I recently gave up eating takeout every night, but I’m too lazy to cook, which led to me replacing it with basically nothing but canned food. Like I’ll mix a can of beans and a can of mixed vegetables together, put half in a bowl and put the other half in a container for tomorrow, put salad dressing on it, and then that’s my dinner. I also eat a half can of fruit per day, because I found the shelf life and inconsistencies with produce to be too annoying.
On the one hand, I think I’m eating better than I was when I was doing nothing but takeout. My salt consumption has plummeted, and in general, I think the nutritional facts for my canned meal are better across the board than the takeout meals I was doing.
On the other hand, if there’s some long term issue with eating too much canned food, then I’m definitely going to be affected by it. I was thinking cats lead pretty good lives with nothing but canned food, so maybe I’ll be ok.
Anyway, am I going to die a horrible canned food death, or am I ok?
Canned fruits are often placed in a ton of syrup and sugar. So they aren’t all that great for you. Even if you don’t drink the syrup.
Canned vegetables on the other hand are perfectly fine and no different from frozen vegetables. There are rarely preservatives added since the heat and vacuum is enough to keep them from spoiling.
It’s important to buy just vegetables. If you buy pre-made canned food then the quality drops significantly due to the amount of sugar, salt, and fats added. So canned peas are fine, canned pea soup not so much.
Canned vegetables have a worse reputation than deserved and it mostly comes from taste rather than health issues.
But mixing up your diet is never a bad idea. So instead of just going canned goods you can consider dried goods. Dried fruits don’t have the same issue as canned fruits while still having a long shelf life. There are dried apple or banana chips, dried plums, mangos, apricots, also nuts and seeds are great alternatives.
And even dried vegetables are an option. They require a little bit more planning because some of them need to be soaked over night. And beans usually need to be cooked in addition to the soaking as they are poisonous otherwise. But not all dried vegetables need soaking, lentils can be cooked immediately. And offers, such as dried peas can even be eaten as snack in dried form.
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With some dried fruits you just need to be a bit careful as they can really speed up your digestive system if you eat too many of them. Dried plums and apricots are the main culprits for me. They are so delicious and I could eat 10 or more in one go. Treat them as fresh fruit and eat 1-3 at a time and you will be fine.
Also get non sulfured variants. They don’t look as nice and don’t last as long but the taste is so much better.
Canning frequently requires processing and heating. These have consequences for some vitamin levels, so they’re not exactly the same. Vitamin C is one of the bigger losses in canned food, often 60% or more because it hates oxygen and heat. Frozen fruit and vegetables are typically better for that reason, but canned is still fine if you account for it and your cans are also BPA free.
Assuming both canned and frozen foods are manufactured in ideal circumstances otherwise.
Canned veggies often have a lot of salt in them which is the main issue with them healthwise. Canned fruits you can reduce the sugar content by draining the liquid and washing them gently with tap water but like most fruits, theres still going to be a fair amount of sugar in them even if you manage to remove the sugars added to canned fruits.