Processed to Death
Empower Weekly Wisdom - Episode 43
May 23, 2026
Yes, you already know that package of crap you picked up off the grocery store shelf in a moment of weakness when you made the mistake of shopping while hungry is not good for you. The label with a laundry list of unpronounceable ingredients clearly marks it as processed. And you’re intelligent enough to know that those chemical additives, preservatives, artificial colours and artificial flavours will not do your health any favours. So, there’s no point discussing it.
What I want to discuss is the harmful food choices you may be unintentionally making. The ones that you mistakenly believe are healthy when in fact they are not. Today, we’re discussing the natural foods that, through minimal processing, become detrimental to your health.
You see, even without additives, simple mechanical processing changes the digestion speed of otherwise healthy foods, creating harmful spikes in blood sugar and insulin with consequent crashes. And it is this repeated pattern of dramatic blood sugar fluctuations that leads to hyperinsulinemia and eventually the development of Type 2 Diabetes.
Stone Ground vs Steel Milled Flour
Flour seems innocent enough. After all, isn’t bread the staff of life? Well, it was before modern industrial milling practices turned it into the agent of disease. Here’s the difference between traditional and modern processing:
You will see parallels with other grains, such as quick oats vs. Steel-Cut oats. I will not detail them here, but a quick check with Google will provide you with a similar comparison to the one above. Instead, I want to move on to other presumed healthy food items:
Apple Sauce vs Apples
Whole apples provide significantly more fibre because the skin is included. Fibre slows digestion, which keeps you feeling full longer and prevents sharp blood sugar spikes.
Not only is the applesauce nutritionally impoverished by processing, rendering it nutritionally inferior to the apple in its original form, but it is also stripped of its fibre, which spikes blood sugar. This is important to note because applesauce still contains more fibre than the next stage in apple processing: apple juice.
Apple juice, like other juices, is all the sugar with none of the fibre. In other words, a nutritionally destitute sugar bomb. I know there is a whole health industry grown up around green juices and juice cleanses and other such nonsense. Truth is, some of these juices are as bad as or worse than drinking soft drinks. The only difference is that folks drinking soft drinks are not under the illusion that their beverage choice is healthy.
The point I’m trying to drive home is that sometimes even minimal processing dramatically changes how we digest certain foods. A lot of folks believe they are making healthy, responsible food choices when, in fact, they are eating foods that are sabotaging their health. And then they wonder why they are gaining weight and losing health.
But you don’t have to take my word for it. Dr. Fung and Doctor Vinay Prasad do a great job of breaking down the dangers of processed foods in the videos below.
