Cooking is a process. Hell, cleaning, peeling, and slicing are all processes. Clearly there's a level of processing that's OK. But they never actually talk specifics, so it's impossible to tell where they draw the line. Is canned food okay? Salted nuts? Cheese? Discussions about UPF are different; those people usually define what they're talking about. But the MAHA people are incoherent.

Yeah I always felt that "Proccessed" foods have a bad reputation for no good reason. The fact that something might have enough sugar, salt and so on to kill a cow is what makes it unhealthy not the fact that it was "processed".