What Is This Common Food? You Get 3 Guesses.

Today lets talk about a food that is in just about every home. Here are some hints: you have seen this food since you were a small child, it has been widely used since the 1840’s, and it can be anything from meat to fruits and vegetables. Right! You guessed it, Canned Food.

How does canning affect the quality, safety, and immune building properties of food? Well… lets understand how we got here first.

Canned food was created before people knew much about nutrition, a method was needed to help food stay edible for longer periods of time. Armies needed food they could take on the move and canning fit the bill. No one understood why the food stayed edible and what harm was done to the food, if any, by using this process.

Later Louis Pasteur discovered that microbes in the food along with enzymes, oxidation and dehydration caused food to go bad. The canning process uses heat to destroy all the microbes, most of the enzymes and by removing the air, the food is preserved.

Now wait a second! Some microbes are good for me, right? Yes, around 80% of our immune system is contained in our gut, which grows in strength by the aid of consuming healthful microbes. We just saw above that canning uses heat to destroy all the microbes good and bad in the food, so the healthful quality of the food is affected in a negative way.

Heat affects some of the vitamins in the food, thus reducing the quality of the food again. Looks like another strike against canned food.

It appears that today many experts in the nutrition field don’t understand the importance of enzymes in food. They assist in fighting aging, weight loss, lowering cholesterol, cleaning the colon, breaking down fats, strengthening the immune system, improve mental capacity, detoxifying the body, building muscles from protein, eliminating carbon dioxide from the lungs etc. Seems kind of important I think, but enzymes are destroyed by the heat of the canning process. That is the 3rd strike against canned foods.

It is interesting to think that canning was invented to cure issues of food spoilage, but it in turns creates food health and nutritional issues. Raw food spoils rather fast and canned food denies the body of its health over-time.

Are we not eating food to maintain our health? I think there maybe a disconnect here. Give that some thought.

Notice we did not even talk about canning and food safety, you maybe surprised at that topic, it goes way beyond just killing the bad microbes, that’s coming up next time.