Yes. People have conflated the term “processed food” with the higher end processing that some foods get, more correctly called ultra processed foods.
Processing food is transforming it from one state to another. Bread is a processed food because you’ve milled the wheat. Acme® Fued lewps™ are ultra processed because the corn was dissolved in acid, reconstituted into a fiberless slurry, fortified with enough vitamins to be legally referred to as nutrition, fortified with enough sugar, salt and fats to make your body demand you eat more, then bulked with milk protein concentrates to make you feel like you’re eating something substantial and also qualify as a dairy product for tax purposes.
The conversation would often be much clearer if people didn’t use the term for “almost all food” when thet mean the more chemistry oriented type of food.
Even within the category of ultra processed foods there are items that are perfectly benign. Breakfast cereals can be perfectly healthy, but they’re necessarily ultra processed since you need at least minimal shelf stability.
Processing isn’t intrinsically bad, it’s just that the worst foods are ultra processed because that’s how they did the things that make them bad, and every transformation destroys some portion of the food, and eventually you need to start adding things back in to make it keep being food, or at least appearing to be food.
Yes. People have conflated the term “processed food” with the higher end processing that some foods get, more correctly called ultra processed foods.
Processing food is transforming it from one state to another. Bread is a processed food because you’ve milled the wheat. Acme® Fued lewps™ are ultra processed because the corn was dissolved in acid, reconstituted into a fiberless slurry, fortified with enough vitamins to be legally referred to as nutrition, fortified with enough sugar, salt and fats to make your body demand you eat more, then bulked with milk protein concentrates to make you feel like you’re eating something substantial and also qualify as a dairy product for tax purposes.
The conversation would often be much clearer if people didn’t use the term for “almost all food” when thet mean the more chemistry oriented type of food.
Even within the category of ultra processed foods there are items that are perfectly benign. Breakfast cereals can be perfectly healthy, but they’re necessarily ultra processed since you need at least minimal shelf stability.
Processing isn’t intrinsically bad, it’s just that the worst foods are ultra processed because that’s how they did the things that make them bad, and every transformation destroys some portion of the food, and eventually you need to start adding things back in to make it keep being food, or at least appearing to be food.