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?