> whole ingredients
These are utterly meaningless terms. You "process" food by cutting and cooking it. Everything is processed. Everything is GMO -- have you seen what corn looked like before humans bred it? Everything is organic. Everything is "whole". Nutrition is too complicated and too individualized for these nonsense labels.
> I'm getting the maximum amount of nutrients from my food
This is utter nonsense. Some processing steps remove some nutrients from some foods. Other processing steps add nutrients that you need. Plenty of foods have nutrients that are completely unavailable for your body until you cook it (many veggies) -- PROCESSING! Other nutrients are destroyed by too much cooking (Vitamin C, I believe). You better be glad the salt you eat is "processed" by adding iodine to it. The water you drink is "processed" by adding fluoride to it. Those last 2 are some of the biggest public health successes in human history.
I'm glad you're feeling better, but it's 100% from paying attention to what you're eating, and 0% from this bullshit about "whole" or "unprocessed" foods with "maximum nutrients". Stop spreading this bullshit.
Looking at the entirety of your comment, you should really apply this advice to yourself.
Highly processed or ultra-processed food is absolutely a meaningful term. The United Nations published so-called NOVA food classification which divides food into four categories by the amount of processing it received.
Category 4 is what OP was talking about. Industrially processed stuff full of preservatives, artificial coloring, hydrogenated oils, protein isolate, maltodextrin, invert sugar etc. Unlike the other three categories, this sort of industrial processing is a relative newcomer, it wasn't even a thing 100 or 150 years ago, so it is entirely plausible that our guts and our gut biome may not be happy about it.
And yet nobody said "avoid ultra-processed food as defined by NOVA". They said "avoid processed foods" and "eat whole foods". It's extremely generous to assume everyone reading the former translates that in their head to "avoid ultra-processed food as defined by NOVA". And the latter is meaningless.
Even if that is what they really mean, that's really surface-level advice. There are foods in Tier 4 that are just fine. There are foods in Tier 4 that are more nutritious than "whole foods" are. Note that if you add whey protein to your soy milk, you have just created an ultra-processed food!
No one means that cutting a carrot make it into “processed food”. You are changing a mostly commonly understood definition to a new wanna-be-technically-correct one you just made up only to suit your argument.
There is a grey area in the definition of processed foods, but it’s not close as large as your definition maintains.
Please show me I'm wrong and give a concise definition of what makes some food processed. The internet needs a good definition as these conversations always just end up with hand waving as there is no consensus of what food is what.
[1] https://www.fao.org/3/ca5644en/CA5644EN.pdf
[2] https://world.openfoodfacts.org/product/3017620422003/nutell...
It's not until you get to Tier 4 (ultra-processed foods) that you start to see anything legitimately concerning. And indeed if the advice everyone was parroting was "avoid ultra-processed foods as defined by the FAO", then I'd care a lot less about it. Even still, the FAO says that ingredients added to ultra-processed foods include:
> varieties of sugars (fructose, high-fructose corn syrup, ‘fruit juice concentrates’, invert sugar, maltodextrin, dextrose, lactose), modified oils (hydrogenated or interesterified oils) and sources of protein (hydrolysed proteins, soya protein isolate, gluten, casein, whey protein, and ‘mechanically separated meat’).
Avoid sugars and foods with high glycemic indices. Absolutely avoid high-fructose corn syrup. Avoid hydrogenated fats; there is clear evidence they are harmful. Those sources of protein? Health nuts add that stuff to their soy milk all the time! Details matter!
My point is that there are specific processing steps that affect specific foods. Advice on how to identify and avoid those foods is fine. But that's not what anyone is saying: they're saying "avoid processed foods" and "eat whole foods". Those terms are meaningless as they use them. It's non-advice. It's water-muddying bordering on misinformation.
I did a quick google search and found that some countries use "NOVA" groups to classify how processed a food is, and I think it's a helpful guideline. https://world.openfoodfacts.org/nova
Since virtually all the food we get at our stores is processed in this way it is leading to serious widespread health problems.
