alt Hacker NewsThis is akin to pitbulls and porn: You know it when you see it, despite the existence of ambiguous cases. I bring this up because your call to specifics is useuful in general. In this case: There are gray areas, but in most cases, it's a useful heuristic. If your food comes in a bright-colored box, advertises as containing "Real [cheese|fruit|etc]" and or is branded with the word "flavor", "Ultra-processed" is a useful categorization.
If your food is something like "Chicken breast", "whole wheat flour" or "Green onions", it's not.
You will be able to find many ambiguous cases, at which point the categorization ceases to become useful. I do not believe this means categorization isn't useful in general.
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You'd love my new food category. It's called Ultra-Priced Foods, and it argues that the more expensive something is, the better it is for you. Sure, there might be some exceptions, but overall price is a quite effective proxy for high quality ingredients.
Oh, you don't have unlimited money? Some people don't have unlimited time or capability to prepare home-cooked meals constantly. It would behoove anti-UPF advocates to design a system that more accurately describes nutritional value of "UPFs" so people can make informed decisions within the constraints of their life.
It may be useful to you as a consumer as a way of avoiding sugar, fat, or whatever it is you think is unhealthy. Even that is dubious. But it's completely useless scientifically. There's no theoretical link between brightly colored boxes and weight gain. As you just admitted, that's only a proxy for something else you care about.