Which processed foods are better than natural?

I think it is very disingenuous to have a headline &quot;Which processed foods are better than natural?&quot; and then talk about food that is cooked, pasteurized, frozen or fermented.<p>Sure it is &quot;processed&quot; in a sense, but most of these things hardly fit the modern definition of what most people picture &quot;processed foods&quot;. I mean at that point, if I cut my apples with a knife, they are in a way &quot;processed&quot; and better than the natural apple since I can avoid eating the bad parts without biting into them.

A big one mentioned at the start of the article is pasteurized milk. I&#x27;ll add another one that the article skipped - water. Processing and distribution of clean water has been a major boon throughout the world. You can see a regression away from it in the &quot;raw water&quot; movement and the associated diseases that raw water fans sometimes contend with.

I don’t think there’s anything intrinsically unhealthy about processing foods.<p>The issue is that if humans are exerting effort and money to process food, it’s almost always to make it more hyperpalatable, calorically denser and faster to digest. All of those features are strongly associated with low satiety and overconsumption.

Obviously processed food, e.g. cooking, is necessarily in many cases. However sometimes certain levels of professing are unnecessary and bad for you, e.g milk chocolate filled with extra sugar and candies embedded vs say an 80% dark chocolate with no added flavors other than milk.

Some fermented foods are better than the original ingredients.<p>Some sun-dried foods, likewise.<p>That sort of thing.<p>Though I&#x27;d still count that as &quot;natural&quot;.

Everytime I hear the term &quot;processed food&quot;, imagine eating &quot;unprocessed&quot; wheat.

This reads like a food-processing industry pamphlet. Suspiciously so.

Hamburger is the best processed food ever.