[CadmiumYellow]

One thing I found super interesting was that the participants in that study rated both diets equally tasty, which points to some other reason why one diet was easier to overeat than the other! My guess would be that the ultra-processed diet is simultaneously more calorie dense and less satiating. It's true that that's not inherently bad, per se, but if we can prove that those factors cause weight gain and related health issues then I'd be pretty comfortable calling ultra-processed foods bad.

Have you heard of Stephan Guyenet? His book The Hungry Brain is a good read on the neuroscience of obesity. He proposes that eating highly palatable calorie-dense foods changes the brain in various ways that ultimately drive us to consume more of those foods and to have difficulty changing our eating behavior. Unfortunately his suggestion is to eat an intentionally bland diet, which is obviously unappealing, but my anecdotal experience is that highly palatable but less processed foods (e.g. a wheel of brie) are far more satiating than similar but ultra-processed foods (e.g. queso made from velveeta).

I'm not sold on the idea that we need to eat bland foods, or only foods familiar to our hunter-gatherer ancestors, or only plant products...it seems to me that we only need to go back 50 years or so to before the dramatic rise in obesity started, which points toward avoiding ultra-processed foods. I hope we get more studies on this eventually!