What are "processed foods" and why should you avoid them?

The term processed means anything that has been produced or changed by a humans hand. Like flour for instance it starts as a whole grain and is ground into a powder. If it is white flour we are talking about then it is bleached. Yeah that's right I said bleached. After that they reintroduce certain vitamins hence the term on the label "enriched" wheat flour. They do this because the bleaching removes these nutrients.So as you can see a loaf of white bread is extensively processed just in the flour itself not including whatever else they might be adding throughout the baking and packing process. Any king of "junk food" such as chips and cookies that sit unrefrigerated and exposed always have "preservatives". Some of these substances that are added to help the product taste fresh have names as long as the paragraph I just typed. I don't know about you but I am pretty sure that when we were all growing and hunting all of our own food these preservatives were not in them. One of the things that these things will do to your body is throw off you biochemistry. There is a whole host of biological reactions that are going on in your body as we speak. These reactions are dictated by hormones their precursors and enzymes and the glands that provide and regulate them within our bodies. One of the main regulators is the thyroid. If it is constantly having to adjust the effects will be a pretty immediate felling of fatigue and mood change. That is why people have trouble getting enough energy to get through the day. Their thyroid is constantly adjusting to metabolize all the junk. That flour I was talking about earlier will also act like play dough in your small intestine and coat it. The problem with this is that the micro vili inside the intestine that absorb the nutrients are now blocked. So you have physically separated your ability to absorb nutrients to a degree. The effect is increased and amplified if you are dehydrated. And as fate would have it most people do not drink enough water. I know that we can not completely remove processed foods from our diets but we can keep them to a minimum. Start shopping around the outside of the grocery store instead of the center. Make more whole natural choices for what you eat. Your body will thank you.