This has always bothered me about these claims. Is 'ultraprocessed' a matter of physical processing? Chemical? Or is it actually about superstimuli, which may

This has always bothered me about these claims. Is 'ultraprocessed' a matter of physical processing? Chemical? Or is it actually about superstimuli, which may or may not actually experience a lot of processing? Cheese is a great example: all cheese is chemically processed milk, pasteurized cheese is also heat treated, aged cheese has more chemical changes, and finally "processed" cheese is also emulsified. Where's the line? The article gives us "industrial food formulations made up mostly or entirely of ingredients... that are not found in a similar form and combination in nature." So a wedge of aged Parmesan is clearly ultraprocessed - even the natural lactose is gone! Somehow, I don't think that's what they're blaming obesity on. It also references "frosted snack cakes and ready-to-eat meals from the supermarket freezer", which is one of the least helpful examples I've ever seen. Frosted snake cakes probably date back a few hundred years, but this obviously means to include Ho-Hos and exclude what you'd get at a tea shop. Ready-to-eat stir-fry can be normal stir-fry tossed in the freezer, perhaps with a stabilizer to sell it in stores. Or you could have a TV dinner with chicken nuggets, fitting exactly the same description. The study described is interesting, and does control for some suspects like energy density. But "ultraprocessed" is not a chemical, or even a defined term. It's hard to see this as anything but preliminary work showing that there's a problem somewhere in a large set of foods, which now needs to be narrowed down.