By Erin Schumaker, Huffington Post

Pop quiz. Which of the following is considered a processed food: Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, homemade greek yogurt, bagged baby spinach? (Answer: All of them.)

The point here, is that “processed foods” includes a much wider variety of products than most consumers typically associate with the term. Secondly, not all processed foods are evil. Processed foods can provide convenience, like in the case of bagged baby spinach, or safety, as in the case of pasteurized eggs, and can even — gasp — be healthy.

“The idea of saying just avoid processed foods is crazy,” Dawn Jackson Blatner, RD, CSSD, LDN, told The Huffington Post. “Yogurt is a processed food. It’s actually been cultured and packaged. Canned beans, with no other ingredient besides beans, is processed because [the beans] have been cooked and they have been canned.” Where Blatner draws the line with her endorsement is with extremely processed foods, which logically enough, is also where things start to get murky for consumers.

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