Shortages of key ingredients during war-time and the rising need to work for the middle class led to households adopting processed food as an alternative to slow-cooked, authentic home food.Powdered milk/custard, cereals, pre-made sauces, and biscuits started dominating the dining table due to time shortage and convenience.

The Rise Of Processed Food

Processed food has earned a reputation for being high in saturated fat, sugar, and salt.Another major concern about processed foods is the long list of complicated ingredients that are cryptic to decode, added to enhance flavor, preserve color, improve consistency, keep ingredients mixed and preserve for longer.

Added Ingredients

Processed food has aided the evolution of Homo Sapiens: As food became easy to eat and digest, our jaws and teeth became less powerful and smaller.The shape of our brains and even the development of language resulted partially from our eating habits in our evolutionary path.

Evolution: Shaping Up Humans

The need for food preservation has historically led the Ancient humans to develop techniques to process food.From learning to control fire to grinding grains, our ancestors have been able to process food in a variety of ways.

Processed Food in History

Processed food has changed our <a href="https://www.sciencefocus.com/tag/dna/">DNA</a> and the way we look. The current crop of super processed foods is altering our insulin resistance, teeth, metabolism, brain chemistry, and internal organs.

Changes in DNA

When I began to research the many ways in which we manipulate food for a book on food fraud back in 2014, I unearthed horrendous stories of deceit - from rotting meat dipped in bleach and sold back into the human food chain to fake milk made from urea, shampoo and milk powder.