What do you fill your cart with at the supermarket? Is it mostly produce and fresh ingredients? Or is it boxed, canned and shelf-stable processed items? Processed foods are terrible for your health. While having a few shelf-stable items in your household is fine, when your kitchen is filled with processed foods, it needs a makeover.

Shelf-stable items certainly make up the bulk of processed offerings, however there are many to be found in the frozen section and even fresh sections of your supermarket. A good rule of thumb is to read the ingredients. If the list goes beyond 5 ingredients or you can’t pronounce the ingredient list, stay away.

What’s so bad about processed foods?

Artificial ingredients

The next time you’re tempted to buy chips and cookies off the shelves, consider making them yourself. They’re filled with preservatives, colorants, artificial flavoring, and texturants. What’s really scary is that processed foods can have tons more chemicals in them that aren’t listed on the label because “artificial flavors” is a way of protecting the secret recipe. What’s not a secret is this: it’s dangerous to your health.

Too much sugar

Americans eat way more sugar than they should, and processed food manufacturers do nothing to stop it. Before you buy something sweet, read the label and see how much sugar it contains per serving. You are much better off buying fresh ingredients and baking your own cookies using natural sweeteners like raw organic honey or even pureed apples to add sweetness.

Less nutritional value

For all the ingredients that are listed on the packaging of processed foods, take a look at the nutritional content. You’ll see loads of sodium and sugar, but what about vitamins? Not so much. There’s a reason our collective health has gone down the tubes as a nation. We’re cramming our bellies full of these foods that lack the nutrients we need, leading to the decline of good health.

It’s addicting

Processed foods certainly taste good. That’s because they’re engineered to. Our bodies desire healthful foods and respond to them but when we eat more processed foods, the chemicals in them trick our brains into craving them.

What can you do? For starters, cut down on processed foods in your home. Stop buying them and start buying fresher ingredients. If you don’t know how to cook healthfully, look up recipes online and use your slow cooker to make more nutritious meals that are waiting for you when you get home.

Eating a little processed food here and there isn’t the end of the world so if you do have chips from the vending machine at work once a month or indulge in some other junk food, it’s fine. However, the more of it you eat, the worse off you will be. Stick to filling your body with what it needs and you’ll soon find you won’t have an appetite for those processed foods like you once did.