Unfortunately, a lot of people are not well-informed about what "processed" food constitutes, to begin with.
According to the Department of Agriculture, processed food are any raw agricultural commodities that have been washed, cleaned, milled, cut, chopped, heated, pasteurized, blanched, cooked, canned, frozen, dried, dehydrated, mixed or packaged.
As such, most of our diet is processed food, and there's nothing wrong with that. If there are particular ingredients that have been added in the processing of any consumer product that are themselves bad for your health, I would definitely encourage abstinence from that product.
While vaping is monumentally safer for one's health than cigarette smoking, both are still a needless introduction of potential harm to one's health, I agree.
But we must eat food, and the harm from that food being vaguely "processed" versus the harm from it containing ingredients certainly known to contribute to stroke, heart disease, cancer, and diabetes just isn't a worthwhile comparison.
The definition by The Global Panel on Agrigulture and Food Systems for Nutrition of "Ultra-Processed Foods" is contingient on those foods being depleted in dietary fiber, protein, various micronutrients, and other bioactive compounds.
While the oreos you're using in other examples would probably fit that definition, the alternative meats we're discussing don't, as they are "processed" to include those constituents.
Your wikipedia links don't make an assertion. The one on UPF does remind you, though, that
Some authors have criticised the concept of "ultra-processed foods" as poorly defined
The crux of this learning moment for you shouldn't be about definitions, but the relative "healthiness" of vegan food products.
It's clear you began with a preference to paint with a broad brush these meat substitute products as "junk food," and you have the opportunity to recognize they aren't as obviously unhealthy as you first thought.
Modern plant-sourced diets may incorporate a range of ultra-processed foods (UPF), such as sugar-sweetened beverages, snacks, confectionery, but also the ‘plant-sourced’ sausages, nuggets, and burgers that are produced with ingredients originating from plants and marketed as meat and dairy substitutes.
Thanks for your teaching moment, but take a second to get up to speed and we can talk after that.
Oh honey, your stealth edit shows that you don't understand.
I'll explain it to you: the study you keep linking doesn't differentiate between those foods in that "range of ultra-processed foods (UPF)," so that means data coming from "sugar-sweetened beverages, snacks, confectionery" is getting all mixed in with the data of the "‘plant-sourced’ sausages, nuggets, and burgers," which unfortunately renders the conclusions of the study rather meaningless when we're talking about the CVD outcomes of just one of the data sets.
I just told you why the study you linked is invalid for this conversation. Do you want me to quote the comment you just replied to so you can reread it?
Low-effort repost of your specious use of a study with nebulous conclusions for this conversation; I'll quote the user above:
that category contains "soft drinks, sweet or savoury packaged snacks, confectionery; packaged breads and buns; reconstituted meat products and pre-prepared frozen or shelf-stable dishes." This gives you no information on Impossible burgers' impact on cardiovascular disease, it only gives you a trend among people who eat all of the above. I would suspect the reality is Impossible meat contributes to CVD slightly more than straight-up vegetables and significantly less than red meat.