I have a hard time understanding how the act of mechanically separating meat from bone and gristle renders it unfit for consumption. Texture certainly matters for taste, but once masticated, all food is roughly the same texture. Digestion is a biochemical process, and if the body is experiencing adverse reactions to certain foods, the cause should be a biochemical one.
> if the body is experiencing adverse reactions to certain foods, the cause should be a biochemical one
No. I can look at a picture of gross food, or imagine it, and be nauseated. Restricting potential causes this tightly is wrong. UPFs have a huge causal surface--how one ingredient breaks down into nutrients is basically not optimized at all compared to all the other stuff. Why only look at the unoptimized part as causal origin, when the optimization is the common factor making it bad?
To put it another way, we know all the stuff that has had a ton of work put into making it something lots of people will buy, is just generally bad for unclear reasons. Examining the aspect which has had very little work put into it is clearly not the way to go.
It could be something as weird as people's built-in heuristics for which food to eat (cravings) being actually kinda important to hit specific nutrient breakpoints at different times. By subsuming those cravings using UPF technology, that stops working and general health suffers.
It could be that the baseline palatability of the output of the mechanical process is low, and so the product is universally combined with an additive that recovers palatability, but has some health drawback.
The overarching pattern here is that optimization geared toward overcoming people's heuristics of what to consume makes these kinds of decisions all the time. Doing one thing to make it cheaper to produce makes it worse at getting people to buy it, but we can just cheat back the ability to get people to buy it by turning the dial on another thing that reliably makes people want to buy it, at the cost of being horrible for them.
