[solardev]

I don't know, it's not really easy for me (as an ignorant American who grew up on junk food) to guess how much processing is in food. I dunno if there's much difference between cow milk, soy milk, oat milk, etc. How is tofu or blueberry yogurt made? What's in a slice of sandwich cheese? Are these fancy organic crackers any different from Ritz? What's in olive oil vs canola oil? Vegan butter vs margarine?

Most of the grocery store is made up of processed flavored glops of one sort or another. The Nova classification is new to me, but would certainly be interesting information (though possibly also fearmongering).

[RcouF1uZ4gsC]

> I dunno if there's much difference between cow milk, soy milk, oat milk

Well given the fact that cow milk exists in nature, has been drank by humans for thousands of years, and the other two are trying to be like cow milk, right off the bat, I think a good working hypothesis is that cow milk is less processed than soy and oat milk. They may pasteurize and homogenize it and add some vitamins, but it is fundamentally pretty close to what came out of the cow. Soy mil and oat milk, need a lot more processing to turn soy and oats into something at resembles milk.

[Novosell]

Isn't oat milk just putting oats and water in a blender basically?

[solardev]

That's the exact question I had too. I don't know they just add water and soak, or if they use some sort of chemical process to dissolve the oats and isolate some powder that they reconstitute later... etc.

I feel like this should be information available on all labeling. I have no idea what "guar gum" is, and whether that's more processed than "enriched wheat flour", and whatever the hell "natural flavors" are.

[stabbles]

Chris van Tulleken has an excellent book (and talk [1]) on the subject

[1] https://youtu.be/5QOTBreQaIk

[solardev]

This is a really phenomenal talk (and he's a great speaker)! Thank you so much for sharing this.

I haven't studied this topic much since the days of Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food, and I really appreciated Chris's scientifically grounded overview. I think I'm going to get the book and seriously reexamine my eating habits in this new year.

Thank you again for linking this!

[getwiththeprog]

You have just asked all the right questions. Now comes the fun part of looking up all the answers :)

Spoiler: Keep it simple and learn to cook.