What makes you think so? Do you have any examples of particularly healthful highly processed foodstuff in mind? Or is this more some "there are no slow programm

What makes you think so? Do you have any examples of particularly healthful highly processed foodstuff in mind? Or is this more some "there are no slow programming languages, only slow implementations" type of argument about the absence of strict logical necessity? Healthy food is basically a lemon market, so what would a plausible mechanism to economically incentivize high processing for healthfulness look like? Conversely there is a clear economic incentive to highly process food in order to decrease unit cost at fixed palatability. By increasing yield (pink slime) or shelf-life (trans-fats) or taste and looks (flavor enhancer etc). None of these are necessarily bad in all cases, and in some cases might even correspond to increases in healthfulness (e.g. by killing harmful micro-organisms). But on average, in the absence of some additional economic incentive to keep or increase healthfulness, I'd expect optimization for these criteria to decrease it. For example, a lot of nutrients have short shelf-lives, so if there is an incentive to increase shelf-life but not an equal incentive to preserve nutritiousness (and I don't think there is), you'd expect healthfulness to go down, no?