There's also a significant different between unprocessed and processed meat, which these studies don't differentiate. Processed meat also varies widely in the kind of chemicals used in the processing.
Is there a good definition of processed food anywhere? All the ones I've seen have been made by examples (eg. Processed foods like hotdogs, bologne, etc.). Is it any food that have anything added to them for preservation or enhancements (eg is oj enriched with vitamin D considered a processed food). Many articles are confusing and seem to make processed food to be wholey bad w/o really defining what makes it bad...
"processed food" is generally intended to be less an exact term and more a proxy for "mass-produced food that has been engineered to cost little, last long, and taste good".
Enriching foods with vitamins is generally considered a form of "processing" (i.e. potentially "bad") because we may not fully understand the way our bodies digest the 'original' food with all of its nutrients, compared to whatever nutrients we've managed to discover to put back in whatever is lost in processing. In the case of orange juice, processing may lose vitamins and fiber, and even if we put the vitamins back in, that doesn't guarantee the body would absorb them the same way it would if it ingested the vitamins and fiber together (may not be exactly accurate in this example, but that's my general understanding of the difference)
It's not meant to be a precise definition as most food is "processed" in some way. Rather it is a reaction against the excessive, unnecessary processing that is basically taken for granted, and everything that goes with it: pasteurization, hydrogenation of fats, ammoniated "beef," "meaty" foods†, GMO, high sodium content, high pesticide content, synthetic estrogens leaching from plastics, decreased nutritional content, rancidity, hormones, dyes, synthetic preservatives, etc., etc., etc.
People who are more conscious of the hyperbole often prefer the term "minimally processed."
† There are legal requirements for what percent of a meat needs to be present to be a considered meat, thus we get things like "beefy tacos" which contain a meat-like product with so much filler they do not meet the already low standards of what the USDA considers to be meat.
A good rule-of-thumb: If it's packaged in cardboard it's almost always 99.99% processed. If it's shrinkwrapped (how meat should be) it's almost always 99.99% unprocessed, or minimally at the most.
>Typically, it means anything more manipulated than cut or ground,” says dietician Lisa Cashman, RD. “This includes most lunchmeats found in deli counters, anything with a casing or in sausage form, and, of course, anything smoked or cured like bacon.”
And the American Meat Institute (that's a thing?) defines processing as "processed meats are fresh products that have been changed from their original state. Some have added ingredients like spices. Some are cooked and some are cured."
Right so even cooking is a form of processing. This should be pretty obvious. Eating "unprocessed" means eating basically food that is in its natural state, like eating a peach. Processing changes it, like cooking that peach.
Meat shouldn't be shrinkwrapped it should be directly butchered from the animal and wrapped in butcher paper. A local single animal, butchered and slaughtered as cleanly as possible. I understand that more expensive and harder to scale across larger numbers of people but I think it's a better way to handle meat consumption. It's also the reason I hunt for my own meat when possible.
