Usually, articles about "processed food" really mean "ultra-processed". And the general idea is that ultra-processed food is that you extract food chemicals from what is usually the cheapest sources, and transform and recombine them into a final product. By contrast regular processed food normally starts with whole ingredients rather than extracts, often of better quality because you can't make up for lower quality using extra processing and additives.
> Food processing in itself is not the issue. One obvious reason is that nowadays, practically all food is processed in some sense and in some way. The term ‘processing’ (like the term ‘industry’) is very general and therefore not helpful, and so judgements of foods simply because they are ‘processed’ are not meaningful.
But the extracts come from whole ingredients, so if you think about where the extracts came from then the whole process is again using whole ingredients.
What word do you like and your definition of it?
If prefer people to use words that mean things. The article wasn't even about processed foods so much as how there is a nutritional model that shows high carbohydrate/low glycemic index foods are particularly fattening relative to their calorie content. The article could easily (and more accurately) be titled "New research highlights the damage from high carb/high sugar foods".
*I mean seriously, vitamin water is "natural"? That stuff is water and sugar alcohol, with a tiny bit of stevia added so it can appear on the ingredients list for people who look for that particular keyword. Those sugar alcohols do occur naturally, I guess, but not usually in foods, and never in such quantities (and never from high fructose corn syrup).
If something has negative health consequences it’ll be one specific thing, not everything done by a machine.
The idea is that the processing can alter the structure of the food lightly (grilling a steak), moderately (frying a burger), or deeply (making a sausage, with all the extractions, admixing, etc). Deep processing is often used to make less edible things more edible, less palatable things more crave-inducing, and less nutritionally good things more palatable.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/health/2019-06-19/ultraprocessed...
But also "natural" ingredients are often bad as well as certain ratios (e.g. high sugar and fat together, all seed oils, etc.).
For example ALL seed oils are problematic; the only "fats" that is fairly safe are: butter, ghee, and coconut oil. The rest become dangerous with heat (especially unsaturated oils). So ANY food made with cotton seed, flax or similar oils are part of the problem.
Processed foods means "industrial made using ingredients optimized for profit". Using seed oils is cheap. Using preservatives to extend shelf-life so that 1-3 month warehousing and shipping is possible. Therefore these are used.
Personally, I only use seed oil (canola) to cook with. I'd definitely be interested to know if that's something I should stop doing.
Anyway, the article was not about any of that. It was about a nutritional model describing how excess carbohydrates and low glycemic index foods would be more likely to result in obesity.
None of that has anything to do with whether the food was processed, made in a factory, or packaged for convenience. Yet all are reasonable conclusions from the title. The only information in the title is effectively that "there may be a good that is bad for you".
A banana is fast food.
What do you think it is about fast that makes food bad? If I put my banana in a pot for an hour does it become better food? Nonsense.
Other than fruits and an occasional salad, everything I eat is "processed" (cooked). When I see a headline like this, it literally tells me nothing. (Seriously it groups yogurt the same as root beer)
Even what people tend to think of when they think of processed foods, such as ready-to-eat foods, tend to be high in preservatives such as salt, sugar, vitamins, and other food-grade additives--but all of these have different nutritional effects.