If you think there is no worthwhile distinction to be made between a boiled egg and a Cadbury creme egg, say that.
If you think there is a potentially meaningful distinction to be made, choose a word which you like instead of 'processed'.
No you haven't and you won't because their isn't one.
You made hand-wavhing non-explanations that revolved around ambiguous feelings about the person making the food that you couldn't possibly turn into a system to classify food as processed or not processed.
I asked many many questions about what your definition of processing was or if it applied in specific scenarios and you wouldn't or couldn't answer.
It's past the point where I'm interested in continuing, I don't see anything coming of this.
I also cannot provide a clear boundary between 'delicious' and 'disgusting', and those are also hand wavy and ambiguous and guided by risible feelings, but there is still merit and usefulness in describing them.
I, too, can ask tons of careful trick questions about "if I take a delicious cookie, then put a drop of pig blood in it, but you don't know it's there, does it THEN become a disgusting cookie? What if it was three drops and a snail but they were boiled and minced first? AH GOTCHA you can't draw a clear precise measurable line between delicious and disgusting, so there can't be a difference".
It's past the point where I'm interested in continuing, I don't see anything coming of this."
If it was true that you were past the point of continuing, you wouldn't have continued. Guess you do understand the idea of a fuzzy boundary after all.
Just because it cant be rendered into a perfect line in the sand or measurable, objectively-defined system of classification doesn't mean it's not useful.
If chickens laid Cadbury creme eggs, they would still be just as unhealthy.
The reduction of food to a quantity of sugar, starch, fat, and protein, is part of what I am objecting to; as if you could say that all products containing 20 grams of metal, 12 grams of plastic, and 2 grams of glass are the same product, or that all programs with 147k lines of code are the same program. "fat" isn't one thing. "sugar" isn't one thing. Fat and sugar are not the only classes of things in plants and animals.
The relevant distinction is all the things which are different, which is a lot more things than people casually talk about. Is it the quantity in grams of saturated vs unsaturated fat? Mono or polyunsaturated? Omega 3 quantity? Ratio of omega 3 to omega 6? Quantity of EPA, DHA or ALA fat overall, or ratio between them? Trace quantity of magnesium, or trace quantity of bio-available forms of magnesium in balance with an amount of medium chain triglycerides? And what about all the countless other potential distinctions with macronutrients and smaller trace compounds, each also denaturing in different ways over different time periods? Many words I don't understand, but understand enough to know that they describe differences which are measurable and worth naming.
There are enough potential distinctions which could be made, that saying "you can crush fresh almonds, extract the oil, put it in cookies, leave them in a box for a month, and as long as there is an equal quantity of oil in grams to the original almonds then they are exactly as healthy as eating the original fresh almonds" is very suspiciously simplified.
If we had an exhaustive list, or if we had a known complete understanding of the effects of all compounds in all combinations, it would be a lot more convincing. "It doesn't kill you, your body can survive on it for a bit longer" is not the same as "optimal thing to consume for optimal long term health".
> "rather than in the mechanism by which they are produced."
The things chickens lay must promote the growth of healthy chicks - if chickens laid creme eggs, we'd be in a world where creme eggs were healthy. But the use of 'healthy' as a boolean toggle property which food has or does not have, and which a behaviour is or is not, is something I grumble about as well.
[1] https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/high-blood-ch...
