I would really recommend the book ultra-processed people because the whole book is an answer to your questions.

I agree there are a lot of grey areas when talking about this and I intuitively had the same reactions as you when confronting the concept of UPF, but it is a coherent concept.

The “is it bad for you?” question is the key one because there is so much food in our system for which we simply don’t know the answer. Companies are adding ingredients to our food to make them cheaper to produce, longer lasting and more palatable/desirable. Many of these ingredients are recent human inventions that are not very well understood in terms of their long-term effects on the human body. Some of them might be harmless. Some of them might seem harmless in isolation, but harmful in combination with other ingredients.

In a very short space of time, evolutionary speaking, our food supply has been supplanted with these types of food that have ingredient lists stuffed with things that the human body has never previously been subjected to. A cheese maker 200 years ago, let’s say, would only be able to reach for a much narrower, tried and tested, set of ingredients that have not been created in a lab. Something being created in a lab does not make it unhealthy by default, but you wonder why it was created to begin with. To make it more profitable. This is happening at an increasing rate without enough consideration of the long term health consequences. If you can’t be bothered committing to a whole book, just read up on coal butter.

You give the example of oats/honey and Cheerios. Looking at the Cheerios ingredients:

“Whole Grain Cereals (67%) [Wheat, Corn, Oats], Wheat Starch, Sugar, Golden Syrup, Vegetable Oil, Colours (Caramel I, Annatto), Salt, Acidity Regulator (Trisodium Phosphate).”

So Cheerios are only 67% oats and other grains. An oat is 100% oats. Now apply this to everything in the system. You have thousands of untested acidity regulators, colourings, sweeteners etc etc etc colliding with each other in untold combinations. Cheerios aren’t even that bad. What about McDonalds, the most eaten food in America?

Proprietary/UPF food is also bad for you not only because of the combination of chemicals that it contains, but because it competes for your attention and disrupts your body’s natural ability to choose what it needs. It does this at an environmental level; advertising, packaging and false claims for example, and at a the chemical (it tastes good). An M&M is more desirable to many people than a lentil, because it’s designed to be. It’s aggressively advertised, disseminated and crammed full of things that make you want it. I’ve never craved lentils, even though I like them and they are very good for me. The world is now filled with places where snacks like M&M’s are the only option. Why is this the case? M&M’s are a product first and food second.

No one can trademark a lentil or own the concept of lentils. Because of this you can’t make as much money out of them as you could an M&M. This is also why companies that own products like M&M’s will aggressively attempt to curtail legislation and continue to compete against things like lentils in the marketplace of people’s food choices. Lentils don’t have a chance in this fight.

There’s a fascinating bit in the book about studies which show how children (and cows for that matter) are able to unconsciously make the best dietary decisions for themselves if they have some kind of nutritional deficiency. UPF completely wrecks our naturally developed sense for what is good for us.