When people think of processing food they think about refined sugar, fat, flower, additives, salt, and MSG commonly known as junk food. When the food industry does this kind of processing they do it in order to increase the taste and make more sales, and the consequence is the very low nutrient density of the food. Nutrient density means that there are a lot of calories inside the meal for example in ice cream there is a lot of sugar and fat but not much anything else. No phytochemicals, antioxidants, minerals, or vitamins. In other words, there are too many macronutrients in form of calories but not many micronutrients. Plus all of the fiber is usually removed leading to rapid digestion and that creates cycles of hunger and overeating leading to obesity. This type of processed food is also something known as supernormal stimuli. Because we have never been exposed to refined sugar and fat our brain is overstimulated leading to the downregulation of dopamine responses in the synapses of the brain as same as in drug addiction. More about processed food in a related article (What Is a Processed Food? -Understanding the Basics).

Processing is not always bad.

It is just a technique used by the industry and not something inherently bad. It all depends on the purpose behind its use. Processing can also be used in reverse for increasing the nutritional value and profile of the food. This type of processing is used in farming where the nutrition profile and cost of the animal feed are the priority. In human consumption, it is used to increase palatability. The problem is in the evolutional conditioning of our brain that our brain seeks only calories, not nutrition, and that in nature nutrition comes along with calories. There is no separation. If we want to eat something sweet we will have to eat entire fruit and that is wild fruit, not a hybrid that was designed to have more sugar content.

Processing food to make it more palatable is not a good thing in a nutritional sense. In other words, processing food will create nutritional deficiencies among all other correlated diseases like obesity, diabetes, cancer, cardiovascular diseases, chronic inflammation…

However, sometimes processing can be used in exactly the opposite way to increase nutrition density and that is the secret.

One good example would be cacao powder.

The processing of cacao is what gave it “superfood“ status.

Cacao powder is one of the best sources of magnesium and other minerals as well as one of the top if not the number one sources of antioxidants in the world. One of the best food items you can buy in terms of nutrient density. Cocoa beans naturally have energy stored in the form of saturated fat. The same fat you can find in butter or any other animal products. In this case, what the industry does is actually grind then heat and press the beans’ liquor to remove its fat content. In the first step after collection, the seeds are placed where they can ferment. Then they are dried, and the nibs are then milled to create cocoa liquor (cocoa particles suspended in cocoa butter).

There is no such thing as raw cacao because if fermentation is interrupted, the resulting cocoa may be ruined if underdone.

The cocoa seed maintains a flavor similar to raw potatoes. Another way is to treat cocoa nibs with alkalization, usually with potassium carbonate, to develop flavor and color.

However, what is important is that the cocoa liquor is pressed to extract the cocoa butter, leaving a solid mass called cocoa press cake. The amount of butter extracted from the liquor is controlled by the manufacturer to produce press cake with different proportions of fat. The cocoa press cake is broken into small pieces to form kibbled press cake, which is then pulverized to form cocoa powder. Cocoa butter is later used in the manufacture of chocolate and with added sugar and powdered milk cocoa powder loses its good nutrition profile.

The secret of cacao’s high “superfood“ nutrition density is actually the removal of its fat content and not just the high nutrition of the cocoa beans themselves. When you remove the macronutrient calories and at the same time leave all the micronutrient polyphenols and minerals in the bean, then you are lowering the number of calories (some are still left in the bean in the fat that is not removed), and you are increasing the relative amount of micronutrient content ratio to one calorie.

Processing, in this case, has created the opposite effect of regular processing where excess fat and sugar are added to increase the taste of the product. You can replicate the same processing at home to increase the nutrition profile of your diet without adding any excess calories.

Wholly grail of nutrition science. To increase the level of nutrients and prevent deficiencies without eating more calories and getting fat.

Or decreasing the level of calories in the diet to lose weight without suffering from nutrient deficiencies.

Now you have learned “the secret“ knowledge of nutrient density.

How can you do this at home? You just replicate the same process with some other food products that have calorie reserve in the form of fat. For example, most nuts and seeds have high-fat content.

So what can you do? How can you replicate these, if you don’t have a cocoa liquor press machine?

Actually, you can if you want. It is called home oil extraction, and many of the juices have the capability to extract oil at home from seeds with some added parts. These home oil extraction devices are designed for raw home oil extraction for health-oriented people who do not want to use refined rancid fats and want fresh squeezed homemade oil for their salad. If you want for example to use omega-three oil, it will get rancid immediately after extraction, as soon as it has contact with oxygen it is gone. Purchasing the flaxseed oil in bottles in the stores is not recommended, and home oil extraction is a much better option if you want omega three oil as a salad dressing.

However, now that you have the knowledge of “the secret” you will use these in the opposite direction. You can use a home oil extraction machine to extract the oil but you will not be eating it. You will throw away extracted oil and only eat the pulp in your muesli. If you are eating oil and cannot lower your oil consumption then replace refined rancid oil for salad dressing with home oil extracted one but it is not recommended practice. If you take 100 grams of sesame seeds for example (raw, if heated they will use some of the phytochemicals that are not thermo-stabile) and put them through a home oil extraction machine it will extract a big chunk of its oil content.

One hundred grams of sesame seed has 48 grams of fat. Half of its weight is fat. The home oil extraction machine generally can extract about 40% by weight varying according to the nature of the seeds you will be left with 8 grams of extracted fat (just enough to aid the absorption of fat-soluble phytochemicals). The number of calories extracted will be 360 and the number of still remaining calories 205. If you add 30 grams of “raw“ cocoa powder and let’s say 10 grams of ground cinnamon, you will have a mixture that has 298 calories in total. For those 300 calories which are about 15% of the average grown men’s daily calorie requirement, we will have (if we used organic products that are grown in mineral-rich soil) 1111mg of calcium which is more than in one liter of milk and 111% RDA, 584% RDA for copper, 244% RDA for iron, 233% RDA for manganese, 121% RDA for magnesium, 122% RDA for phosphorous, 91% RDA for zinc, 71% for selenium, 28,2 grams of fiber for 74% RDA, 24 grams of protein and 41000 units on ORAC scale. That is the power of superfoods.

In comparison 2 whole eggs with 2 large slices of whole wheat bread and nothing else will have 353 calories and 18% RDA for calcium, 23% RDA for copper, 40% RDA for iron, 82% RDA for manganese, 17% RDA for magnesium, 48% RDA for phosphorous, 22% RDA for zinc, 22% for selenium, 5,2 grams of fiber for 14% RDA, 21,8 grams of protein and 1160 units on ORAC scale with 328,2mg of cholesterol for 170%RDA (ideally this number will be zero).

Keep in mind that both eggs and whole wheat bread are whole foods and that there are people out there that will advocate for the use of eggs and whole wheat bread as the best of the best. What do you think will give you more satiety, 100 grams of sesame pulp, cocoa powder, and cinnamon mixture with 28,2 grams of fiber (you will have a hard time eating all of this because fiber gets bloated in the presence of fluid) or 2 eggs with two slices of whole wheat bread (most the people will eat white bread). Both of these meals are made from whole foods that in reality can be a lot of different things. Meat is whole food so is honey.

Not all thing is made equal, and we need to use a scientific approach when designing meal plans not just whole food or not just even a whole food vegan label.

It is better to eat whole food instead of processed food, but this is just for the beginners, the average couch potato that doesn’t understand and doesn’t care about anything. Using techniques like “the secret“ and others can give a completely different nutrition profile.

Sometimes even the extraction of fiber can be a positive measure for increasing the nutrition profile of your diet.

We can process fiber out of vegetables that are full of nutrients but low in calories and full of fiber which limits our capacity for eating them in large amounts. We can process fiber out or in other words extract the fluid from them. This would be a subject for another article.

Juicing greens for example has its benefits because there are not many calories in them and the fluid is full of nutrients. If you eat enough fiber in the other meals, you can add this practice for increasing the nutrition content of your diet as well.

The real situation we are facing is that soil is depleted and there is no scientifically possible way to produce food organically for 7 billion people on the planet plus for all of the animals on farms. It takes 7 calories of starch to produce one calorie of meat. Then when we process food and take most of the nutrition out we are left in a situation of a chronically malnourished population. And yes you can be morbidly obese and chronically malnourished at the same time. You can eat excessive amounts of calories but those calories are all empty and deprived of nutrition. Most of the population is obese and at the same time, most of the population has severe forms of different nutritional deficiencies. It is estimated that 92 percent of the population in the U.S. is suffering from at least one mineral or vitamin deficiency based on the Dietary Reference Intakes. Keep in mind that if we take out the babies and professional athletes and people with professionally designed diet plans from nutritionists that this number actually means that we all have nutritional deficiencies. Every single one of us, me, you, and everyone else except breastfeeding babies is basically malnourished. And also keep in mind that these charts are based on food that is grown with synthetic fertilizers so these charts are completely inaccurate because they are based upon organically grown food. Commercially grown food on depleted soil is completely deprived of minerals, 100%.

Even with these fake charts According to the CDC and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA):

• 6 out of 10 Americans are deficient in magnesium
• 9 out of 10 Americans are deficient in choline
• 10 out of 10 are deficient in potassium (98% of the population)
• 10 out of 10 are deficient in rare earth metals needed for the human body
• 7 out of 10 are deficient in calcium
• 8 out of 10 are deficient in vitamin E
• 10 out of 10 are deficient in fiber (97% of the population)
• 7 out of 10 are deficient in vitamin K
• 50 percent of Americans are deficient in vitamin A, vitamin C, vitamin D
• 90 percent of Americans of color are vitamin D deficient
• Approximately 70 percent of elderly Americans are vitamin D deficient
• Also, 0 out of 10 are deficient in protein (less than 1% of the population)
• Also 10 out of 10 had excessive intakes of sodium (97% of the population)

If you don’t want to change anything about your diet you can use these “secret“ techniques just as added bonus a couple of times a week. We can think about home oil extraction but not as intended. People usually do home oil extraction to have fresh, not rancid oil that they can use for dressing but no matter the source of oil even if it is derived from a home oil extraction machine it is still oil. Oil is the ultimate junk food with empty calories. Is it better to have home oil extraction than refined rancid store-bought oil? Yes sure but, it is still better to avoid oil if you can. The problem is that most people can’t. In thease realistic situations where most of you will consume oil, you can try to correct some of the nutrition deficits by using home oil extraction as a form of reverse corrective measure. You will have fresh oil but still do not throw away the pulp. You are doing this for the pulp in the first place. Think about home oil extraction pulp as a multivitamin multimineral supplement. You can eat this type of muesli let’s say two times a week, and you can juice some of the vegetables two or three times a week just to protect yourself from deficiencies and to increase the antioxidant value of your diet.

If you do not want to do anything for your health or lifestyle just do this. Home oil extraction and juicing will help you more than any pharmaceutical drug or therapy or supplement, and it is dirt cheap. You just need to spend a couple of hours a week in the kitchen. I will analyze all of this in more detail in correlated articles.

Sources:

Passages selected from a book: “Go Vegan? Review of Science: Part 2” [Milos Pokimica]

1. US Department of Health and Human Services and US Department of Agriculture. 2015-2020 Dietary Guidelines for Americans December 2015. Available at: https://health.gov/dietaryguidelines/2015/. Accessed 4/23/18.
2. National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases. Overweight & Obesity Statistics. Available at: https://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/health-statistics/overweight-obesity. Accessed 8/31/17.

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