How to tell if food is ultra-processed

The trend towards fractioned vegetable oils worries me. Not in any "data" way, just that I have a standing suspicion that we evolved eating things closer to their "whole" state, and wandering too far from that may have unforeseen consequences.

Saw an ad on craigslist recently for several tons of surplus "soy protien isolate"; sacks of snowlike powder, offered as a livestock feed additive. Can't imagine how that came to wash up on the shore like this but it looked suspicious. the product itself, not this specific instance.

That said, my contrary says there's things like cheese that hafta be counted as ultra processed. the whole class of fermented foods probably joins it. Some of the more obscene sausage recipes absolutely count as unfit for living things.

Yet we manage to use these things with reasonable moderation. they enhance our diets and our cultures in ways we're willing to pay some costs for. Not just in the abstract "those canned weenies will kill you someday" way but in the immediate gastric distress everybody knows a good story about. "All you can eat wings night, man... Couldn't leave the house for 3 days."

I've got severe restrictions on what i can digest anymore. There's some ingredients I know to avoid, but I can't say in my case that I see many hard connections there. Its more my sensitivities than the ingredients becoming ever more complicated chemistry treatises.

The government should regulate more in that area