Are eggs processed food?
No. An egg is about as close to unprocessed as food gets. Nothing's added, nothing's taken away; it's the food as it came. Cooking one, whether boiling, frying, or turning it into an omelette, doesn't change that. What matters for "processed" is what the food is made of, not how it's cooked at home.
Where confusion sometimes creeps in is a separate question entirely: how the egg was farmed. Terms like "free-range," "barn," and "caged" describe production methods, not degrees of processing, and they're a genuinely different question from how processed the food itself is. An egg from any of those systems is still, nutritionally and structurally, the same unprocessed food once it's in the pan.
Ultra-processed foods are a different category, often involving industrial formulations and ingredients not usually used in home cooking. Some breakfast cereals, bars and reconstituted meat products fit that description, though not every processed food does. An omelette, built from eggs and real ingredients, isn't in it.
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