[adrian_b]

The most useful way to define "ultra-processed" is as food that you have not cooked yourself from raw ingredients, like by the time of our grandparents, but you have bought as ready to eat food.

Nowadays most people have given up on cooking, for fear that cooking may require too much time and their work does not allow enough time for this.

This has also happened with me many years ago, and because of that I became obese and I stayed so for many years, despite many failed attempts to lose weight. Eventually I learned to control my weight and I returned to a normal weight after almost a year of losing weight continuously. Had I returned to my previous diet, I would have gained weight again.

Nowadays, I eat only food that I cook myself and there is one obvious difference, which matches what is said in the parent article. With my food, I eat only fixed quantities that I have planned before, once in the morning and once in the evening. After I finish eating, I have no desire to eat more, even if I think that my food is very tasty. Later, I am not hungry again before the next meal.

In the past, when I was eating industrially-produced food, it was very difficult to stop eating soon enough. Moreover, a few hours later I was hungry again. It is certain that nothing has changed with me, but only with my food, because when I eat occasionally other food, again it does not satiate me properly.

When you have to cook for a large family, that is still possible by cooking all or most of the food for an entire week in one weekend day and then reheating the food in a microwave oven in the work days.

When you cook only for yourself, it is possible to cook the food every day just before eating, if you use modern methods instead of traditional methods. I cook all my food in a microwave oven. This requires about a half of hour before a meal, but only at most 10 to 15 minutes are active, e.g. peeling, paring and slicing vegetables, mixing ingredients and washing the vessels used. The rest of the time is passive, waiting for the food to be cooked in the oven and then to cool down, when I can do other activities, e.g. work at a computer.

So even if I have to spend some time with cooking food, that is acceptable and the benefits make it worthwhile. Moreover, food that you cook yourself can be many times cheaper than the alternatives, while also being much healthier.

When talking about "ultra-processing", it is important to differentiate the processing methods that separate the useful components of food from the processing methods that either mix various ingredients and additives or transform the food through various methods, e.g. heating.

Separating the useful nutrients is not bad intrinsically and it is frequently very desirable. For instance, using whey protein concentrate or milk protein concentrate for cooking is much healthier than using any other kind of dairy, because the protein concentrate is the useful part of the milk, while both lactose and milk fat can be harmful in excess. The only danger with separated nutrients is that they facilitate abuses, e.g. the existence of pure sugar makes it easy to add too much sugar in food.

On the other hand, the processing methods that either mix additives in food or transform it, are irreversible, so they are very frequently harmful. Moreover, when you are not the one who mixes the food ingredients, you can never be certain about which is the real content of the food. Therefore this is the kind of "ultra-processing" that should be avoided.

[nradov]

How is that useful? Even if you cook yourself, the reality is that many of the ingredients are already processed to some extent. I mean basic stuff like cheese, olive oil, flour, tofu, etc. What matters is the output, not the process.

[adrian_b]

You have not read all that I have written.

Not all "processing" has the same purpose and the different methods of processing should not be confused. There are 2 broad classes of "processing" that are very different. The methods of processing that extract the most useful components of the sources of food are never bad by themselves, even if the availability of pure nutrients allows their bad use by choosing unbalanced recipes.

Such processing that is not bad unless its products are misused includes the extraction of oils from seeds or fruits, the grinding of seeds into flour, the filtration of the proteins from milk into protein concentrate, the precipitation of proteins and fat from milk into cheese, and so on.

The methods of processing that are bad and the only that should be called "ultra-processing", cause irreversible degradation of the food, by either mixing various food ingredients and additives into an unbalanced and unhealthy combination and by various treatments, e.g. heating, frying, boiling etc. whose effects cannot be undone to make again a healthy food.

Only the 2nd kind of processing methods must be avoided, and the way to do this is by cooking yourself, because the food that is either completely unprocessed or it has been processed only with methods of the 1st kind cannot be eaten directly, with the exception of some fruits and vegetables that have a too low content of nutrients to be able to sustain human life.

In theory, an industrial producer of food could use methods of food processing equivalent with a home cook and make healthy food. Unfortunately, this almost never happens, because it is much more profitable to make tasty but unhealthy food.