It’s not like this is a weird health nutter concept. It’s also not like these foods are necessarily as bad as some people like to act. But it is definitively objectively definable.
People disagreeing on the boundaries or details of a definition doesn’t make it not an objective definition.
It seems pretty clear to me that tea would fall into the ultra processed category, since it’s an extraction of a highly processed ingredient. Home baking, fermentation and cheese making would all be processed because they’re a transformation of unprocessed foods or processed food ingredients like flour. I’m not incredibly familiar with the classification system so I’m not sure where a piece of uncured beef, an unprocessed food, cooked with salt, a processed food ingredient, would go. I’m thinking it would be processed, like bread, but I’m not sure where seasoning falls.
Disagreement in the boundary conditions is pretty normal. Geologists disagree on exactly where different types of rock fall on the classification scales. Biologists disagree on a wide array of animal taxonomic boundaries.
You wouldn’t say that geology lacks an objective definition of what is or isn’t limestone, you’d just note that some people would disagree with the classification of some samples.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10260459/
Cheese, fermented and baked goods are typically processed, but can be ultra processed depending on the specifics of production.
The image should provide a more concise feel.
Basically:
Unprocessed, minimally processed, processed and ultra processed, respectively.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova_classification
It’s not like this is a weird health nutter concept. It’s also not like these foods are necessarily as bad as some people like to act. But it is definitively objectively definable.
Removed by mod
Okay?
People disagreeing on the boundaries or details of a definition doesn’t make it not an objective definition.
It seems pretty clear to me that tea would fall into the ultra processed category, since it’s an extraction of a highly processed ingredient. Home baking, fermentation and cheese making would all be processed because they’re a transformation of unprocessed foods or processed food ingredients like flour. I’m not incredibly familiar with the classification system so I’m not sure where a piece of uncured beef, an unprocessed food, cooked with salt, a processed food ingredient, would go. I’m thinking it would be processed, like bread, but I’m not sure where seasoning falls.
Disagreement in the boundary conditions is pretty normal. Geologists disagree on exactly where different types of rock fall on the classification scales. Biologists disagree on a wide array of animal taxonomic boundaries.
You wouldn’t say that geology lacks an objective definition of what is or isn’t limestone, you’d just note that some people would disagree with the classification of some samples.