Q: I want to get my boys off the fast foods, but I'm not ready to start learning how to cook. What ingredients should I definitely stay away from  And are there any ingredients that sound bad but are OK? 

A: The first thing is, all progress is good! If your family is now eating prepared foods that at least have some vegetables in them, they're much better off than if they're living on fast food. A lot of what we eat is determined by our "self-identity." For example, devout Muslims and orthodox Jews don't eat pig meat, among other things. And they're not constantly tempted to binge on bacon and ham. Their self-identity simply doesn't allow them to even consider eating pig.

Similarly, vegetarians whose main focus is animal welfare don't have a big problem with will-power when it comes to Big Macs and spare ribs. They're just not the sort of person who eats animals.

So if your boys are McDonalds and Taco Bell devotees, just the act of giving them prepared, processed imitations of real food may begin to shift their view of who they are and what they eat.

If they're old enough, I recommend showing them the documentary "SuperSize Me," about a very funny guy who went on a McDonalds diet for 30 days and almost didn't live to tell about it. Even if they're not old enough, rent it yourself.

Now, on to your questions.

What are the really bad things in processed foods?

1. Trans-fats

Avoid anything on the label that says "hydrogenated" or "partly hydrogenated." Don't be fooled by labels, though. Through a weird loophole, a product can be labeled "trans-fat free" if there is half a gram of trans-fat or less per serving. So what do the friendly food manufacturers do? They decrease the serving size. Presto - disease through creative mathematics!

Just in case you need some motivation: Walter Willett, a Harvard professor of nutrition, estimates that if trans-fats disappeared from the US, there would be 228,000 fewer heart attacks in 2007. 

2. Dairy

Dr. Fuhrman calls cheese "the single most dangerous food in America." Given its popularity and amount of saturated fat and casein, it's hard to argue. If you're buying processed foods, at least make sure they're free of dairy products.

Here are your label tip-offs that you're about to feed your family the baby food of a tortured, diseased cow:

butter
butterfat
butter oil
buttermilk
calcium caseinate
casein
lactalbumin
lactose
milk chocolate
simplesse
whey

3. Artificial colors and flavors

Especially if you have kids who tend toward hyperactivity, please avoid all artificial ingredients. Our bodies simply have no way of processing them. Usually they are labeled as artificial colors and flavors. Some packages give you government's stamp of "approval," as in FD&C Yellow #6. All this means is that their inadequate testing hasn't yet found a link between the totally unnecessary substance and disease. Since 1918, the government has allowed, and then banned, 17 different food dyes.

4. Sugar

 Here's a partial list of sugary synonyms on labels:

corn syrup
high fructose corn syrup
sorbitol
maltitol
isomalt
maltodextrin
dextrose
glucose
fructose
maltose

Basically, if an ingredient ends with "ose" or "itol," it's a hidden sugar. Even foods labeled "sugar free" can be harboring lots of empty sugary calories.

Check out Connie Bennett's excellent SugarShockBlog for eye-opening and entertaining information about the massive amounts of sugar hiding in our food.

5. Salt/sodium

Too much salt is linked to stomach cancer, heart attacks, osteoporosis, and "all-cause" mortality, which means: "all things being equal, them that eats the most salt dies soonest."

According to a HealthDay article from June 2006, over 75% of our salt is ingested unknowingly, from high-sodium processed foods, rather than being added by shaking it from a dispenser at the table.

Dr. Joel Fuhrman recommends getting all of your sodium from natural sources (i.e. fruits and vegetables and nuts and seeds). His guideline: aim for 1 milligram (mg) of sodium for every calorie. Products with 200 mg of sodium per 100 calories should be mostly avoided. Anything higher than that is just asking for trouble.

So how do we determine whether something is a low- or high-sodium food? Let's do a quick tutorial with a coupld of products I happen to have at hand, from my community's pantry:

Campbell's Classics Vegetarian Vegetable Soup

Sounds great, no? The label proudly proclaims, "A Full Serving of Vegetables." So let's see how M'm! M'm! Good! this really is.

The nutrition label tells us that the soup has 80 calories per serving, and the total sodium we get from that serving is a whopping 680 mg. To find the number of mg of sodium per 100 calories, just multiply 680 x 100, and then divide by 80.  That 's a total of 850 mg of sodium per 100 calories! Over 4 times the level that's just beyond safe.

Oh, and another thing - how big do you suppose a "serving size" is? Half a cup.  Grab a half-cup measure, fill it with water, and pour it into a soup bowl. Now tell me: is that bigger or considerably smaller than the average soup serving that your boys typically consume? So for a normal portion, say 1 cup of soup, you're feeding your loved ones 1700 mg of sodium.

Progresso Cannellini (White Kidney Beans)

OK, these little guys are about as good as you get from a can. Natural kidney beans, cooked and canned. What could be bad? In fact, the ingredient list reinforces our good feelings: "Soaked white kidney beans, water, contains less than 2% of: salt, calcium chloride, disodium EDTA (preservative)"

It' all (mostly) good, right? Well, our serving size here is 110 calories. Sodium? 340 mg. Doing the math: 340 x 100 / 110 = 309 mg sodium per 100 calories.

My advice? If you eat canned beans, wash them well before preparing them.

What isn't so bad?

Here's the deal (and it's the same deal I've been pushing all along): you want to get most of your calories from unprocessed plant foods. Now, if you need to do stuff to those foods to make them taste OK to you, then go for it. So if your main dish is a veggie stir-fry (ideally fried in water or broth, not oil), and you want to put a little Thai Peanut Sauce or some such processed food on top, go for it, keeping the list of "bad" foods in mind.

You know how the breakfast cereal industry pretends its foods are healthy by "fortifying" them with vitamins and minerals? Well, you can do the same thing in reverse: "fortify" your healthy diet with small amounts of processed foods to make them taste the way you want.

When you're buying processed foods, look for:

whole grains
low sugar
low sodium
no artificial ingredients
as many fruits and vegetables as they can pack into them

If you need to go online to shop for "healthier" processed foods, check out Shop Natural.

Hope this helps!