New York Times gift articles

That makes no sense.

My taking issue with oversimplification, doesn't mean I'm advocating for less thought to be put into the matter.

It means the opposite.

We can do better than simply "how much has this been processed" which is just another word for "preparation".

"Ultraprocessed" makes it seem like the act of preparing the food somehow ruins it, when the real problem is all the other differences between industrially prepared food vs how you'd turn individual "unprocessed" ingredients into a meal, cookies, or whatever else at home.

A bowl of noodles consumed in a restaurant, or prepared by you yourself, would be classified exactly the same as a bowl of sodium-overloaded instant ones, because the classification has literally nothing to do with what the food actually contains, merely how far removed it is from a raw ingredient.