[cogman10]

This sort of gets to the heart of the problem I have with "processed foods are bad". It doesn't feel meaningful because of how vague it is. If I point at butter and ask "is this processed food" the answer is yes or no depending on the person I'm talking to. That makes it hard to trust the claim "processed food causes obesity". Well, maybe it does? Maybe it doesn't? Pickles don't likely cause obesity (they are very low calorie), so it feels unfair to lump them in the same category as cake, for example.

If it's unreasonable to pin down what is processed, it seems unreasonable to make a claim about the effects of processing.

[lobocinza]

In a way everything we eat is processed and processing is not necessarily harmful. To take your example of butter, organic butter may be completely different than mass produced butter regarding it's health implications. And this applies to nearly all food. Mass produced tomatoes will be poor in micro-nutrients and contaminated by pesticides. Et cetera.

Our understanding of nutrition and health isn't keeping up in pace with innovations in the food industry. And due to the scale and depth of it I think it's unavoidable that many small bad things will sum up over time leading to health problems without a clear root cause.

Reasons why "processed" food might be bad for health:

- skewed omega-3/omega-6 ratio

- micro-nutrients depletion

Also it's just not economical or environmentally sustainable to feed everyone with "real food". At least not without radical change and trade-offs in other areas.