The "processed foods" fears are misguided.

According to the NOVA classification method, baking bread or churning butter is sufficient to turn a food into "processed".

Generally laypeople are fearful of "ultra-processed foods" which use industrial distillation, stabilization, additives from petrochemical derivatives, synthetic sugars, etc.

My complaint is that some of these "processing" techniques are likely orders of magnitude more harmful than others, so we shouldn't blindly treat them all as equal.

Profit is the main motivator. Do you want your soda made out of cane sugar or corn syrup?

Bad example, both cane sugar and corn syrup are extremely terrible for you in the quantities that exist in soda.

Excellent example. If you ever wondered why you’re cola, your orange crush, your Dr Pepper taste funny, just drink a soda made out of corn syrup, nothing you can eat on the face of the planet is good for you if you eat it in excess without exercise.

Which was something before the last century, you didn’t have to worry about because most people had to work like a horse to survive, and many people on the face of the planet still do.

There are two things allowing people to live longer lives today. Vaccines and antibiotics, both of which are critical towards any human being living past the age of 20, too bad, there are many people today in some of the Western countries that have forgotten what it was really like to live in a time when you could die from an infection before the age of 20, it only took two generations, maybe three, to forget that.

I remember the march of dimes and all those infectious diseases that took out a significant number of kids before they reached 10 years old, and if you did survive, many were either blind, disfigured or crippled many countries in the world are still going through that…

The biggest killer of humankind has always been some type of disease/pestilence or infection before the age of 20 causing death, disfigurement, or lameness and if it wasn’t that, it usually was at the hand of another human it wasn’t by eating animal fat or sugar particularly after the discovery of fire and cooking.

By the way, the screw worm fly is now in Arizona and New Mexico up from Texas hopefully the current administration has learned something from Covid the first time around, doubtful.

Corn syrup is used because it’s cheap. It isn’t used for taste. That’s secondary. Particularly in America…

Is corn syrup actually worse somehow than cane sugar? It's an intensively-farmed monoculture crop, from which pure sugar is extracted, and then put into your drink in disturbingly high quantities. At what scale of relevance is fructose ratio, or the particular choice of crop?

> The "processed foods" fears are misguided.

I like Michael Pollan's advice from 200:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Defense_of_Food

When shopping for food try to stick to the edges of the store and avoid the middle aisles with the 'shelf stable' products; look at ingredient lists and lean towards things that have (~)five or fewer listed; if there are a bunch of ingredients / chemicals with terms you cannot pronounce it's probably not that great.