What is this article's obsession with things being "processed" food? Is "processed" the new "chemical"? It's like the article trying to keep repeating the words "processed", "ultra-processed", "hyper-processed" as if it's some scary boogey man.
Agreed: "made from processed ingredients such as pea protein, potato starch and potassium chloride" Since when is potassium chloride a processed ingredient? I think the author just doesn't know enough chemistry. And you can make potato starch by shredding a potato and drying the resulting water - that's not really what I think of by "processed".
The advice to avoid processed foods isn't necessarily to avoid nasty chemicals, it is to avoid high calorie, high salt, high fat foods that often strip out the healthiest parts of the constituent components during processing. For example, the healthiest part of a potato is the skin, but very few "processed" foods made from potatoes will keep the skin on as part of the processing. You can make a pretty healthy french fry by using organic potatoes and air frying instead of deep frying, but at the end of the day, you would have been better off just eating the whole potato. That is the argument that is generally being made when people talk about processed foods.
I personally like the new plant-based meats and hope they succeed, but I definitely consider them processed food and limit my consumption to every once in a while. But I also consider normal burgers to be processed food, because of the bun and sauces, and in many cases the patty. Using really good pasture raised meat to make a burger patty is way more expensive than any of the plant-based patties. And the cheap meat based patties are probably made from factory farmed animals full of antibiotics. So I am fine paying a little more for a non-meat patty that kinda mimics the real thing. Even if I consider it a processed food, I think I would rank it above the cheap meat patties in terms of health risks.