> No, I can't. That doesn't mean there is no distinction between the two. I cannot draw an arbitrary line where "low altitude" becomes "high altitude", but there are many differences between them.

"Altitude" refers to height above sea level. It is measured with an altimeter. The unit it is measured at is feet (or a convertible unit, like meters). Based on the context being discussed, "high altitude" represents an altitude in the upper portion of the distribution of altitudes; for example, very few cities on earth are above 5,000 feet, but Boulder CO is, so it is high altitude. Humans might consider any flight in a plane high altitude, but if we're comparing many flights, a high altitude flight implies a flight above the regular cruising feet of 30,000-ish feet.

I can't personally think of an answer similar to what I said above about processing. There's some notion that processed foods involve a lot of sugar, and salt, and fat, and calories, and maybe artificial sweeteners (themselves a class of many unrelated products), and also sometimes it means GMOs, and sometimes it seems to mean "includes stabilizers or ingredients normally used only at scale like xanthan gum", but it's also a non-biological statement about the way the food was produced or sold. I don't know how to relatively measure the importance of those components in "processing". If I have a bunch of data in a matrix and apply PCA or something, will the first principal component be a latent measure of processing?

This is a definition sufficient enough for me to tell you the steak I ate last night is not processed but the Hungryman at the grocery store is, but not sufficient for me to understand the causal link between processing and obesity, which is what the article is proposing. What about the Hungryman makes people fat?

I personally would like to understand -- are you arguing that a food being yellow makes people obese? That fresher food is metabolized different than less fresh? That the blade of the mechanical separator affects how nutritional the meat is? That the company's profit margin drives obesity? I don't think so. It's not quite that, right?

This speaks to the fact that processing here is a bit of an nebulous concept, and that's probably why the article seems unsatisfying to the parent comment you're replying to and to me. In part because one of the best definitions of processing seems to be "food that's high in calories but doesn't make you feel full so you eat more", which is sort of tautological -- yes, food that makes you fat makes you fat. So let's try to come up with a definition that lends itself more to the kind of proposal the parent article is making.

Someone says "I like oak tables, but I don't like processed wood like MDF or cardboard".

And the parent commenter is nitpicking that oak tables are processed, with the implications that a) there is no distinction between oak tables and cardboard, and b) the important thing is to beat the person down on precise word use to win internet points. "But they're all processed! Ha! Gotcha!", yes yes Mr Intelligent you win for being technically correct, the best kind of correct.

We can all agree that oak tables are processed wood, but we can also see clearly that there is a scale of processing which takes wood further and further away from things we typically know as 'wood', despite still having the same plant cells in the construction somewhere. We can see that the use cases, costs, strength, texture, appearance, changes. We know from life experience that things cannot be repaired back to original condition, and that more repairs deteriorate condition more over time, and similarly wood cannot go through infinite 'processes' and stay like new.

It is easy to argue that sliced, dried, planed, mortice-tenon joined wood is processed, and that anyone calling it 'unprocessed' is being deceitful. But to do that and focus on that, to imply that MDF, cardboard, papier mache, 1-ply toilet roll are all the same because 'processed' must be just one binary thing, is way more disingenuous.

Am I arguing that toilet paper being bleached is what makes it less-nice for a table material than oak is? No. But bleach is part of what makes it toilet paper instead of oak planks.

Yellow aspect is not something which makes people obese, but it's pretty clear from a glance at many cooked food selling places that chips/chisps, pastry, pizza dough, pasta, noodles, bread buns, in the yellow-pale-brown-white colour range show up enormously more often than cabbage green does, and the reason why they show up more often is that flour is easier to fit through a repeatable process, more shelf stable, easier to preserve, easier to get a consistent result every time with simple procedures, cheaper to work with, and hooks taste buds more strongly than fresh mixed fruits and vegetables.

> That fresher food is metabolized different than less fresh?

Dead things decay and denature, cabbage leaves taken from the cabbage and left on the side will wilt and then rot in days. The fact that you get Little Debbie Cakes in a box with a three month use by date, but you don't get Little Cabbage Cakes with fresh cabbage leaves in a box for three months, says something about the ability of preservatives. If it didn't matter what was in the cabbage leaves and denaturing, we'd simply eat six month old cabbage leaves through the non-growing season without bothering about preservatives. Since we do have to preserve food, there must be things in it worth preserving, and refining plants as if they were only made of 3 things which can then be kept and combined into foods must have some effect on what is and isn't preserved.

> In part because one of the best definitions of processing seems to be "food that's high in calories but doesn't make you feel full so you eat more", which is sort of tautological -- yes, food that makes you fat makes you fat. So let's try to come up with a definition that lends itself more to the kind of proposal the parent article is making

But it's only tautological because you're refusing to see that it's not "food which is high in calories" which people on My 600lb Life TV show are gorging on. They are never eating beef dripping on pure starchy sweet potatoes and drinking buttermilk - all high calorie food. They are always eating take-out pizza, chips, candy bars, cake bars, ice cream - all food which has been built to be the equivalent of clickbait. They all have things in common - longer path from food to mouth, more processing, adjusted to be tuned to maximise hooking people in order to maximise profit, lack of things which are hard to fit through industrial processes like interesting vegetable colour and fresh leaves.

Since there is no single thing in common, and there is no word for the distinction between a potato and Lays potato chips, and frozen potato starch dinner accompaniements, the word 'processed' fits as well as any word. English is fine with a lot of word overloading.

> I don't know how to relatively measure the importance of those components in "processing"

I don't either. Therefore I must conclude that they are the same, and that apples from the market and McDonald's apple pie are no different?

> Cooked uses whatever ingredients are available now. Processed uses only ingredients are available in bulk year round.

So if I make tomato sauce in the winter out of imported tomatoes from south america, is it processed?

>Cooked is stuff a human can make. Processed is filtered by what fits in a factory process.

If I build a robot to make me breakfast, is the food going to be "processed" instead of cooked?

>Cooked is food that you trimmed the manky parts off while peeling. Processed is 5 tons of tomatoes dumped onto the ground by a truck.

I once went to a super foodie restaurant and ordered something like a $20 appetizer which included some kind of braised carrots that were not pealed and still had the stems and a bit of grit from the soil on them. Were my disappointing carrots "processed"?

>Cooked is food taken as a whole. Processed is treating food as resource to be refined into separate components, then ignore all the non-profitable components and concentrate the obviously useful ones.

If I go to a restaurant and get some food prepared by ordinary line cooks that don't give a shit about their job besides just getting it done, is that food processed?

>Cooked is food you would make yourself. Processed is what a company would make to sell to maximise money.

If I get really good at making cookies and start selling them do they automatically become "processed"?

What would I have to do to avoid that "processed" label?

What would I do that would tip me over from delicious home-cooked cookies to worthless processed cookies? How big the ovens and mixers are? Where I source my ingredients? A specific kind of oven? Cooking machinery?

I've explained what I see and what I think many people see when they talk about 'processed foods' in a way that makes a fuzzy but usefully coherent classification.

If you think there is no worthwhile distinction to be made between a boiled egg and a Cadbury creme egg, say that.

If you think there is a potentially meaningful distinction to be made, choose a word which you like instead of 'processed'.

> I've explained what I see and what I think many people see when they talk about 'processed foods' in a way that makes a fuzzy but usefully coherent classification.

No you haven't and you won't because their isn't one.

You made hand-wavhing non-explanations that revolved around ambiguous feelings about the person making the food that you couldn't possibly turn into a system to classify food as processed or not processed.

I asked many many questions about what your definition of processing was or if it applied in specific scenarios and you wouldn't or couldn't answer.

It's past the point where I'm interested in continuing, I don't see anything coming of this.

You asked a lot of obviously trap styled bad-faith questions to try and force a clear edge boundary which I already said I cannot provide.

I also cannot provide a clear boundary between 'delicious' and 'disgusting', and those are also hand wavy and ambiguous and guided by risible feelings, but there is still merit and usefulness in describing them.

I, too, can ask tons of careful trick questions about "if I take a delicious cookie, then put a drop of pig blood in it, but you don't know it's there, does it THEN become a disgusting cookie? What if it was three drops and a snail but they were boiled and minced first? AH GOTCHA you can't draw a clear precise measurable line between delicious and disgusting, so there can't be a difference".

It's past the point where I'm interested in continuing, I don't see anything coming of this."

If it was true that you were past the point of continuing, you wouldn't have continued. Guess you do understand the idea of a fuzzy boundary after all.

And yet distinctions made based on the average of feelings about a bunch of related things are used every day, to great avail, and are absolutely critical to everyone--and I do mean everyone--'s decision-making ability and common sense.

Just because it cant be rendered into a perfect line in the sand or measurable, objectively-defined system of classification doesn't mean it's not useful.

It seems to me that the relevant distinction between a boiled (chicken) egg and a Cadbury creme egg lies in its nutritional content -- grams of sugar, starch, fat, and protein -- rather than in the mechanism by which they are produced.

If chickens laid Cadbury creme eggs, they would still be just as unhealthy.

And yet a raw egg and a cooked egg have the same grams of protein, but different amounts of human-usable protein if eaten. Trans fat is associated with an increased risk for heart disease and the FDA says that it is no longer "generally recognised as safe". Two grams of trans fat vs two grams of other fat is "the same quantity of fat" but not the same effect on human health[1]. If we reduce the amount of sugar in a creme egg, so it has the same mass of fat and protein as a boiled egg, is it then equally healthy as a boiled egg?

The reduction of food to a quantity of sugar, starch, fat, and protein, is part of what I am objecting to; as if you could say that all products containing 20 grams of metal, 12 grams of plastic, and 2 grams of glass are the same product, or that all programs with 147k lines of code are the same program. "fat" isn't one thing. "sugar" isn't one thing. Fat and sugar are not the only classes of things in plants and animals.

The relevant distinction is all the things which are different, which is a lot more things than people casually talk about. Is it the quantity in grams of saturated vs unsaturated fat? Mono or polyunsaturated? Omega 3 quantity? Ratio of omega 3 to omega 6? Quantity of EPA, DHA or ALA fat overall, or ratio between them? Trace quantity of magnesium, or trace quantity of bio-available forms of magnesium in balance with an amount of medium chain triglycerides? And what about all the countless other potential distinctions with macronutrients and smaller trace compounds, each also denaturing in different ways over different time periods? Many words I don't understand, but understand enough to know that they describe differences which are measurable and worth naming.

There are enough potential distinctions which could be made, that saying "you can crush fresh almonds, extract the oil, put it in cookies, leave them in a box for a month, and as long as there is an equal quantity of oil in grams to the original almonds then they are exactly as healthy as eating the original fresh almonds" is very suspiciously simplified.

If we had an exhaustive list, or if we had a known complete understanding of the effects of all compounds in all combinations, it would be a lot more convincing. "It doesn't kill you, your body can survive on it for a bit longer" is not the same as "optimal thing to consume for optimal long term health".

> "rather than in the mechanism by which they are produced."

The things chickens lay must promote the growth of healthy chicks - if chickens laid creme eggs, we'd be in a world where creme eggs were healthy. But the use of 'healthy' as a boolean toggle property which food has or does not have, and which a behaviour is or is not, is something I grumble about as well.

[1] https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/high-blood-ch...

That's exactly it.

You cannot classify food as processed or cooked without handwaving and saying it's some "other" without any real way to decide what to label a food. It's nonsense virtue signaling adjective soup.

And it is still unclear if I make meatloaf to freeze and am in a bad mood whether or not that food is processed. Maybe I have to use a really big oven to make sure it's processed instead of cooked.