https://www.mondelezinternationalfoodservice.com/Product/Pro...
Like the flour you use to make a cake has been altered from its whole state more than a little bit. So has the sugar. And of course, both ingredients are used in Oreos, for roughly the same reasons you'd use them at home.
I suppose most people don't cook with palm oil and soy lecithin.
high fructose corn syrup, palm oil, vanillin
<< Vanillin – natural or synthetic? – secrets of science 99 % of vanillin flavor is produced synthetically (petrochemical origin) or biotechnologically (e.g. from ferulic acid, eugenol).>>
PALM OIL, SOYBEAN AND/OR CANOLA OIL…HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP…SOY LECITHIN…ARTIFICIAL FLAVOR
Soy lecithin isn't, but it isn't a significant nutritional component or particularly questionable (it's a vegetable extract used as an emulsifier).
Your other points seem sound, and are things that I would not be surprised to find in homemade cake (except maybe the lecithin; what use does a cake have for an emulsifier?)
> They mean food that is processed industrially with a bunch of (usually unnecessary) chemicals added to stabilize or enrich the food. Oreos are a processed food. Cake you make at home from whole ingredients is not processed.
The ingredients I listed aren't whole ingredients - which I would take to be e.g. flour, eggs, milk, butter, etc. If you're cooking with high-fructose corn syrup then you're not cooking with whole ingredients.
The properties of flour are in fact quite different than the properties of whole wheat. And of course there is then a continuum, from whole wheat flour to white flour to bleached white flour.
There might be some significant nutritional impact from that, but it's more or less a similar process to make it (with an additional reaction to convert some of the glucose to fructose).