[SapporoChris]

There has to be somewhere in the spectrum a company that processes food and it ends up being superior. In fact, I bet it's more prevalent than you expect.

I did a few searches. Turns out there are benefits to food processing. Inactivation of toxins seems like a big plus to me. Improved nutrition, seems good.

Yes, many processed foods are of nutritionally poor value, but please don't label all processed food as being bad.

[docandrew]

Depends on the food - something like acorns, for example, they are inedible for humans in their whole form, but hulling, grinding the nuts, and rinsing them of tannins makes a tasty nutritious flour.

The word “processed” is kind of a lazy heuristic - butchering, cooking, hulling, mixing, those are all ways of processing that are healthy and effective.

Creating something like a Twinkie is a whole different ballgame and looks more like a triumph of chemical engineering and material science than anything related to baking or cooking.

[kipchak]

My personal favorite oversimplification is you shouldn't eat what the average person would try and stop a zookeeper from feeding to a monkey.

Some bread made from acorn flower, cooked butchered meat or hulled rice would be fine, but giving them a Twinkie or Mountain Dew seems like the kind of thing that might lose them their job.

[the_arcadian]

The problem is that I've read "If you give a mouse a cookie" to my daughter so many times that I would naturally assume that giving a twinkie to a monkey would result in a bedtime-story length chain of humorous events.

[docandrew]

That’s funny, but not a bad rule of thumb!

[spidey1]

I've heard the term "Ultra processed foods" used for twinkie like foods.

[pencilguin]

Unfortunately, "plant-based meat substitute" is, canonically, ultra-processed food.

[Ferret7446]

Why unfortunate? Plant-based meat substitutes are exactly as unhealthy as one would assume from them being ultra-processed. They are made to taste good in the same way (adding lots of fats, sugars, salt, etc.).

Perhaps there are ultra-processed foods that are not unhealthy, but that does not include "Impossible Meat".

[pencilguin]

It is unfortunate because we cannot in good conscience ask people to switch from barely-processed meat to ultra-processed meat substitutes, despite the meat industry's heavy contribution to looming climate disaster.

Many of us have switched to things other than meat, but that choice seems beyond most people.

Another alternative is what is called "lab-grown meat", which is not a meat substitute, per se, but is actual meat that might be a lot less harmful to produce. Where it sits on the "processed" spectrum is hard to assess. Obviously it is, in one sense, 100% processed, but details matter.

[tharkun__]

I'd say many of these terms are way too vaguely defined and used. What exactly counts as "packaged" food? What's "processed" food?

If I process cabbage into Sauerkraut or Kimchi, does that count as bad, because it's "processed"? What if it's processed by some company? What if they process it differently?

Case in point, Sauerkraut. If I make that at home, the bacteria stay alive the whole time. They still multiply in my fridge right now and keep the Sauerkraut OK to eat if a bit mushy after being left in there for too long coz I don't eat it often enough. If I buy Sauerkraut in a glass it's dead. Sure, they also used bacteria to actually make the Sauerkraut. And then they killed off all of the good bacteria by pasteurization to be able to stick it on a shelf w/ a long best before date and to guarantee the texture and color. Not to mention the extra "ingredients" they put in there.

[californical]

Generally when people talk about the negatives of processed food, they mean either:

1. Something that was originally nutritious, but had some part removed due to processing. Sometimes they attempt to add vitamins back into it, like enriched flour, but the issue is that we don’t know what else might be missing, or how changing the structure affects the body (faster absorbing carbs for example)

2. Foods that are sanitized heavily. Obviously it’s in the name of safety, but there could be benefits to eating a little dirt sometimes (ie there’s tons of vitamin B12 in dirt, but who knows what else we could be missing)

3. Foods that have lots of artificial or derived chemicals. Many are probably fine but it’s hard to know how certain things affect our gut microbiome.

There’s so much we still don’t understand about our bodies, especially our gut and it’s bacteria. That’s why nutrition science changes constantly. “Fat is bad, no wait it’s good” etc.

It’s not entirely scientific, but I strongly recommend reading In Defense Of Food. It’s thought-provoking and hits heavily on the many inconsistencies in our primitive understanding of nutrition. The author also calls out interesting points about “whole unprocessed foods” and why nutrition science is hard (eg too many variables)

[theGnuMe]

No, if you process something minimally like Kimchi it is not bad. In fact fermented foods are generally seen as good for you. Yogurt, cheese as well.

So Kimchi is considered minimally processed. Flour has various processing levels to make bread. Enriched white is strictly worse than others.

Cookies with hydrogenated palm oil would be bad. Any oils beyond cold pressed extra virgin olive oil are supposedly bad.

Now the preservatives in store bought kimchi could theoretically be a bigger issue.. I don't know how many folks have studied them. I imagine they just pass through us but probably influence the microbiome etc...

Canned foods are worse than fresh or frozen.

[agileAlligator]

> I'd say many of these terms are way too vaguely defined and used. What exactly counts as "packaged" food? What's "processed" food?

Do you think this is some sort of a smart or incisive observation?

I am sorry if I come off as rude, but I have grown weary of people making such asinine comments, quibbling about terms and their definitions, when they clearly know what the parent comment is talking about.

[tharkun__]

It does come off as rude, yes. We see right here in all the threads the difference in opinion of what constitutes "processed" or "packaged". A lot of misunderstandings in the world stem from people using the same terms to mean slightly different things. So in fact I think it's very important to state this explicitly. It helps in business communication as well, when you're the third party and see that two people are saying the same thing with different words or using the same word to mean different things and they just keep arguing.

[agileAlligator]

I think most people know what processed food is when they see it. Asking what the definition of processed food is, is talking past the point.

[tekla]

This is just a excuse to be intellectually lazy. You just offload the definition to "you just know" and make it impossible to refute since it targets arbitrary definition.

[tharkun__]

Exactly!

And there's a case in point right in one the answers to my reply:

    So Kimchi is considered minimally processed

Minimally processed vs. processed. What does this actually mean to everyone? Who draws the line where?

As with the Sauerkraut example, home made Kimchi is minimally processed I would agree. Commercial Kimchi, like commercial Sauerkraut I would probably count as just "processed", not good for you. But agileAlligator may not see even commercial Kimchi/Sauerkraut as processed and he draws the line at "processed cheese", so that weird vegetable oil with "natural" color in it.

agileAlligator says

    Asking what the definition of processed food is, is talking past the point.

and I bet my other two questions above he'd see the same way. But he's not seeing that I'm not asking a direct question. I am not expecting any answers to those questions. I'm not asking for an actual definition. I'm "asking" so that people may ponder these and think back to previous conversations or look at some of the back and forth in these threads and recognize that people are talking past each other.

[eduction]

This is a great point. "Processed food" is an incredibly broad category that is being somewhat demonized at the moment (not saying any comments here do this).

According to this Mayo Clinic quotation of USDA, processed food includes anything dried, frozen, canned, or mixed. https://www.mayoclinichealthsystem.org/hometown-health/speak...

I don't think (and am guessing most would agree) canned tomatoes are particularly harmful food, nor are frozen blueberries or fish, nor are dried raisins when I'm putting them in oats.

It's a spectrum. With my kids, dried mangoes make me slightly guilty because I know they are pretty high in sugar, albeit natural sugar. Most people would be more wary of frozen chicken nuggets. Some more specificity around what makes processed foods harmful, from the science and science comms communities, would be helpful.

[victor106]

Using the word “canned” is meaningless.

Canned sardines/mackerel is super healthy and minimally processed. Just like canned beans, canned tomatoes, canned corn..etc

[SpicyLemonZest]

Popular wisdom is hopelessly confused on what "processed" means. Cheese, yogurt, tofu, nixtamal are all subjected to intensive processes using industrial chemicals which radically alter their flavor and texture. But it feels almost trolly to suggest that they're processed foods in the same way that a Twinkie is. Certainly it seems ridiculous to suggest they're less processed than frozen french fries - but they are! Many brands of fries are just potato, oil, salt, coloring, with the only processing steps being cutting, frying, freezing.

I think most people understand it to mean something more like "stuffed full of oil or sugar".

[SapporoChris]

Nixtamal, I had no idea what it was so I looked it up. Then I learned I knew what it was but still had no idea what it was.

https://www.epicurious.com/ingredients/what-is-nixtamal-arti...

Thank you!

[Spooky23]

“Processed” is a bullshit word”.

When you see “natural”, “processed” or “toxin” in reference to a food, health or cosmetic product, pretend the word isn’t there. At best, it means nothing, at worst it is a manipulation designed to part your money from you or a fake cure.

[ASalazarMX]

More like a complex concept who can't be reduced to white and black. Sausages are processed, but there's a big difference between chorizo and Oscar Mayer. Powdered milk is processed, but yogurt and cheeses are too. Even cooking is significant processing that actually makes food safer and more nutritious.

[Spooky23]

It’s a concept in a conversation like this, but deliberately misused in marketing.

Perdue sells raw, butchered chicken breasts by the pound with 5% water as “minimally processed”, for example.

[tremon]

a company that processes food and it ends up being superior

To be glib, any process that makes normally undigestible things edible to humans would qualify for that. Cooked rice is superior to raw rice, fermented cabbage is superior to raw cabbage, and glazed onions are superior to raw onions.

That's usually not the type of processing people refer to when they use the term "processed foods". It usually refers to a type of processing where the original ingredients are no longer individually recognizable, and where the end result contains much more additives (sugar, salt, fats) than were in the original product(s).

[KineticLensman]

My rule of thumb is to think about the processes and whether I could do them in my kitchen or not. Things like 'boil' or 'grate' are recognizable processes that I don't worry about. Thinks like 'hydrogenated' are indicators that some serious modification of the underlying ingredients has taken place.

The term 'hyper-processed' is used to refer to foods that bare very little resemblance to recognizable ingredients straight from the farm.

[l5870uoo9y]

I think the term is imprecise and there should be a distinction between:

- cheese, pickled herring, charcuterie and such which can be part of a healthy diet

- pre-made (supermarket) meals or junk food (a vulgar term but unfortunately fitting) which typically aren't part of a healthy diet