Good food totally can have a label so it never will stop me… But I almost exclusively buy one-ingredient packaged things since many years. I even find the at least 2-ingredient canned fish useful now but it’s a very very short period until I figure out how to make good fish dishes from one-ingredient packaged fish
(everything is awesome mixed with eggs and fried but I like variety).
And I surely won’t buy the not-packaged meat from a simple store, it’s below my standards and it actually may have problems… I want farm meat, packaged or (preferably) not.
Carb counting
Shinita
#21
amwassil
(Michael - When reality fails to meet expectations, the problem is not reality.)
#22
Don’t fool yourselves. If you didn’t grow it or kill it, you’re eating ‘processed’ food. There’s lots of ‘processing’ between the pasture/feedlot and your plate. Here’s what a minimally processed meal looks like. The less your meal resembles this, the more processed your meal.
I think it serves little purpose to denigrate ‘processed’ food in the name of food purity. Yes, indeed, there are a lot of things we don’t want to eat which is why the list of ingredients is as important as the nutritional macro breakdown. But condemning food simply because someone else did the dirty work preparing it is silly.
By the way, here’s ‘unprocessed’ food. This is what our ancestors’ meals resembled until they started ‘processing’ by cooking first:
As always, in my humble opinion. 
Fangs
#23
That wasn’t the twist of what I was referring to about processed food.
It is about the chemical fake crap in most food. Yes there are way less processed foods that lc/keto plans etc. can enjoy. Key is tho one must really shop. Packaged for us food is notorious for hidden junk in that ingredient list.
What is that old saying, more than 3 ingredients on the label, don’t buy it 
PaulL
(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing)
#24
It’s rather like the advice in the back of one of Gary Taubes’s books, to the effect that if the label says “low-carb” or “keto-friendly” we should avoid eating it. 
PaulL
(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing)
#25
Since the discovery of fire goes back almost to the very origin of the human evolutionary line, it would appear that cooking isn’t a type of processing that we need to avoid.
amwassil
(Michael - When reality fails to meet expectations, the problem is not reality.)
#26
I agree that cooking, for the most part, is not necessarily processing that we need to avoid although it’s not harmless either. But just how long humans have controlled fire sufficiently to cook with it, depends what you mean by ‘human’. I think ‘human’ goes back to when our first ancestors became distinct and separate from our other primate relatives and ancestors. This time frame is 4-7 million years when humans split from chimps. The earliest evidence for serendipitous use of fire dates to 1.5 - 2.0 million years. There is solid evidence for controlled use of fire, including cooking, only from 400-300 thousand years, and some controversial evidence to 1 million years. Whatever dates you choose, I would not describe ‘cooking’ as a type of processing that goes back to the very origins of human evolution, unless you want to limit ‘human’ to homo sapiens only, which I think unwarranted.
My point is there are other forms of processing that we don’t necessarily need to avoid either. And unless we grow it or kill it ourselves we can not avoid many. Yes, I totally agree there are forms of processing that we want to avoid, combinations of ingredients that are bad to horrific and should never cross our lips, chemicals that belong in a lab not our bodies. But I think lumping a can of water packed tuna or a pound of foil wrapped butter or a round of brie cheese as no different from a Kraft Macaroni Dinner is nonsense.
Shinita
#27
And that’s what I totally disagree with (even though I usually buy 1 ingredient stuff).
It matters WHAT KIND OF ingredients (and it’s individual anyway). Some of my spice mixes has lots of ingredients and all are fine for me. Just because not I mixed them myself, it’s the same.
And even a little bit of sugary tomato sauce on my fish is way healthier for me than half a pound of a 2-3 ingredients roasted peanut… But it could be one ingredient and still bad. (It’s best to avoid both in any amount and it’s easy but I have my less ideal but healthy enough moments and it’s perfectly fine for me especially when it’s the lesser evil in some situation.)
People adore oversimplification but it often doesn’t work at all. I don’t care about other’s rules, they are usually quite wrong and needlessly restricting to me. I look at the ingredients themselves, not their number and the amounts matter a lot too.
But I kind of agree with the general attitude. Stuff with zillion ingredients is usually bad. But not always and it’s not always important anyway if it’s a bit “bad”, it may do insignificant harm and offer benefits.