I would concur: specifically the taxonomy doesn't offer any indication of mechanism, how is the 'processing' negativily affecting my biology? There's nothing in the naming to create a rule from.
Unlike say glycemic index: high glycemic index > releases glucose fast > body can't compensate fast enough > bad (diabetes, poor satiety, etc.) right now it's just processed > ???? > bad (in unspecifiable ways, by unspecifiable means).
I don't like that your comment and the parent both got negative reviews. It is a valid contrarian question.
However I would suggest researching about cirrhosis and fatty liver in children. It is a new disease that was unknown up until the 90s and is now common in developed countries. And it has to do with the following: your digestive system has the ability to process nutrients at a certain rate, depending on how hard they are to break down. For example sugar. The cells have a certain rate at which they can metabolize nutrients. The temporary excess is stored in the liver.
Then it becomes not a question of quality rather than quantity. The question then is not "how high is the glycemic index of food X" but "at which rate (i.e. mg of sugar per minute) can this food X be processed by our digestive system, and is this rate too fast for our cells to metabolize, which in turn causes our liver to store the temporary excess?"
Then the boolean variable "is this food X highly processed " becomes a plausible proxy variable, IMO, since refined sugar is something else than whole bread, when we talk about the rate at which nutrients enter the blood stream.
You make sense, but whats needed is a word that isn't 'processed' that means: 'proxy variable for rate at which nutrients enter the bloodstream' and an objective measure for that word[0].
To put up a bit of a strawman: By what empirical measure, is an apple different (healthier) than an apple-equivalent of raw glucose/fructose + multi-vitamin + fiber supplement? The latter is obviously more processed, but I literally lack the means[1] to say how, why, and to what degree, one is 'healthier' than the other.
[0]Regardless of name, afaik there is no meaningful way to say e.g. kraft mac and cheese is '80% processed, where as homemade with box pasta, fresh cheddar and bechamel, is 50%, and homemade w/ hand-pulled noodles is 25%.
[1]e.g. a test of 'rate of which simple sugars leach in a ISO standardized simulated stomach'.
"Processing" food is literally what people do in their kitchens. But that's presumably not what they mean.
Certain kinds of processing have to be applied to food to make it safe for consumption. But that's presumably not what they mean either.
Certain kinds of processing make the nutritional contents of food more bioavailable. Not what they mean.
Certain kinds of processing are required to preserve food. If humans stopped doing it, their environmental footprint would be orders of magnitude higher than it now is. Presumably, that's not what anyone is suggesting who is opposed to processed foods.
Fermenting is a kind of processing, and fermented foods may be playing a role in a healthy microbiome. ...whoops. Again: Not what they are talking about.
So what exactly are they trying to say? ...surely, picking a word other than "processed" would help in clarifying.
Unlike say glycemic index: high glycemic index > releases glucose fast > body can't compensate fast enough > bad (diabetes, poor satiety, etc.) right now it's just processed > ???? > bad (in unspecifiable ways, by unspecifiable means).