Those identically shaped chicken, turkey and ham for slicing at the deli are generally mechanically separated.

It is available as ground meat. You can make meatloaf from it. Or you can buy preformed meatballs which is just ground meat with some shape so you can just drop it into pan and bake in the oven. 40 minutes and done.

Peel some potatoes, cook them and you have a dinner in said 40 minutes.

And I have no idea why this would be classified as ultraprocessed food.

Acually, MSM is not found in hamburger, only hot dogs.

Ground meat is different from mechanically separated meat, which is a paste. At least personally I haven’t seen ground meat for sale in the US that lists MSM as an ingredient, though it may exist.

Is such "ground meat" labelled differently from ground or minced meat that is made the traditional way?

In the US at least they are considered different things and must be labelled as such.

You never ate ground meat? It is very common to buy separated processed meat without other ingredients since it is very quick and easy to cook.

Mechanically separated meat is different from ground meat, it’s made by pressing unusable scraps through a sieve to remove bits of bone. The end result is a paste.

Pâté is the commercial offering.

Diff production method (not a hydraulic sieve with meat treated with ammonia)

So the additives are unhealthy?

I don’t think anybody has a concrete answer yet, I’ve seen speculation that the texture of the food may be a component, and the extreme palatability that causes people to eat more than they otherwise would. There are so many potential root causes that it will take time to pinpoint specific ones, but what is becoming clear that eating lots of foods with additives and highly altered basic ingredients (like mechanically separated meat) is not good for you.

I have a hard time understanding how the act of mechanically separating meat from bone and gristle renders it unfit for consumption. Texture certainly matters for taste, but once masticated, all food is roughly the same texture. Digestion is a biochemical process, and if the body is experiencing adverse reactions to certain foods, the cause should be a biochemical one.

Again, no one is claiming that every component of every ultra-processed food is bad.

As an aggregate, the category of foods appears to be bad for us.

And we aren't sure why yet.

> if the body is experiencing adverse reactions to certain foods, the cause should be a biochemical one

No. I can look at a picture of gross food, or imagine it, and be nauseated. Restricting potential causes this tightly is wrong. UPFs have a huge causal surface--how one ingredient breaks down into nutrients is basically not optimized at all compared to all the other stuff. Why only look at the unoptimized part as causal origin, when the optimization is the common factor making it bad?

To put it another way, we know all the stuff that has had a ton of work put into making it something lots of people will buy, is just generally bad for unclear reasons. Examining the aspect which has had very little work put into it is clearly not the way to go.

It could be something as weird as people's built-in heuristics for which food to eat (cravings) being actually kinda important to hit specific nutrient breakpoints at different times. By subsuming those cravings using UPF technology, that stops working and general health suffers.

It could be that the baseline palatability of the output of the mechanical process is low, and so the product is universally combined with an additive that recovers palatability, but has some health drawback.

The overarching pattern here is that optimization geared toward overcoming people's heuristics of what to consume makes these kinds of decisions all the time. Doing one thing to make it cheaper to produce makes it worse at getting people to buy it, but we can just cheat back the ability to get people to buy it by turning the dial on another thing that reliably makes people want to buy it, at the cost of being horrible for them.

Ammonia. Sh*ts full of bacteria it has to be treated