Do you really not eat bread? We've got to come up with better ways to categorize foods. At face value such a term seems to imply you should only eat raw food.
I do avoid eating (highly processed white) bread in most meals, because it doesn't make me feel great.
We're really targeting "highly-processed" foods. Personally I draw a line between sausage that went through something resembling a hand-powered meat grinder vs. sausage that has been obliterated into a fine pink sludge and reformed. Both are processed, but the latter is highly processed, with more room for additives.
The issue with sausage isn't the processing, it's the preservatives and the choice of meats (and their corresponding nutrients) that go into the sausage.
My understanding is that degree of "processing" is acknowledged to be an imperfect metric, just one that fits easily with EU labeling concerns. I just don't think that's as useful as is advertised.
I’m not even talking about the fact that flour is processed in the general sense. The generic sliced grocery store loaf itself has added preservatives, sugar, etc that you wouldn’t find in a homemade loaf. When people talk about eating non-processed foods they usually mean eating whole (ex. Fruits, vegetables) or foods without preservatives and stabilizers.
> I think we all mean bleached, stabilized and enriched flour.
The entire point of this conversation is that the meaning of "processed" is entirely unclear, and I still don't understand what beef you have against bleached, stabilized, and enriched flour.
I'd put any amount of money that whatever your concerns are can be addressed with the aphorism "everything in moderation".
That's a great point. In the USA the FDA mandates what is acceptable in moderation, individually. There is a maximum dose of a known poison that is considered "ok". The powers at be allow food companies to Micro Poison the public.
A good example is in 2012 big-ag started spraying wheat and oat with glyphosate to improve yield. Glyphosate is, by any available metric, a biohazard. Glyphosate is "ok" in small quantities (-- which by the way it has been measured in consumer food products to be orders of magnitude higher than allowed 100% of the time --). But my point is that each serving of bread will contain the maximum allowable dose. So if you eat 2 servings - you got 2x the dose. That's how the USA calculates it.
The aphorism "everything in moderation" is useful only because it doesn't specify what amount would be acceptable as moderation. Is having a slice of bread a day considered moderation? What about five slices? Is having 10 grams of sugar a day moderation? What about 50 grams? The meaning of "moderation" is conveniently unclear.
