[jimmaswell]

What does it precisely mean for a food to be "processed"? "Processed" in general just means "went through some kind of process", which covers pretty much anything (if a local farmer collects their apples in a bin and moves them across the field that's a process) but in relation to food it has a negative connotation, so it must be specific processes the food was involved in that are unwanted? What about these processes inherently make the food more sugary or otherwise unhealthy?

[greeneggs]

I'm not sure it is a science problem, i.e., processing food makes it unhealthy. I think it is more an economics problem; food processors don't have the incentives to care about the long-term health of the food consumers.

Food processors have incentives to improve their logistics (e.g., increase shelf life) and to make the food taste better (or even, hopefully, addictive). Some brands try to make their products appear to be healthy, but consumers generally have little information about what is going into processed food, so appearance might not mean much.

Of course, even unprocessed food like fruits and vegetables has been heavily engineered by breeding, especially in the last century---and again, not to make it healthier.

[Broken_Hippo]

I think commonly, processed doesn't mean so much "flour you didnt grind at home", but more "these meats have been ground and mixed with spices and cured" or "they made the speghetti sauce at the factory" or "artificial flavorings and lots of added sugar!".

Not all processing is bad, per se: Factories can make red sauce pretty darn healthy if they want. But what usually happens is that the sauces are filled with a good deal of fat, salt, and sugar along with other things you'd never actually put in food at home (not all of which are bad, but some are misleading - food coloring, for example). They do this because... well, they researched this and found there are 'bonus taste points' if they have the right combination of flavors and feels.

And there is a lot of politics and lobbying to keep the labels more confusing and to use special ingredient names so people don't really know what is in it. Sometimes even when you are trying to avoid something, it is really difficult to figure it all out.

And really, what would probably be needed is some sort of push for healthier processed foods without the weird ingredients. Some things will probably always be bad in excess - cured meats, for example, but we can do better with the others.

[tiglionabbit]

Moving apples around is not really processing them because they are still the same. A better example of processing is when you homogenize or pasteurize milk, or mill and separate wheat into flour and bran. Of course you don't see anyone demonizing these processes because we've been doing them for a pretty long time. It's good to bet on traditional foods because the cultures that came up with them must have survived on them somehow. However, newer processes could modify foods into more dangerous forms. Partial hydrogenation, for example, turned out to be a pretty bad idea. Also, modern processing often comes with new additives that wouldn't occur in traditional diets.

[undersuit]

>mill and separate wheat into flour and bran. Of course you don't see anyone demonizing these processes because

There is actually a movement to avoid modern milling techniques. Something about how the high pressure steel mills today affect the endosperm and then the readdition of the separately ground germ and bran produces a different whole wheat flour than grinding the wheat berries as one ingredient.

[dredmorbius]

"Processing" is a continuum, not a binary. I'll let you work it out from there.