Food is ultraprocessed to make it cheaper, more palatable, or both. So while the definitions are orthogonal the goals align.

Go to your grocery store and see if they have half and half or whipping cream with just milk and cream as ingredients. At lot of grocery stores I've been to don't have any cream it's a recipe with cream guar gum and a few other ingredients. They shouldn't be able to call that recipe the same name "cream". My point is even trying to just buy these ingredients is itself complicated

Simple in theory, snobby in practice.

Making food from scratch is a time luxury. It often benefits from good/expensive kitchen equipment unless you want to spend even more time and labor.

Let’s take bread as an example. I can buy it from the store for a dollar or two pre-sliced with preservatives and processing, or I can make it myself, which doesn’t really save any money.

The fresh kind from the grocery store bakery with no preservatives costs more and goes bad faster.

I work two part time hourly jobs and my only way to keep up on bills is to pull extra hours.

When am I getting extra time to bake bread?

How am I getting extra money to buy a $300 stand mixer to make baking bread less painful?

Who is educating me to do all this when the industry has lobbied to keep ingredient disclosures confined to tiny fine print with no industry requirement to prominently display negative health aspects? It’s not like my grade school taught me this because I grew up in the wrong zip code.

For example, the sugar cereal has fun characters and colors at eye level of children and it has a bunch of advertising copy on it that makes nearly-false claims of its health benefits. But you’re saying “just don’t buy those foods” when trusted institutions are telling us the opposite.

We can also talk organic reduced pesticide vegetables, which cost more. Want to buy eggs from chickens that weren’t abused? Costs twice as much. Milk from cows that are farmed responsibly? Costs twice as much.

Here it actually means 70%, but the paper is in a paper from mdpi which have been under criticism for predatory (i.e. fraudulent, junk-science enabling) practices.

From TFA:

"We report results of a cross-sectional assessment of the 2018 US packaged food and beverage supply by nutritional composition and indicators of healthfulness and level of processing. Data were obtained through Label Insight’s Open Data database, which represents >80% of all food and beverage products sold in the US over the past three years. Healthfulness and the level of processing, measured by the Health Star Rating (HSR) system and the NOVA classification framework, respectively, were compared across product categories and leading manufacturers. Among 230,156 food and beverage products, the mean HSR was 2.7 (standard deviation (SD) 1.4) from a possible maximum rating of 5.0, and 71% of products were classified as ultra-processed. "

In this case, it seems to be lower than the figure quoted in the report abstract[1] (emphasis mine).

> Among 230,156 food and beverage products, the mean [Health Star Rating] was 2.7 (standard deviation (SD) 1.4) from a possible maximum rating of 5.0, and 71% of products were classified as ultra-processed.

[1]: https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/11/8/1704

2% definitely sounds about right for the US...bahaha