“This [anti-abundance] mentality ultimately stems from the 1970s `Limits to Growth’ report, which predicted that natural resources would run out, prices would shoot through the roof, and there would be mass starvation.
“Reality has shown this to be bunk. Yet it lives on in decision-takers’ minds, reinforced by the belief that climate change requires a reduction in our global footprint as human beings and use less of everything. And it’s strengthened by a fundamentally elitist, snobbish mindset about economic growth, the view that growth is all about the hoi polloi buying more `stuff’ they don’t need, rather than what it is: the advancement of human possibility for all of us during our limited time on the planet.
“Look hard – actually you don’t need to look hard – and you see it everywhere. Consider the disdain for `cheap food’ and the moral panic about UPFs, surely a fabricated concept, and one whose principal benefit is psychological, allowing well-off politicians and campaigners to play Lady Bountiful telling ordinary voters how to eat. Think of the sneering at big cars, or worse still, people with more than one car, the suburban lifestyle, houses with gardens instead of egg-box flats, package holidays instead of leisurely eco-travel.
“Contemplate all the tedious lifestyle preaching, the hectoring of supermarkets about packaging, the determination to build houses with tiny windows and small rooms and then to ban air conditioning as it’s too damaging to the environment.”
– David Frost, Daily Telegraph.
Note: “UPFs” are ultra-processed foods, which now seem to have achieved the same Voldemort status as tobacco and booze.
Regarding the “abundance mindset” approach, I recommend this book, Fossil Future (2022), of a year or so ago by Alex Epstein. Another is Merchants of Despair, by Robert Zubrin. Last but not least is this book, written more than 25 years ago – The Intellectuals and The Masses – by John Carey. He shows how, from the 19th Century and into the 20th, a lot of supposedly clever people hated the rising prosperity of the broad mass of the public, not simply out of some concern for the natural world (much of which was sentimental bullshit), but because they hated people, and ultimately, themselves.
Great stuff, good article, but to be fair ultra processed foods “are* crap 🤣
Bread is ultra processed food.
David Frost always talks a lot of sense.
Why he’s still in the authoritarian, big-state, net zero loving Conservative Party is a mystery of our age.
Somehow fake vegetarian ‘meat’ gets a pass from being evil crap, despite being ultra processed. Or maybe the word I want is “indulgence,” in the religious sense.
Before about 1970, there were Progressives who actually believed in progress, in a bright, shiny future of abundance. It was a belief in a future where the Best Experts (employed and empowered by Government Almighty) made Bigger Better Plans for Society that happened to crush any individual plans that individuals might make for themselves, but those Progressives did at least have a vision of a bright and prosperous future.
Then they were supplanted by a new left with a new party line of “Learn to live with less, you evil greedy bastards!”
I suspect what happened is that the left finally twigged to the fact that Super Soviet Socialist Economics based on Expert Government Planning was not going to leave old-timey horse-and-buggy free-market economics in the dust after all. When that horse-and-buggy ‘capitalism’ did seem to outperform Super Soviet Socialist Economics, there had to be a catch, a disaster waiting to happen. Or, if it was true with no catch, then it must MUST be the case that abundance and prosperity are EVIL and poverty and immiseration (which socialism is superior at producing) must somehow be a GOOD thing. Because Socialism being a failure was “INCONCEIVABLE!”
No, supermarket ‘Wonder bread’ is ultra processed food. A loaf of trad sourdough from a proper baker is something quite different chemically & digestively speaking.
Then they were supplanted by a new left with a new party line of “Learn to live with less, you evil greedy bastards!”
And yet they never seem to ask the state to learn to live with less.
I’m quite happy with “ordinary” bread – from a proper baker. I’m distinctly unimpressed with most so-called “artisan” products, which typically look like something you might uncover when digging out foundations. My simple litmus test is whether bread is still fresh the day after I buy it: if the answer is “Yes” that’s because it contains preservatives. Suffice to say bread from my local bakery is going stale the next day, which is why I buy several sliced wholemeal loaves, and pack them (2 slices to a plastic bag) in the freezer as soon as I get home.
I was walking through a park today and found that the local council had added a skate park (now some years old), a new climbing frame, new adult outdoors exercise machines, replaced the bandstand with a modern equivalent for much larger ‘events’, and most recently marked out red, green, and yellow exercise routes.
When did government elbow their way into peoples’ exercise choices? Tedious lifestyle preaching indeed.
Although I think some concerns about ultra processed food are legitimate, I do want to speak up for industrial agriculture and food production. People used to starve to death, suffer serious nutritional deficiencies with diseases like rickets and iodine deficiency, death by food poisoning, there used to be famines and so forth. Where we all live these things are unthinkable today, and that is also true of more and more of the world. Why? Because of modern agriculture. Because of food additives like vitamin fortification, iodine in our salt, preservatives to keep food from going bad, antibiotics in our livestock, pasteurization of our milk, disease and adverse condition resistant crops, an international market and delivery system for food and so forth.
When I was a kid my parents put an orange in my Christmas stocking because they grew up in a time when it was extremely difficult to get fruit in the winter.
That fresh baked sourdough bread that Perry enjoys is made out of wheat that has been genetically engineered for thousands of years. “Eating food the way God made it” is a vary bad idea. Farmers have dramatically improved the food they grow from the initial plants and animals that God gave us. Broccoli, kale, brussel sprouts, cabbage, all of them come from one original plant through years of genetic engineering.
That isn’t to say there aren’t bad things in the modern food supply. For sure there are. The massive success of modern agriculture and food production has lead to such an abundance that the biggest problem for the poor today is obesity rather than starvation. So, let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Clement Atlee Government was an excellent exemple of the ideology of anti abundance.
UK was still rationing when it already disappeared from Germany and Italy defeated and in case of Germany heavily destroyed.
I would say even hidden in back of the head the ideology of anti abundance permeated the UK state at least since WW2.
Flour, salt, yeast, and water. I make it two or three times every week.
Now, Wonder Bread is UPF, but it’s really not bread.
This goes back to the “Club of Rome” in the 1960s.
All its predictions were false – but they did not care about that, as the predictions were just an excuse for their preexisting objective – world “governance”, world POWER. The objective was POWER – the arguments and predictions were just a means-to-this-end.
In the 1970s many of the same people were involved in the World Economic Forum – with he same objective, world “governance”, POWER. Such people dominate all international organisations – from the United Nations to various Corporations.
In the late 1980s they started to use Carbon Dioxide as an excuse for policies, world “governance” – POWER, that they had already been advocating for decades. Odd that policies they had long pushed before talking about Carbon Dioxide just happened to be he correct solution to the Carbon Dioxide crises.
Nothing has changed – the objective of the international establishment is power, the desire to stamp their boots down on the faces of humanity (everywhere) for ever.
@bobby b
Now, Wonder Bread is UPF, but it’s really not bread.
Why? It is also made with flour, water, yeast and salt and is baked in the same (if gigantically scaled up) way that you bake your bread.
For sure there are some additives, but they aren’t there for no purpose. For example, it has a tiny amount of dough conditioner to make it stronger and thus more fit to the purpose of taking a spread for making sandwiches, it has some tiny amount of preservative to make it have a longer shelf life and therefore be cheaper and more accessible, and it has wheat gluten added — which is basically just the same as the flour but washed to just get the gluten proteins, again the make the bread more suitable for sandwiches. And yeah, it has some sugar, mainly to feed the yeast, but if you want to avoid sugar the small amount in a slice of bread is fairly low down the target list for things to eliminate.
FWIW, one of my favorite online cooks, who I like because he looks at these sorts of questions and analyzes them scientifically rather than feelz, discusses the subject of this type of bread in comparison to “fancy” bread in this video. It is worth a listen if you want to understand why this bread is the way it is.
For sure I think there is a lot of crap, unhealthy food out there, and I don’t eat wonderbread, but that is because I don’t really eat bread very much at all — I don’t think it is a particularly healthy food even the fancy ass bread or the stuff you make at home. But I think the Skippy and jelly (peanut butter and jam for the Brits) you put on the bread is probably on net worse for you than a couple of slices of wonderbread.
In some senses the anti-abundance mentality goes back to the “Arts and Crafts” movement of the mid 1800s, a reaction against the industrially mass produced designs of the time.
Wonder Bread is to bread as Velveeta Cheese is to cheese.
I’m not making a scientific critique here. I just think the taste and texture of Wonder Bread is disgusting, while the taste and texture of simple bread is great.
(Even though I now find myself unable to eat it as much as I’d like. Carbs, you know.)
Because it’s an ultra processed product for mass produced junk food sandwiches. Bobby is right that crap should be thought of as something else.
I recall Magnus Pike (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnus_Pyke) on the TV in my youth describing how a hamburger bought from a fast food place was healthy. It had carbohydrates(bread), protein (the hamburger) and salad for vitamins (the lettuce and tomatoes etc.) as well as dairy (cheese and mayo).
I wonder what happened? Or is it the propaganda since then that has been fed to the population to discredit cheap and nutritious food and now such food is bad for you?
And while we are about it, can someone tell me if this week red wine is good or bad for you? I lost track …
This week, red wine is very very good to me.
(To be read in a Garrett Morris voice.)
((Right now, as a matter of fact, with my fresh olive-and-herb fougasse!))
@Phil B
And while we are about it, can someone tell me if this week red wine is good or bad for you? I lost track …
See this is the problem, there actually ARE foods that are unhealthy for you. Wonderbread — even if you don’t like it — isn’t one of them, or certainly isn’t any worse than any other bread. I mean it isn’t very nutritious, but at least it isn’t actively bad for you like, for example, the supposedly healthy “pulp free glass of orange juice for breakfast” which is basically a glass of sugar water, and worse, a glass of fructose sugar water.
It all gets mixed up with the government issuing shockingly dreadful advice bought off by the people they supposedly regulate, and equally by the hairy armpit ladies who seem to think that all additives are bad and anything “natural” is good. These latter people are almost as bad as the first. The movement, for example, to drink raw milk is quite dreadful. Pasteurization has saved countless lives. And when it comes to bread, the dreaded “preservatives” probably saved a lot more lives than you’d imagine. Preservatives prevent the growth of mold on bread and mold, even in small amounts are quite toxic (and worryingly it accumulates in your body and is not easily eliminated.)
And ignorance along the dihydrogen oxide scare level is so damaging. I remember talking to one of the hairy armpit ladies in a grocery store who was reading an ingredient list outraged by the fact that her bread had been poisoned by ascorbic acid. Until I pointed out to her that she had a jar of ascorbic acid supplements in her cart.
But the biggest concern surely (and I hate to sound like Snorri here) is the advocacy of replacing fat with carbohydrate. You can trace America’s massive rise in obesity almost to the day that that vile food pyramid was released.
I think Bobby Kennedy is a bit cookie, but it is good that someone from the other side is pushing the food “Overton” window in a decent direction.
BTW, I’m unclear on his position on all vaccinations, I think he pushed the “mercury in Thimerosal causes autism” nonsense — though I could be wrong. But the fact that the Covid vaccination was so counterproductive is dragging down other vaccinations in a very troubling way. Next to the purification of the public water supply, vaccinations are probably medicine’s greatest triumph in saving the lives of hundreds of millions of people, especially children. And it is so damaging that the covid crowd has pissed in the well and poisoned so many people against the whole notion of vaccination. Our collective conscience has forgotten the tragedy of watching one’s kid die of whooping cough.
Curious – does anyone know what “Ultra-Processed Food” really means? I’m pretty sure I don’t. I’m also pretty sure that it has many different assumed meanings, leaving discussion of the subject fraught with miscommunication.
When I first encountered the term, my assumption was that it was foodstuffs of indeterminate base, mixed and blended and blended some more, and then extruded into shapes or molds – with no resemblance to whatever constituent ingredients went into it. “Turkey” loaf, and such.
All of which cannot be technically correct, because such actions would not effect the nutritional value of the extruded mess. It would certainly effect the aesthetic and taste qualities, but I’m not sure nutritionists would be up in arms about such qualities.
Is it the addition of preservatives and conditioners and emulsifiers and gelling agents? Such things are found in most items labelled as UPF’s, but in small enough quantities that I wouldn’t worry overmuch about them. I’d worry more about Wonder Bread’s sugar content than about the additives.
For discussion purposes, I now just assume that any mixture of edible ingredients that has been blended forever and then extruded into some unnatural shape – such as the vaunted WB – satisfies the UPF elements. Yuck. I’ve spent enough time around farm and ranch ops that I retain an appreciation for food which still resembles something found in real life.
It all resembles past discussions about, is there value in growing your own food? The answer being, of course, that value is where you find it – value is what you like and want.
Two points I missed:
1. Ragusea is great!
2. One should not hate to sound like SG. He has strong views, but I’ve not seen any of his views outright disproved, and in fact my adherence to similar views has me down 65 pounds from my personal high and feeling (and testing out as) very healthy. 😉
I repeat, it is odd that the policy, world “governance” – power, the international establishment had been advocating for decades (back in the days of the Club of Rome in the 1960s – indeed even before that) just happened to be the “solution” to the supposed “crises” of Carbon Dioxide – that they started to talk about in the late 1980s.
For example, David Rockefeller, and many other people involved in the 1992 Rio Conference, had been pushing this policy (world “governance” – power) decades before he started to use Carbon Dioxide as an excuse for it.
By the way – if Perry and others do not like “ultra processed” foods, they will like Portugal – as the people of Portugal consume less ultra processed food, as a proportion of their diet, than any other Western European nation.
Technically, it means a food which includes little or no “unprocessed” food, based on the following;
Category 1) unprocessed or minimally processed food – vegetables, meat, fruit, plain yoghurt etc. Freezing these, or cooking them, still leaves them in category 1
Category 2) processed ingredients – eg. butter, sugar, oils etc – basically, these are foodstuffs that are largely ingredients rather than food in it’s own right; like, you’d put butter on a corncob, but probably shouldn’t be eating it by the spoonful on it’s own
Category 3) processed foods – foods from category 1 that have had something a bit more involved than cooking or freezing done to them. Homemade bread would fall into this category, as would yoghurt with added fruit, cheese and so on. Canned veg (think: heat baths) would sit here as well.
Category 4) Ultra-processed food: it contains little or zero food that is NOT processed in some manner, and usually also contains chemical additives such as preservatives, artificial sweeteners, food colourings and the like. Crisps (chips for the yanks), sodas, ready-meals, margerine (as opposed to butter), mass-produced bread with preservatives, all fit under UPFs (so does vegan/vegetarian meat alternatives, btw, no doubt about it). Yoghurt with both fruit and sweeteners would be ultra-processed.
I’ve used yoghurt a few times, as it kind of demonstrates how a food can sit under different categories depending on what’s been done to it.
The rule of thumb often used is “if it contains ingredients that the average home cook doesn’t have in their kitchen, then it’s probably ultra-processed”. Which is fine as a rule of thumb, but has obvious outliers – I have a pouch of Prague Powder in my cupboard, because I make my own bacon from scratch, for instance. Am I an average home cook? Probably not, but it shows the limits of “rules of thumb”, at least.
The other thing, to support something Fraser said earlier, is…none of that gives you any idea whether it’s bad for you or not! If I ate supermarket bread, I’d much rather take my chances with it having preservatives in it than risk eating mould.
I think it’s one of those things where it really isn’t that hard – eat loads of veggies including grains and beans, a small amount of fruit, and decently farmed meat/fish in smallish quantities, and you’re probably going to be okay. If you fancy a bag of tortilla chips with salsa, go for it. If you survive off of chicken nuggets, pizza and icecream, well, things might not go so great for you – but this absolutely cannot be new news to anyone, surely.
I think we’ve massively overcomplicated it with things like the wretched food pyramid, the “salt is evil” movement, and so on.
———-
Enormous caveat: I’ll now contradict everything I said above by noting that “fed is best”, and some people, whether due to long hours, lack of funds, lack of physical capacity, or whatever, absolutely cannot eat fresh foods everyday, or even possibly most days, and have little choice but to survive off of chicken tenders and microwave ready-meals. I’m certainly not in the business of shaming those people for not having a “perfect” diet.
@neosnake, nice, especially your caveat at the end.
I think an understanding of diet can be understood simply by the fact that cows are “finished” for slaughter by feeding them corn and other high carbohydrate foods. Makes them fat and worth more. It also makes us fat and die younger.
Which is ironic because high carb foods are exactly what the government told us we should eat instead of that scary “fat”.
Is the meat from cows treated that way “ultra processed”? Or the meat from a turkey so pumped up that its breast is half its body weight. Is that “ultra processed”? Does it matter if the “processing” takes place when the animal is alive or dead?
In this context, “no” (from a technically accurate perspective) – but in a wider context, yeah, it’s clearly not as healthy as a free-range bird; that’s not just a wishy-washy hippie happy turkey thing, there’s genuine evidence that animals that are treated better have better health outcomes for us when we eat them. My interest is primarily in “inflammatory” foods, as I developed spinal arthritis a couple years ago, and things like grass-fed beef are linked to better health overall. I largely eat using the principles from the Mediterranean diet, which seems to have kept it in check. Carbs – especially pappy white bread – do seem to trigger a reflex, whereas homemade flatbreads or sourdough breads do not.
There’s an interesting thing I found with making my own bacon (I reckon I make 80% of whatever bacon I eat myself, but I obviously occasionally buy some if I’ve run out and I’ve not had time to go through the whole curing process etc), which is that my home-cured and smoked doesn’t shrink when cooked, or give off that horrible white liquid. It’s the “pumped full of water” that you refer to re. turkey breasts.
I think another thing about bacon is that it’s clearly not healthy, BUT – I tend to use it as flavouring nowadays. Add some finely chopped bacon to a bowl of brussels sprouts, or into a bowl of beans (I’m a fan of charro beans), and the kids I cook for are suddenly able to eat their veggies. I’ll take that as a win every time, and I don’t think the small amount of “unhealthy” bacon outweighs the benefits of them getting a bowlful of healthy veggies down their necks.
(also, please don’t take that as saying I never have a bacon sarnie – I very much do so every now and then, and thoroughly enjoy it)
Since we have gone deep into the meaning of what “processed” is and is not, I want to add a few paras from an interesting Bloomberg article of a few days ago about how approaches to healthy eating seem to have gyrated a lot in the US:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-07-18/was-the-us-ever-healthy-what-maha-gets-wrong-about-nutrition-history?cmpid=071925_WKNDNL&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_term=250719&utm_campaign=weekendnl
I mean, they say that like it’s a bad thing…
Since i have been mentioned a couple of times, in flattering terms, i guess that i should offer an opinion, or maybe half a dozen.
First, I am flattered by Fraser mentioning me, even if he hates to sound like me. The fact is that i am aware of sounding like a crank — not for insisting on the dangers of seed oils and refined carbs to general health, but specifically to mental health.
Why, then, do i insist on dangers from diet to mental health?
The answer needs to be broken down.
First, i find that i am constantly gaslighted by various insanities, both in my immediate surroundings (and you know nothing of that) and when reading about politics.
Finding that i was right, 8 years ago, to dismiss Russian collusion as a hoax, goes some of the way to protect me from gaslighting; but ultimately i need to keep repeating to myself that we are all insane, because of the #### that we ate when our brains were developing. I am not troubled by the thought that i, too, am insane, as long as i can blame obvious insanities, like the Russian collusion hoax, on other people being at least as insane as i am.
Second, i find that i cannot simply keep repeating all of this to myself. I need to tell other people that we are all insane, to see if they can cogently argue that i am the only one who is insane. I have told my closest friends and family; the next step is to tell people on Samizdata.
— Please note that RFK Jr might be setting up a natural experiment: If he can change the American diet for the better, and subsequently American politics returns to sanity, that would confirm my theory.
@Johnathan interesting article, however, one thing I’m not sure I agree with:
Science is not broken; it’s just slow, subject to temporary setbacks and often abused by politicians and advertisers.
I think this is true but misleading. The caveat at the end is thrown in as a kind of aside but it is far more than that. Science is broken BECAUSE of the interference of politicians and advertisers. Pure science gets so much of its funding from highly biased sources, especially the government, that it really does a huge amount of damage to that science. I don’t need to tell you of some very disturbing recent examples of “scientists” jumping on board the good ship Political Correctness or the USS Socialism. The government are the worst offenders but large companies are pretty bad at this too if they can leverage pseudo science to conjure up anti competitive advantages for themselves. Such corrupt practices in science are legion.
And it is certainly true that Big Food and Big Ag was more than happy to leverage “science” to get them competitive advantages and bring about addictive behaviors in their customers.
Science does a huge amount of good, but I often think that this is an accidental side effect of the true purpose of modern science — to advance the agendas of their paymasters, especially so the government. Good science does happen in commercial organizations, but mainly when those organizations exist in a competitive environment where they advance by providing desirable good products and services to their customers rather than delivering the answers preferred by the government in Washington or London.
About the definition of UPFs: neonsnake’s definition is sensible. I just want to mention that today i read this:
I myself mostly buy raw food (except for cheese and yogurt, ham and bacon); but when i buy UPFs (eg horseradish sauce), i read the list of ingredients. Seed oils, sugars, and flour are what mark dodgy UPFs for me; and yes, that means that homemade bread looks dodgier to me than the best sort of commercial horseradish sauce.
(I have never been much of a bread eater; and when it comes to pasta, i used to favor tomato-less recipes, but now i favor pasta-less recipes.)
Fraser:
There is much truth in that, but i would add “mostly” before “BECAUSE”.
That is because of how difficult it was to convince people that DNA carries genetic information, or that a bacterial infection causes gastric ulcers.
BTW: I visited a whisky shop in central London, back in the last century, which also had a tasting bar. It might or might not be still there.
Chatting with the barman, i was surprised to find that he considered Lagavulin and Macallan to be ultra-processed whiskies, as opposed to genuine articles such as Laphroaig and Glendronach (Islay and sherry-cask, respectively).
I myself appreciate all 4, as well as Bowmore and other Islay and sherry-cask whiskies.
Never tried sherry-cask Islay whisky, sadly; but i am not dead yet.
BTW I was thinking some more about this pure bread, made out of water, flour, salt and yeast. So, let’s think about those ingredients:
1. Water: it doesn’t just come out of the ground, the water we use in cooking, even assuming it comes out of your household faucet, is filtered, cleaned, treated with chlorine to kill the bacteria, often with chemicals to balance the Ph and mineral content, and probably a few other things I forgot. Sounds pretty processed to me.
2. Flour: first of all the result of thousands of years of genetic manipulation. Grown in massive farms, usually fed with chemical fertilizers, then stripped from the fields by massive machines, beaten to remove the outer shell, ground down into a powder, frequently bleached, and sometimes has fortifying minerals and vitamins added. Sounds pretty processed to me.
3. Salt: comes either from mines in the ground, where it is carefully washed and cleaned to remove impurities, or from ocean evaporation pans where it is also similarly cleaned. Processed for sure, maybe not as much as the other ingredients.
4. Yeast: used to be a byproduct of beer manufacture where it is skimmed and cleaned and purified and dried. Today I think it is mostly brewed up in gigantic metal kettles, before being cleaned, purified and dried. Again, food literally made in a factory in a big metal tank. Sounds pretty processed.
So whether your food is “ultra processed” seems to me to be a bit of a matter of perspective. Though to Perry’s point, pan sandwich bread is a very different product than “artisan” bread, just as that is a different product from brioche, or croissants, pita, or tortilla or nana. All are bread, just serving different purposes and uses.
Fraser – under the UPF guidelines, wholemeal flour* and water are group 1, salt is group 2, but fast acting yeast (which is “typically” what you’d pick up off the shelf) can be group 4 (ie. a UPF). You can buy natural yeast, for sure, but typically those little packets of 7g each? UPF. Homemade sourdough starter is, I think, a group 2 (I’m not 100% confident on that, but it’s not a UPF anyway).
This is one the reasons I’m not a full-throttle believer in it, as it’s a bit squiffy, and you have to squint a bit to understand why certain foods are in their designated groups.
Like, I understand why salt is in group 2 – it’s an ingredient, not a foodstuff in it’s own right. Fine, that makes sense. But wholemeal flour in group 1? I “sort of” get it, but intuitively I’d have put it in group 2.
Another issue is the categorising from 1 through to 4. Usually this would indicate that 1 is healthiest, and 4 is least healthy. But in this case, sure, an apple I’ve just picked off my tree IS healthy, and is group 1. But a decent amount of genuinely healthy diet would be in group 3 – tinned fish (oily fish is good for you, remember!), tinned vegetables like sweetcorn, cheese, and so on. And, again, group 2 isn’t “food”, it’s just ingredients. This is “okay” once you understand it, but I think many people would go “okay, group 1 good, group 4 bad, ergo group 3 bad but not very bad, and group 2 better than group 3”
*white flour with fortifications would be group 2 – although some websites have it as group 1, just to add to the confusion.
This is why I treat it as a rule of thumb, not a strict guideline – it’s fairly simple to say “the more additives that are non-nutritional (eg. preservatives, colourings etc) or processes something has gone through, the less healthy it’s likely to be, and probably shouldn’t be the bulk of your diet” and be roughly correct, whilst acknowledging that it’s not quite that black and white, and there will be lots of exceptions.