Personally I don't buy into articles like this. The one and only tip I can personally give to eat healthy and well is "learn to cook yourself". No matter how high quality the restaurant where you are getting your food, you will be able to do it better at home for yourself.
To a statistically significant degree?
One study I found mentions that after one week refrigerated beans lost 77% of their vitamin C versus blanched and then frozen beans lost 28%.
So in the case of Vitamin C it's highly significant. There are some nutrients though that will be better off never being frozen.
It's not as black and white as one can say "X is better then Y".
But the real take away is that frozen vegetables are basically never less healthy than fresh.
A second reason is that processed foods are engineered to have addictive qualities -- lots of sugar, engineered "mouth feel". At home, you can limit the amount of sugar and salt, and you probably wouldn't be able to do the complex food science behind getting the right "crunch".
BTW I think it's a reasonable question - don't know why you were voted down.
Industrialization does not fit well with food production. Because price optimization through division of fixed costs leads to standardized high volume products. But it is diversity that is healthy, tastes good and is natural.
And even allergies, that depends. Some simply come with a warning, instead of banning the ingredients wholesale.
It's like making synthetic foods, but by first taking the components out of natural foods so you can call them natural.
It's the easiest way to get 0%, 0.5%, 1%, 1.5%, 2% etc milk. I don't think you could do it without starting all of them from 0% milk. Especially considering you have to compensate the lack of taste from fat with extra lactose. And you can't use "added sugars" without raising major red flags with consumers.
So you use lactose. Because it's already in milk. And you don't have to say you've added it.
Source: my friend who studied food science.
"I don't think you could do it without starting all of them from 0% milk" is not a valid basis for facts. I don't want to come across like a meanie, but no one cares whatever facts you make up in your mind using (pseudo) common sense. Milk production is very well documented and regulated.
I doubt it is cheaper than a measure and blend process would be, so I doubt the majority of milk is so heavily processed.
It could certainly be that some milk is being separated down to constituents and ingredients added back to other milk, but that would be to top off a blend, not the default process (because separation obviously costs more than doing nothing).
But orange juice isn't healthy before or after processing, so the point is lost.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-is-the-differ...
I encourage you to read "Swallow This: Serving Up the Food Industry's Darkest Secrets" by Joanna Blythman. Most food if not every food that comes in a cardboard box has been assembled from parts, often from various parts of the globe. Vitamins and antioxidants are added to every processed food, iron is added to breakfast cereals, flavourings are used to change your perception of the food, caramel is added to meat to give it a nice brown color, "natural" extracts are in fact extracted using solvents, of which traces can be left in the food, and there is no need to put it on any label, because solvents are processing aids.
It's really much worse than you think unfortunately.