The Impact of Convenience Foods on Health and Nutrition

Running head: NUTRITION
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Author’s Note

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Part 1
Question 1
With the evolving world, the generation is also evolving rapidly and with this rapid
growth, the consumption process of the human kind has changed immensely. In order to meet the
requirements of an individual’s needs of consumption, development of processed foods are
prepared, often termed as Convenience Food or Tertiary Processed Food. Examples of such are
frozen foods, ready to eat foods, cake mixes and many more. These foods do not require any
preparation time and can be directly consumed, thus the term “Convenience”. Apart from saving
time and making life easy, the convenience foods are of major health concern for both adults and
children. As the foods are prepared and processed in factories, they need to be packaged before
human consumption. This packaging is usually done using Plastic, which is a major threat to the
environment. In order to meet the food’s flavors and taste requirement of humans, several kinds
of food additives, food flavors and food preservatives are added. The compositions of these
processed foods are rich in fats, carbohydrates, sugar and salt, for increasing the flavors. These
artificial addition of components in food and consumption of these foods results in obesity and
other health care problems. The reason behind addition of these additional components is to
increase the appealing behavior of food to humans and the selling of the products.
Examples of convenience foods are Breakfast Cereals, Frozen Vegetables, Canned Fruits,
Cheese, Savory Snacks, Microwave Meals and many more.
Health Risks due to Convenience Foods:
Convenience food’s composition of excess chemically modified sugar, salt, fats and

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carbohydrates are a vital cause of occurring health problems in the society. Some of the major
health risks are mentioned below:
 Inadequacy of Nutritional values: Processing of the foods often results in destroying the
nutritional value of the food. Therefore, the processed foods have low nutritional value
than the unprocessed ones. In the production process of convenience foods, the synthetic
nutrients (nutrients developed in laboratory) are added, instead of naturally occurring
nutrients. These synthetic nutrients are not the efficient replacement of the naturally
found nutrients in plants and animals. Addition of these synthetic nutrients results in the
destruction of the quality of foods.
 Composition of Artificial Ingredients: The main objective behind producing convenience
foods is to make profit out of it and in order to do so, the producers or the manufacturers
often add artificial ingredients (produced in laboratory and are chemically modified) to
enhance the taste and flavor of the food. The most common artificial ingredients are Food
Preservatives (to increase the lifetime of food), Colorings (to give food an attractive
color), Flavorings (to give food a unique flavor) and Texturants (to give food its perfect
texture).
 Over consumption: The convenience foods are designed for over consumption. The
addition of different chemically modified substances to enhance the taste and smell of the
foods, results in satisfying the taste buds of humans, therefore resulting in over
consumption. Over consumption further leads to Obesity and other health care related
issues.
Question 2
Dietary desires of the healthy children aged a pair of years through eleven years archaic