Clean eating and avoiding processed food- good or bad?

I love having fresh food. Freshly prepared food with fresh vegetables and fruits, brimming with (what else)"freshness"!! And do you have any idea how difficult it is to find fresh food? 

So much of food that we consume today is smothered with fat and sugar or it is full of preservatives, colorings, synthetic ingredients. Even your apples are suspect as they are coated with wax to prevent them from spoiling. 

So what exactly is processed food? Anything that comes out of a box or a packet is generally ultra processed. 

Eating clean is to go back to the basics and focus our diets around whole grains, fruits and vegetables. This will give us more energy and fill us with better nutrition.

In our quest for convenience, we have lost our taste for good food. No wonder people binge on "comfort foods" like a bag of chips or cheese pizza which end up as food addictions.

 Our tastebuds have become so simplistic that we like foods which are either sugary such as doughnuts, sweets or salty such as chips and pretzels or meaty such as processed sausages. I was surprised when someone asked me why I was drinking milk without sugar. Why do I need refined white sugar to mask the natural, inherent sweetness of milk? Similarly, if you head into a coffee shop, it's no more just a plain coffee but a dessert with so many toppings.

We need to get back to our basics and not cloak foods with additives. A freshly prepared meal with salad and natural flavors will probably overload our tastebuds!!

Mediterranean and Japanese diets, which do not smother food with spices but rather let the natural flavor of food speak for itself, are unsurprisingly the healthiest diets to follow. Those regions have the highest longevity rates in the world.