A comment by Jane prompted this quick post here. Often the terms processed food or refined food tend to be used interchangeably in the general nutritional discourse. I get the general idea -- eating steak, broccoli and a baked potato is eating real, whole, unprocessed and unrefined foods. Same meal but substitute brown rice for that potato and you have added what I would call a processed food. The rice "kernel" had to be extracted from the plant.
So loosely speaking "processing" would include shucking, grinding, cracking, rolling, soaking, fermenting, and ... cooking! So then that original meal was actually processed food because we didn't just slice off a slab of meat, wash the dirt off of a tuber and some broccoli and eat them.
