Here I thought it all was. I didn't have kids so I didn't ever have a reason to look into them. But don't like all baby foods go through a food processor so the baby's can eat them without teeth? So you already hit processed food status right there...

So then you try to mix processed foods from different plants and something to make them shelf stable and it's gotta be hard pressed to not be called ultra processed.

I'm not an expert but like if someone took canned tuna and mixed it with processed sweet potatoes, broccoli, liver, and feeds it to someone, at what level does it become ultra processed as opposed to combinations of processed foods?

One of the big fuck ups with nutritional values, is assuming we know everything.

It's a problem with metrics in general, if people only care about metrics, then the system only works if everything is a metric. Because anything that's not, is ignored.

With processed food, most of it is stripped out, then just "fortified" where only the metrics on the label are added back in.

Are we getting the most important parts? Almost definitely.

But we're not getting all the trace amounts of other shit our bodies evolved to expect with it, and some of that might matter