[webscaleizfun]

We can't actually quantify nor do we fully understand all the vitamins, chemicals & molecules in your average vegetable, or how they are digested and used in your body. It might be bad to peel a carrot prior to eating it, since you lose the nutrients in the skin (that may only exist there) and oxidize the rest of the carrot breaking down other potentially good nutrients, similar to how garlic loses certain multi-drug resistant infection killing abilities when chopped or crushed[1].

If we did have a good grasp of the nutrients that the human body needs, and in what form (particularly to prevent your bowels from shutting down or having mass dieoffs), then something like Ensure, Soylent, etc might be practical with a group of people who were well versed in the science of nutrition designing it, but I do not have that kind of faith with our abject lack of understanding & the present lack of nutritional skills Soylent, and many other processed food companies have shown.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allicin

[pas]

Yeah well, there are millions living on processed food. They are pretty much a-okay.

Yes, sure, there is probably some difference, but it's marginal. Translated to QALY (quality adjusted life year) I guess it's probably somewhere under 1.

Differences in individual biology are much more influential, and matching our own needs contributes a lot more QALYs than eating it as raw as possible or as processed as possible.