If you buy a fresh hamburger at the butcher, made by him with salt and pepper, it's processed food.
But if you add sodium nitrite/nitrate, monosodium glutamate, phosphates, high-fructose corn syrup, artificial flavors, sodium erythorbate, carrageenan, bha/bht, propyl gallate, tbhq, soy protein isolate, modified food starch, dextrose, caramel color, red 40, yellow 5, etc... it's ultra-processed food.
1. sodium nitrite/nitrate salts have been used in Europe at the very least from the 19th century to cure meat, the earliest regulations in (of course) Germany date back to 1916 [1].
2. MSG has been a part of traditional Japanese dishes, it naturally occurs in soy and fermented fish sauce.
So for these two substances, I'd say their presence in food doesn't make it "ultra processed" all on its own - they and their usage in cuisine date back to times when there was no food industry to speak of.
The public are not lab rats to be experimented on using these artificial ingredients so that companies can make money.
Everything is a chemical. Salt is sodium chloride. Ingredients should be assessed individually and scientifically for their safety. Not just scary name equals unsafe. That's childish.
The war on monosodium glutamate is based racism and not science. It's as safe as table salt. There is no real science showing that it's anything but delicious.
Dextrose is just a simple sugar. It's essentially glucose chemically. Nothing to worry about. Your body produces glucose itself. You are not ultra processed because of that fact.
High fructose corn syrup is just fructose, another simple sugar [1], and there's no real science to back up all the fear mongering around it. It's no worse for you than any other sugar. All things in moderation.
And colorants/"food dyes" are even worse. A bunch of them are under strong suspicion of being carcinogenic, and often are used to mask the ingredients being cured for longer shelf lives or being of sub-par quality.
Depending on production method, I believe MSG can be a Nova Group 2 (processed culinary ingredient) product.
The name comes from the additional step of converting some portion of the glucose to fructose after converting starch to glucose.
you are being skeptical in a very silly way, sorry to say. if you don't see the industry incentives to use trash in your food instead of normal ingredients, you are missing the point in a very unproductive way.
Two people can eat the same number of calories, but if one of them is slamming UPFs they will gain more weight.
Additionally, UPFs do not satiate hunger like more natural foods. Meaning people can eat more UPFs than more natural foods before feeling full.
There are absolutely industrial ingredients we should be banning in the US that other countries have rightfully banned.
Come to me with scientific evidence and not fear mongering, and then we can talk on an equal field.