). And you can bet that the food companies are far more interested in making sure you love the taste than in making sure you get a healthy, balanced meal.

You only have to look at the ingredients list on some of these processed foods to see that they contain things that you’ve never even heard of, unless you make a habit of studying chemistry text books. Some of them are stuffed with so many additives that there’s hardly any room left for the good stuff!

The problem with additives

ingredients listThey put all kinds of things in there … flavourings, colourings, preservatives, etc. The idea behind it is good, make no mistake. They want your food to be extra tasty and to look good, and not go off too quickly. But there’s a downside to most of these additives. They’re not the kind of things you’d normally find in natural food, so basically you’re eating non-food chemicals along with your pasta sauce, or whatever. And that can play havoc with your system.