Also "processed" can often mean "making it fucking edible."
Wheat is a fine example, because while it is indeed edible raw, cooking or milling wheat makes it much more digestible.
Some aspects of processed foods are just removing a step our body has to do to digest it (which requires energy).
When you digest say, processed sugar, your body has to do almost nothing to digest it compared to complex carbohydrates.
It's a short-cut for your body to expend less energy while getting energy.
(but that's not always a good thing)
It's probably worth distinguishing between processed - which as you mentioned includes broad swathes of cooking - and ultra-processed, the McDonalds-tier of foods.
The former is not particularly bad, while the latter is pretty bad.
The arguments against 'ultra processed' food IMO are twofold. First, in some countries, additives are poorly regulated and enforced, hence food sometimes contains harmful substances. Though I think it it fairly rare.
Second, most 'ultra processed' food in discussion are commercial fast food. Being ultra processed, they contain same energy and fat in less volume due to low indigestible junks. So people can eat them more. And due to over commercialization they are often made addictive with flavoring. This means you'll binge eat and come for more. This over consumption of macro nutrients and sometimes elimination of micro nutrients due to cost effective processing makes what is unhealthy about such food.
So if the production is honest about ingredients (verified by regulatory tests), you calculate your daily nutrients intake to be in recommended range and you don't fall for addiction easily, go for any ultra super processed food, no harms done.
(There are evidence of dietary fibers helping prevent certain types of colon cancers but unless you're eating only sugar stuffs, most food in market contains enough of that, how much processed it be).
Old joke:
Do you know what they used to call Organic Food in the 1930's?
spoiler
food
Would need to be closer to early 1800's because canning foods became popular around then. Canning included a lot of processing.
There's also the issue of pesticides which got their kickoff in the late 19th century and were in full swing use by the 1920's.
Your body has evolved to eat organic food. Processed food is engineered to be as cheap as possible to produce first, edible second and nutritional last.
*ultra-processed.
Depends on the processed food, and what country you live in. If you live, say, in the United States... Well over there it's just fine to eat things that increase the risk of cancer.
Our bodies were designed to eat the organic food.
Our bodies were designed…
Ok buddy
You process food by washing, cutting, or cooking your food. Processed isn't being used properly to scaremonge people. Over processed or ultra processed food is the worriesome stuff
Hmm I assume you bite the meat right off the pig/cow? You certainly wouldn’t process it with heat, that would be unnatural…
I too am also going to take this meme super seriously raaaaaaaagh!!!
Food is emotional and cultural.
this would have made sense.. god, more than 50 thousand years ago, since even hunter-gatherers would have been going around selectively spreading only seeds from plants they liked.
Truly the only flaw in the logic
People haven't been farming before 10,000 years ago
With farming defined as deliberately selectively spreading seeds
50k years ago people weren't eating many plants at all due to the glaciers.
This is not a proper dichotomy as organic isn't about level of processing, it deals with farming conditions and species.
Also processing a spectrum. For example a smoothie and juice are both processed fruit but the smoothie has everything that the whole foods have in it while the juice is missing some of the nutrients, notably the fiber. If you then add refined sugar to that juice to make it more palatable that is further processing, and if you reduce that juice to a jelly that is further processing, with each of these processing stages you are making the food more calorically dense. Processing can also make a food easier to eat or improve the nutrition though, processing isn't inherently a good or bad thing but it very often is one of those.
Opposite of processed food are raw ingredients
Opposite of organic food is conventional food (that is usually sprayed on with chemicals to kill bugs)
can't speak for what everyone else is talking about all I know organic is just a bespoke waste of money in my books, take that lable off and the price drops ten to twenty percent for the same raw ingredients
Has been for almost 20 years now. Organic used to mean something, then Big Agro adopted it as a marketing buzzword and it's become meaningless. Did you know organic produce can still use pesticides and weed killers? Did you know organic foods don't need to follow practically any sustainable practices? Did you know many organic foods produce more waste than normal because they have a higher rate of rejection for produce that doesn't "look" good?
Organic means nothing anymore.
Fun fact: Many if not most processed foods contain cellulose. That's just their fancy code word for sawdust.
Organic food is literally designed for you to eat. Processed food turns your body into crap which will degrade into the ground sooner rather than later.
Organic food is literally designed
Found the creationist.
Have you ever been to an organic farm?
I'm not a religious or health nut (although they are delicious) .... my point is that the fewer steps your food has to take to get to you eating it is way better than most things you buy in a box/can/plastic container.
Most "organic" food you can buy is entirely man-made, and never came into existence naturally. I would almost argue that 10,000 years of farming and cultivation has been humans processing nature itself for our benefit.
Processed food turns your body into crap which will degrade into the ground sooner rather than later.
Tell that to Donald Trump. Some of the unhealthiest and most mentally unwell people live the longest.
Except he has doctors that most of us will never afford. They probably pump vitamins and young girls blood into his veins.
As far as evidence goes, this is not particularly compelling. It's a bit like when someone has an anecdote of their chain-smoking 90-year old grandmother - yes, outliers exist, but at a population-level, both smoking and eating ultra-processed foods is not a good idea.
