Tagged biology because it’s related to health studies.
I keep seeing that “processed” and “ultraprocessed” foods hurt longevity and cause all sorts of risks. I get what that means in a very general sense – e.g. don’t eat Doritos every day – but this terminology seems really mushy when you push on it, kind of like with “organic” and “genetically-modified.” Please help me understand what the actual guidance is, rather than just panic about how everything is processed.
In: Biology
An apple is an unprocessed food. Well, you should probably wash it to get off any cruft that fall on it while it was being shipped to you, but that’s not much processing.
Applesauce is a processed food. Apples are put into a machine and chopped/mashed/… to make it.
Shelf-stable apple flavored bars are ultra processed. Sure, apples were used in one of the machines, but that’s only a little bit of the bar you’re thinking about eating. It’s mostly refined ingredients/chemicals that give it the exotic properties that the manufacturer wants it to have so you can buy it and it won’t go bad.
Organic is about how the farmers raised the raw ingredient and GMO is about what species of the ingredient they choose to raise.
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