I agree. To me it always seemed a bit like insisting that foods from the first half of the alphabet are bad for you.
Are they? Maybe! Alcohol, Burgers, Croissants, for all I know there are more bad-diet things in the first half of the alphabet than the last. It could even be that if we convinced people to buy less high-alphabet food, they'd be healthier. But that doesn't mean it's a sensible category. We don't "need more research into high-alphabet foods", we need a causal theory of what makes food healthy or not. It's pretty clear it isn't alphabetic priority, and it's also pretty clear it's not simply "processing".
Most food needs to be processed in some way or another to be edible. I read a terrible catalog many years ago, from an alternative magazine, listing a ton of weird diets and questionable health practices. There were only a handful of things in that catalog of hundreds of things that even they warned against, and one of them was the "raw food diet".
If it's benzopyrene from frying that's the problem, talk about frying. If it's micronutrients being lost from soaking or boiling or long storage with preservatives, talk about that! But don't dumb us down by putting it all in a box and refusing to engage with what actually makes it bad.
Are they? Maybe! Alcohol, Burgers, Croissants, for all I know there are more bad-diet things in the first half of the alphabet than the last. It could even be that if we convinced people to buy less high-alphabet food, they'd be healthier. But that doesn't mean it's a sensible category. We don't "need more research into high-alphabet foods", we need a causal theory of what makes food healthy or not. It's pretty clear it isn't alphabetic priority, and it's also pretty clear it's not simply "processing".
Most food needs to be processed in some way or another to be edible. I read a terrible catalog many years ago, from an alternative magazine, listing a ton of weird diets and questionable health practices. There were only a handful of things in that catalog of hundreds of things that even they warned against, and one of them was the "raw food diet".
If it's benzopyrene from frying that's the problem, talk about frying. If it's micronutrients being lost from soaking or boiling or long storage with preservatives, talk about that! But don't dumb us down by putting it all in a box and refusing to engage with what actually makes it bad.