Part 6: The Frozen Section and Center Aisles Based on the book “What to Eat” by Marion Nestle
Researchers who work for the frozen food industry have looked into the hearts and minds of supermarket shoppers. Their profound insight: you want hot food on the table no more than 5 minutes after you begin preparing it and never more than 20. Frozen food companies dream up all kinds of prepared meals to grant this wish. Frozen fruits and veggies, however, are vastly underrated. At best they are picked at peak ripeness, flash frozen, and more or less ready to eat whenever you want them. You may have to perform some cooking tricks to compensate for the way freezing changes the texture, but in the dead of winter the frozen fruits and veggies are going to be of higher quality than your fresh ones. By law the ingredients of packaged foods must be listed in order by weight the one present in the greatest amount is listed first. For frozen fruits and veggies with single ingredients what you see is what you get. Freezing has practically no effect on the nutritional value of fresh produce. It does not change the number of calories, the amount of protein, fiber, carbs, fat, or minerals. As a general rule, the more that happens to a fruit or veggie between the time it is harvested and the time you eat it the more nutrients it is likely to lose. Whole fruits are a better nutritional bet than juices and fresh juices are better than frozen. When you see a juice labeled pulp free look for another option. The remaining aisles are devoted to foods in boxes, cans, bags, and bottles. Along with smaller sections containing such things like condiments, juices, cooking oils, baking supplies, health foods, canned fish, fruit, and veggies, entire aisles devoted to soda, to snack foods, to cookies and candies, and to cereal. Foods in the center aisles are highly profitable. And why not? They are made with the cheapest ingredients, advertised with the biggest budgets, and manufactured by some of the largest food corporations in the world. These companies pay slotting fees for that center aisle space, but make up for that expense in sales. You contribute to their income and that of the store everytime you move a product from shelf to shopping cart and pay for it at the register. Let’s talk about unprocessed, lightly processed, and ultra processed foods. Lightly processed foods use methods like aging, drying, freezing, canning, and cooking which do change foods, but they cause little loss of nutritional value, if any, and often make the nutrients more bioavailable to the body. More extreme processing methods add or subtract components of the food and cause significant changes in nutrient content. Frozen foods can be lightly or significantly processed. Frozen fruits and veggies look much like their fresh counterparts and are more or less nutritionally intact, but others like frozen meals and pastries are highly processed and much changed nutritionally. Ultra processing does three things to foods: 1. diminishes the nutritional value of basic ingredients, 2. adds calories from fats and sugars, and 3. disguises the loss of taste and texture with salt, artificial colors and flavors and other additives. Canned foods also can be lightly or heavily processed, their principal additives are salt and sugars. The nutrient composition of a food depends on several factors: how much water it contains, the more water in a food the more dilute its nutrients; the solubility of nutrients in water, some of our vitamins and minerals are water soluble so if you throw out the water you throw out those nutrients; the extent of processing, the more that is done to a food between harvest and eating the lower its nutritional content including heat, light, air, and storage; what gets added, your salts and sugars. Remember that raw carrots may have more nutrients than canned carrots but canned carrots are still worth eating if you cannot get anything better.
