The article doesn't lay out a good argument for why "ultra-processed" is a more significant comparison than considerations like "too much sugar is bad", "too much salt is bad".
"too much sugar is bad" is already enough to express things like "drinking coca cola is unhealthy": since coca cola is high in calories but low in nutrients. It's easy to consume more calories than the body burns by drinking coca cola.
AFAIU, the argument as presented is that "ultra-processed" foods are unhealthy, because the processing makes you want to eat the food more.
I feel the argument against "ultra-processed" is in agreement with "limit consuming food that's low-satiation, low-nutrition, calorie-dense"; but then focuses on "ultra-processing bad", seemingly because processing leads to those bad things.
Diet Cola is about the same as water nutritionally but is a UPF. It's my understanding that adding diet cola to one's diet causes the same weight gain as cola. Obviously this can't be a direct calorie result, so this is about messing up the our perceptions for the normal range of food.
Adding diet cola causes weight gain the same as normal cola?
Where are you getting that info from? The chemistry doesn’t add up.
A quick search does bring up this page, which mentions an observational study where people who drank more diet soda gained more weight. https://www.webmd.com/diet/features/diet-sodas-and-weight-ga...
But, again, "diet soda causes weight gain" doesn't explain how drinking more diet soda would lead to weight gain. Whereas "people who drank more diet soda also ate more (than those who drank less diet soda)" seems both plausible, and would explain the result.
Right, so this is an example of a UPF that would be more harmful than avoiding UPFs given that it confuses the senses and most people don't want to track everything and refuse themselves food according to the numbers.
One could naturally make UPFs that are entirely boring, but his would they compete on the consumer market with UPFs like the diet cola?
I'm just gonna leave a thought here...
Young people forget how contentious the idea that "tobacco causes cancer" was back in the day. The "circunstancial evidence" was overwhelming[1], so naturally the industry did all it could to muddle the water, in the shape of making money flow towards people who were already predisposed against targeting tobacco. So the thought is: since theres an industry profiting from UPFs, the same will happen around the debate on whether UPFs cause problems.
[1] because the evidence was almost always observational from which you cannot conclude causation, unlike with randomized controlled trials, like with UPFs. They mention to this in the article.
I saw a TikTok video comparing the ingredient labels on major packaged foods from the 90s that are still around now (Doritos, Cheetos, rice crispy treats, etc.) and there really are way more strange chemicals and additives now. Even in the 90s, the food labels were mostly normal common ingredients and didn't have 20+ total ingredients... It's funny/sad/surreal how little our government does to protect its citizens health. I also saw another video where someone was talking about how pasta water made from US manufactured pasta had a high concentration of pesticides. I definitely prefer to buy DOP goods over anything in the US because I trust the EU way more than US regulators on food safety.
... so not Doctor Who :(
We should have a better education campaign on what it is. Is soy milk ultra processed? Probably right? Lots of people drink soy milk thinking it’s a healthy alternative. I mean bread qualifies. So let’s begin by educating the public. More science wouldn’t hurt, every study replicating the findings builds evidence. Every news article about same raises public awareness.
I think focusing on the "processed" part of what's so damaging about these "ultra processed foods" is a bit of a red herring. The issue is engineered food. Ready to eat, convenient, snacks and meals produced by these major food conglomerates that have invested literally billions of dollars into food research to make the food as addictive as possible, as shelf stable as possible, and as cheap as possible to manufacture. A growing body of research has correlated the portion of a nation's diet filled by these kinds of foods to the rise of obesity there in a trend seen across the globe.
Things like vitamin supplements and protein powders could also be considered ultra processed consumables/foods, but those are products that have been engineered to make it easier to get more of that vitamin or protein respectively into one's diet. The foods that are really at the root of the issue here are products that have been engineered for one purpose alone, profit, to get you to eat more of them. The evidence suggests that humans have gotten so good at this, engineering foods to make you want to eat more of them, that it appears to hijack our natural system of hunger response which tells us to stop eating when we've had enough, leading to weight gain. There isn't evidence for this yet, but I highly suspect the companies involved know this and may have purposefully muddied the waters about the cause of rising obesity, pushing claims that it's caused by people living too sedentary of lives, or people lacking discipline and self control, to shift blame of their negligence and exploitation to the very victims of their crimes.
I agree with you. I think the place to start would be with the ingredient list. I think they would say to avoid things that don't sound like food. I think chemicals are the real danger. It is very hard to do a conclusive study on how good or bad specific ingredients are, unfortunately, so it is hard to say some chemicals is OK. Secondly, but not as bad, I think are ingredients that are refined from foods. There are many levels of refinement so this is tougher. White flour? Sugar? Then there are things that take an industrial process to extract things from food, which I just put in the chemical category. Maybe they could color code the ingredient list on food packages?
You're conflating processed food with ultra-processed foods. Bread and soy milk are processed. A lot of food that isn't necessarily bad for you is considered processed.
Ultra-processed food is better described as a chemical soup that is turned into something resembling food. A good barometer is whether or not the ingredient list makes sense to a lay person. Bagged chips, candy bars, white bread, sodas, energy drinks, etc are all considered ultra-processed.
I agree there needs to be more education. There are several documentaries on this you can find with a trivial Youtube search. The conclusion most of them reach is that the food lobby is so strong (here in America) that research rarely gets out. The companies responsible have an army of morally and ethically bankrupt PhDs pumping out garbage research to lower the SNR enough to muddy the waters. Ultra processed food companies are more-or-less the modern equivalent of the Tobacco lobby.
As a final note on news - you should take a look at who is giving advertising money to the major news companies and movie studios. As always - follow the money. They'd never bite the hand that feeds.
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Doctor, yes, but of criminal justice https://www.suffolk.edu/academics/faculty/m/o/carlos-monteir...
You may be surprised to learn this but multiple people, even professors, may have the same name.
http://www.iea.usp.br/pessoas/pasta-pessoac/carlos-augusto-m...
The article and this page even have pictures of two different people.
Is there such thing as toxic skepticism, where the need to shoot holes in something to virtue signal being too smart to believe the presented journalistic narrative leads to misinformation through worse "research" than the journalist performed?